Community

I hung out with Ty and some people at his house yesterday watching Foxcatcher. It was a huge contrast from the dinner on Saturday (which I ultimately regretted going to but after talking to another friend I decided to forget about it) and it makes me wonder where the difference (from both nights) comes from. Well, I guess the difference is Ty. He is an anomaly. (And he was the one that also pointed out to me his boredom with the white-Christian people hailing from the mid-west.)

Anyways, I realized while hanging out with Ty that this is the community that I am the most comfortable in at this point. And whenever I'm hanging out with them, I'm smiling and laughing. Yesterday, we were laughing so hard about the split brain test. Jens pulled up diagrams from his phone and was passing them around. He totally reminds me of Paul. Hanging out with this group reminds me of the community I experienced when I was in AZ as a high school/college student.

So this dinner I promised peeps -- I might cook Korean.

I should invite:
Ty/Jens (Jens is Ty's brother and is pronounced /Yenz/ )
Megan
Sagar

And Lisa. So that's five people. Six including me.

Claire offered to tutor me French and I am wondering if I should take up this offer. If Claire becomes my French tutor and I don't have to spend an arm and a leg for French lessons, then I can start taking piano lessons again. Or maybe I should invite Claire to the dinner, too? The more the merrier? I don't want to cook for ten people, though. Need to figure this out.

Good-bye

This is really really random but when I was nineteen I fell in love with one of my closest friends. It lasted forever and it seemed like it would never go away-- that was about 1.5 to 2 years. But that time seemed to stretch on and on with no end. Probably one of the most intense and painful experiences I've had in my life. The love was unrequitted. I think the most difficult part was that this person did care for me very much just not in the way I cared for him (Rachel and Joey in Friends? But ten times more intense.)

After all these years, I just remember all the conversations we had. On the phone for hours, at cafes, walking down the streets of Seoul.. They were deep. A number of things he said changed the way I looked at the world (in a good way) and affected and still affects the way I live today. We really did understand each other in an uncanny way, and he was there for me during one of the most difficult times of my life with nothing but respect. The text messages he sent and the words he spoke into my life then gave me strength and hope. Nobody had that power over me during the time, but he did. Our connection really made me wonder why we (as humans in general) have these inexplicable, profound mutual bonds, but that bond - at the end - doesn't work out and trying to work it out is like fighting fate, banging your head against a dead end wall or something. No matter how hard I (we) tried it just did not work out. It was one of the most difficult lessons I learned: in life, you must (sometimes) let go of things. And it will not come back. No matter how much you love, it will not come back. You must say good-bye.

At the time, he told me that one day I would leave (Korea, and in extension him) and never look back. He said he just knew this about me and when that time came, he would just be someone in my life that would be standing in the way. I remember looking at him thinking, 'Why do you say that? How can you say that when I am sitting here across from you with my heart crushed and telling you that I care about you so much?' But he was right. He did know me. He knew me better than I knew myself.

I dont even know if he's dead or alive now. Nobody I know knows where he is or what he's doing. But out of so many ppl who have come and gone in my life, he is really someone I cannot forget. I hope wherever he is, he is at peace and well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UZlzNRwk1c

Do we need permission to love? Permission to hold what is most sacred in our hearts as sacred?

What is sacrilegious? How is that what I consider sacred in the deepest part of my heart is chastised and condemned as a sacrilege?

Love - the deepest most profound love - makes us sacrilegious because it defies all logic, all rules, all social conventions.

I realized something:

It's when I am sincerely challenged that I become defiant.

Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's new novel is out. The novel is almost 800 pages.
I love her but it hurts.
What am I doing? :(

하나님이 내게 원하는것이 너무 어렵게 느껴질때.
매일매일 머리를 벽에 박는것 처럼 느껴질때...
어떻게 해야되는걸까....

Joyce Carol Oates?

I thought I only had respect for Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gaitskill, Donna Tartt and Marilynne Robinson among the female writers that are still alive and at work. Yesterday, after a three hour conversation in the cold outside of Pinkberry with Liz, I came home and cracked open a short story collection I had bought at a second-hand bookstore on my way home from Jane's wedding in February. Liz and I didn't even talk about books but our conversation in general made me exuberant and I was in the mood to devour something.

I read Chekhov and I finally understood. I finally understood what he was doing and what was so brilliant about him. There was a full page picture of him in the anthology and he had beautiful eyes. His eyes reminded me of Reed, the boy that I met in Iowa so many summers ago.

Then, I read two stories by Joyce Carol Oates and I was enthralled. I had read a couple of her stories years ago and they had fallen flat on my ears and had not reached me in any way, except leaving an impression that she was an old white lady that had lived in cloistered middle class neighborhoods most of her life. In fact, her name was synonymous to that. It was probably because of the combination of her three names. Joyce, Carol, and Oats. It really can't get more boring than that. 

The only impression I had of Joyce was that she was insane. I still remember sitting in the auditorium at Skidmore College at the NY Summer Writers' Institute. She was talking about running and someone trying to talk to her, and I sat there thinking, 'This woman is craycray...' 

But I suppose every artist is.

But yesterday, I was blown away. And the only reason I chose to read her, probably, was because Alice Munro had recently received the Nobel Prize in Literature and she is sometimes compared with Joyce Carol Oates. Made me want to read Oates again to re-assess.

Anyways, so I came to the Central Library to get a hold of a copy of The Wheel of Love, which is actually out of print. The librarian let me borrow the book even though there was only one copy of it in the library for reference. I felt very grateful.

After finding out just how unbelievably prolific Oates was, I thought to myself, 

'She must not have had any children,' and checking on Wikipedia, I was right.

The article also said she would be teaching her last semester at Princeton next fall. Her name and Princeton pictured together with a classroom, brought back that longing and tugging in my heart. The desperation of wanting to be there. Of wanting to have somebody to talk to and share these things with.

I never had that education, I never had that community.

I was standing in the middle of the Literature Department at the Los Angeles Public Library and reminded myself that I had access to all of the conversations I could have with anyone dead or alive. 

Anyways, I need to get up earlier. 

I wish the library opened earlier. But whatever.

Somehow, I have to make this work.

sleeples in los angeles

I can't sleep.This is driving me crazy..I think I need to buy a stash of bedtime yogi tea. Haven't had that in over a year. What's going on? :(

어제 새벽2시까지 글 쓰다가 혼자 새벽에 마루에 앉아서 이런저런 생각을 하게 됐다.
어쩌다가 싸이에 끄적거리게 됐는데 "끄적끄적"이 긴 하나님에 대한 생각을 정리하게 되는 글이 되어버렸다.
그리고 마지막에 내가 끄적인 말을 보면서..
그렇게 하나님과 싸우고 힘들어하다가
결국엔 내가 돌아왔구나
라는 생각이 들었다.

그리고 어제 새벽 4시 30분까지 편지를 쓰게 됐다.
오늘 편지 부쳤다.

이제 정말 내가 할 수 있는 모든 일을 다 했다고 말할 수 있다.

.
.
.




Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.














-Robert Hass

My grandparents when they were young. My grandmother passed away several years ago and my grandfather is 95 years old now.

In Transition

I was listening to my ipod, slightly sleepy, comfortably seated in the back seat of a black cadillac on my way to JFK on Monday. The driver was a quiet and well-mannered young man who minded his own business. It has been raining in New York for almost a week but the day I was leaving, the sky had cleared and everything was clean and bright.

I sat in the back seat of the car thinking,
"I wish this car ride would never end."

I didn't want to be back in LA. I didn't want to be anywhere.
I just wanted to be in transition. Just like this- alone, listening to music, the scenery changing and irrelevant.

Unless, perhaps you are like myself, then we can meet at midnight at a cramped bar in Soho, huddled together at the bar, drinking bacardi and coke and cranberry juice and talk about music and art and writing, and how the Manhattan skyline reminds you of home even if the sense of home is lost in the actual streets.

Up in the Air

Let's see. My best friend just moved from New York to Singapore with her fiance. They won't be back for at least three years or never, since Peter wants to start a business in Shanghai. Their wedding is going to be in Singapore possibly during the semester. There's a high chance I won't be able to attend. My sister, who was staying with me for a couple weeks, went back to Seoul for a month, before she takes off to Madrid for a workshop, and then back to Boston. My crew from college is currently living/working/married in London, Madrid, Dubai, Seoul, Hong Kong and have no desire to visit or live in the U.S.

I'm helping a good friend ship all his stuff to Korea tomorrow because he's leaving back to Seoul on Saturday. My Seoul friends are attending the Dubai friend's wedding in Bali in June, but since that is way too far from where I am currently situated (without the money to travel around the world) I can't attend that wedding, either.

As for family, my cousins in New York whom I bonded with during my stay in NYC are moving to Hong Kong next year.

Everything and everyone being up in the air all the time - a reason for my anxiety.

A Windy Day Poem

What You Need for Painting

By Raymond Carver, Based on a Letter by Renoir


THE PALETTE:

FLAKE WHITE
CHROME YELLOW
NAPLES YELLOW
YELLOW OCHER
RAW UMBER
VENETIAN RED
FRENCH VERMILLION
MADDER LAKE
ROSE MADDER
COBALT BLUE
ULTRAMARINE BLUE
EMERALD GREEN
IVORY BLACK
RAW SIENNA
VIRIDIAN GREEN
WHITE LEAD

AND DON'T FORGET:
Palette knife
Scraping knife
Essence of turpentine

BRUSHES:
Pointed marten hair brushes
Flat hog hair brushes

Indifference to everything except your canvas
The ability to work like a locomotive.
An iron will.

From Beijing

This is a part of a letter a friend wrote me from China:

Sometimes, I think life is hardest when you're trying to change it, to make it better. Acceptance of something is easier, though not necessarily the most recommended route. You and I are constantly changing our lives and as creatures of habit, change is hard. There are too many unknowns. Hang in there. Sooner or later, you find the parts of you that you wouldn't give up for a greener side.

=)
Helen


*Helen and I met in Seoul. She is originally from New Jersey.

Autobiographical Character Sketch

This was submitted to a certain film school that rejected me:

Tidbits of faces, places, conversations and moments that unceasingly fill my head.

On traveling verses shopping-
You should come, too. Instead of buying two,three Michael Kors bags.
Michael Kors is only three hundered dollars.
Only three hundred dollars?!
Yeah...CJ and I talked about it and we have psychological issues.
So two people with psychological issues got together and came to that conclusion?
It’s either that, or we’re superficial people with vanity issues.
So you’d rather be mental than be superficial?
Yeah.
Jamie?
Yeah?
We’re more similar than I ever thought.

On best friends who drunk-dial you daily from Tokyo-
Laughing is like crying, I don’t cry, I laugh. You, Addie, are a diver. I don’t like diving. I like breath strokes. I try diving but I see myself doing breath strokes again.

Matt on one of the greatest singers of our time-
Andrea Bernanni or something, HE’S BLIND! Before I was like, why does the dude look like he is always sleepy??

On Sun’s chipmunk cheeks that are about to burst-
Her eyes are brimming with tears but a stupendous smile engulfs her entire face. Have you ever felt so lucky you feel like you’re going to burst?

Hae-kyeong on laptops from IBM, the IBM T40 versus the IBM T30. It’s like this. You have a BMW. I have a Sonata. Jee on “smoke” rising from New York City streets. Yeah, New York is so dirty. No wonder they staged Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles coming out of the sewers here in the eighties. Harvard Law school student and dear friend Kerry on the topic of “despair, failure and loss of faith.” My biggest tragedy is that I’ve never experienced a tragedy. Jason on the topic of his squinting Asian eyes. If my eyes were any bigger I’d feel exposed. Boyoung on the topic of our own people. I think people should be free and not oppressed. If you’re oppressed you turn out like…Koreans. Cece brutally honest again. When you look at them they’re so ugly but they’re so happy. It’s cute. It makes you think about a lot. Like, why am I so unhappy? Timmy’s support on my choice of life. Don’t worry, Addie. Ten years down the road if you turn out to be a poor writer living on cereal every day, you’ll have rich and powerful friends like me to back you up.

But Gustave Lebon, French Sociologist, nailed the dilemma: To respect tradition is a condition of existence for people; to know how to disengage from it, a condition of progress.

And in the library five-year old curly-haired Tizian Frohn is hugging his Magic School Bus books to his chest and exclaiming these are my books forever and ever and ever!

I don’t want to be anybody else, I just want to be the best version of myself. Are you still swinging at the biggest piñata in the world?

Music from Asia

First video (old school):
Seotaeji /SUH-TAE-JEE/ & Boys - The most famous Korean pop group that ever walked the peninsula. A living legend. They released this song right before the group broke up in 1996. They changed the landscape of gayo (K-pop) forever.

Second Video (old school):
Eco - A popular all-girls group from the mid-nineties. They had a couple of hits then disappeared off the face of the earth. But this particular song lives on in Korean kereoke (this word is japanese, the korean word is 'No-Rae Bang' i.e. NRB) lovers. It's one of those songs that everybody knows and loves but not many people remember who sang it. This is the one I always sing when I hit the NRB.

Third Video (new):
Jay Chou - The "Seotaeji" of Taiwan. He took a quarter of the world by storm when he debuted with his first album in 2000. He is an amazingly gifted singer/song-writer. All of China, and a large portion of Asia, is obsessed with him. He is still very active. This is one of my favorite music videos of all time. It's a work of art. Jet Li is in it, if you're interested. My favorite part is at 3 minutes 10 seconds when the break-dancing and Jet Li's fighting is intercut with each other.

Fourth Video(relatively new):
M-Flo - I'm just throwing this one in. It's a Japanese group. I had a friend who listened to M-Flo all the time and got me interested for awhile. Another good friend of mine, was actually friends with "Melody" and would hang out with her in Seoul/Tokyo.

Midnight Snack

The can of chili can was marked "HOT" in capital letters. Spicy American chil? 'Big deal,' I thought to myself. Koreans dip green pepper in red pepper paste as snack food. Eating spicy food is a sport in Korea. When I was a kid, my mother filled a bowl with water and washed half the Korean food that was put on the dinner table for me. The water diluted the spicy red pepper sauce/paste/powder on the food. I remember the specks of red pepper powder floating around in the bowl of water that grew darker shades of red as the meal went on. All Korean kids went through years of training to eat spicy food. As an adult, almost nothing would come across as "spicy" unless you were directly squirting Tabasco sauce onto your tongue. I looked at the label on the can, again. 'Seriously, whatever.' I dumped the entire can of chili onto the sauce pan and stirred.

Half an hour later, I am wiping tears from my eyes. My nose is runny, too. I am currently pacifying my tongue and stomach with a cold glass of milk.

While I was eating the bowl of chili and my eyes watered up, a couple of things crossed my mind. The first was that if it's hot for Koreans then they should have a warning sign on the product - "Spicy even for Koreans." In fact, I think that should be the official name for the highest level of spiciness that people refer to on the "spicy scale" if there is such a thing.

Koreans have an entirely seperate word for spicy, hot, food that makes your eyes and nose water. It's pronounced (roughly) mep-dah. It means that the food is so hot (not in temperature but in taste) that it stings. Koreans think that meh-woon (a verbal variation of the noun above) food chases away the heat. So we eat a ton of meh-woon food in the summer. In fact, Korean people actually say, "It's so refreshing and cool," when they eat anything that is especially spicy.

As I chewed on the last bit of my chilly, I wiped the tears from my eyes, and continued with my mulling. Wait a minute. How COOL would it be to write a scene in the future (this is the writer in me kicking in) where the main character is eating food that is so spicy she/he is crying and then while she/he is wiping tears from her/his eyes and eating the chili, her/his friend (significant other, family member or friend - it can be anybody) steps into the room. They start talking. It starts out as a normal conversation but then ends up with the other person leaving the room (out of frusturation or anger) and the person eating the chili pushes the bowl of chili away and start crying vehemently. This time because he/she is upset.

I think that would be cool. Both ideas. I guess I have power over the second idea but not over the first one.

*Reading this post over, it doesn't even make any sense. I can't follow my own logic.

Church Approves Fishnet Stockings

I have just been told that a picture of me in fishnet stockings, a short black skirt, and black leather boots is going to be published in a church magazine.

So I attend this church called Mosaic. Mosaic doesn't believe that church is a building so we have services all over LA in different venues. One of these places include a nightclub in downtown LA. I go to that one. But just because Mosaic holds church services at a nightclub doesn't mean people show up looking like they're going clubbing. This is why I was surprised just now, when I received an email from their graphic designer telling me that they will publish a picture of me in fishnet stockings in one of their publications.

A random poem I wrote was chosen to be published in a magazine that's put out yearly by Mosaic. Everybody who is being published in this year's issue had to have their picture taken. I didn't want a picture of me next to my writing piece (it's awkward!) and I was busy, so I missed their photo shoot. They tracked me down and told me to send over pictures via email. Generally, I'm not even a picture person. So it was difficult to find high resolution pictures of just myself. I went through a plethora of digital files and found some pictures that might work. Among them was a full length picture of me in the fishnet stocking outfit. I was about to go clubbing in Hollywood when my roommate shot the picture of me. I sent over six files including that one to the magazine graphic designer. Then I added a note saying that I knew the fishnet picture might not work but she could just crop my face from it.

She wrote back within ten minutes and said that the "party outfit would work best" because it was the only high-resolution, full-body picture.

Uhh...I'm still relatively new to this church, and I don't want to be known, in the Mosaic community, as the girl with the fishnet stockings and leather boots without any given context. And I just remembered something else. The second line in the poem contains the word "naked." Whatever, they can handle it. So I guess this is how I make my debut at Mosaic.

Santa Monica & Malibu

My sister's told me a number of times to invest in a camera. We had a camera back in Korea, but she got first dibs on it. I haven't gotten around to purchasing a camera yet, but in the meantime, the blackberry picture folder on my hard-drive is getting really fat.

* A Santa Monica Sunset on my Blackberry: April 11th, 2009


















* A Malibu Sunset on my Blackberry: February 14th, 2009






* My day reminded me of the lyrics to Savage Garden's "Santa Monica":

In Santa Monica in the winter time
The lazy streets so undemanding
I walk into the crowd

Beauty so unavoidable
Everywhere you turn its there
I sit and wonder what am I doing here

But on the telephone line
I am anyone, I am anything, I want to be
I could be a super model or Norman Mailer
And you wouldnt know the difference
Or would you

In Santa Monica on the boulevard
You'll have to dodge those in-line skaters
Or theyll knock you down

I never felt so lonely
Never felt so out of place
I never wanted something more than this



ps) In Santa Monica, you can see the sun setting behind the mountains. In Malibu, you can see it directly dip into the ocean.