academia

wanderings:

insadong, around seollal. making tradition snacks.

hongdae hottdeuk guy. freeeee hottdeuk<33

french girl asking, "eulma yayo?" ("how much?")

buddhist temple in jongno. crazy ceremony i found in the middle of the night.

i started writing a long "what if" blog about the possibility of me becoming a professor, and then erased it. im not particularly interested in entertaining the what ifs, and im even less interested in airing publicly the extent to which my over-analytical mind runs me in circles right into the ground. certainly there are a plethora of other opportunities out there, but one possibility that keeps coming up is:

-graduating, still not knowing what the hell i want to do, defaulting into coming back to korea to finish learning korean

-graduate school in korea for what? history? literature?

-translation work/ becoming a professor here or in the US.

i'm not scared, it just seems like a cop out.

i have a lot of wandering still to do, more of asia, africa. europe. latin america.  in some ways roots are barely fathomable. the years in which i will drift from temporary life to temporary life stretch out before me like a carpet, or an ocean. or a great, gaping gulf. or a fantasy.

in other ways i'm perpetually preoccupied with the notion of my future family, where we'll live, the kind of schools my children will go to, raising them in my faith. 

it's the babies. babies and families about around here. they're everywhere, and they're so adorable and incredibly small and beautiful and full of promise, they make me imagine my own stomach swelled to accommodate someone half-me and half-my husband, about to live in the world.

anyway. academia. i really just want to effect more people than that, in a direct way. how can academia be the route to the most good? i love history but studying it like that, being the one writing the source material... it just appears to me as a very self indulgent work (valuable though that work may be.)