2014 (The Intentions)

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a list of things I said would happen in 2014. Spoilers: most of those things didn't happen. And yet I'm perfectly happy with most of the results on the list. Having gone through this experience, I think setting intentions and goals is more like creating calls of action for myself. They start to get me in action and the universe in motion, but the results themselves are all over the place! Let's take a look:

The Weekend Before Christmas in Korea

I blinked and Christmas is a mere handful of days away. Korea isn't very serious about Christmas so we'll be hard at work all the way up to the day before and then we'll have the day (but no more than a day) off.

In the meantime, my schedule is filling up to bursting.

Having the Perfect Halloween in Korea

I gotta say, I'm really not that big up on Halloween. I'm way too lazy and cheap to buy a full blown costume just for that one day, all with the expectation that I'd think up something to top myself the next year. As such, I usually use Halloween to wear whatever I wanted in the bizarre, topsy-turvy way I felt like... without having to explain myself. That aside...

고양이과 꼬리

I had a perfect Halloween in Korea. For once, I felt like I had a cultural imperative to dress up for my students, to share with them the joy of dressing up and asking for candy on this random day in autumn. 

Gyeongju, South Korea

We had a three day weekend at the beginning of October and I was honestly at a loss for what to do to spend it. In fact, when I woke up on Friday morning, I wanted to do absolutely and completely nothing.

However, I did promise my friend Jen that I would meet her and the rest of the gang in Gyeongju, a small city less than an hour away from Ulsan. I almost didn't keep that promise out of sheer laziness, but I am extremely happy that I did.

나는 왕자, 너는 왕비

Shakespeare in Busan (and Yang Rou)

(Photo taken by my friend Suvasha)

I've been itching to do some improv since taking a class back in Seattle. Sadly, improv isn't very widespread in Korea. It was hard even to find foreigners who would be down to do some.

I did, however, find the closest thing I could and joined up with a local theater group. Recently, we participated in the Busan International Shakespeare Festival.

Tokyo, Japan

When I was about 6 or 7, Sailor Moon came to the Philippines and I heard about Tokyo and Japan for the first time in my life.

Fireworks in Tokyo
불꽃

 20 years later, I finally visited the city that has been in the back of my mind for ages.

China

For my summer break, I went to mainland China for the first time in my life. Twice.

My contract guarantees me 8 days off in the summer, but the school gets to decide how I get those 8 days. With summer camp dates set by the Ulsan Metropolitan Office of Education (Ulsan MOE), my school split my break into 5 days and 3 days, with the three week camp in between.

My original plan was to travel to Southeast Asia but after talking to my mentor, Jon, I ended up making plans to go to China after all. We had been talking about my coming to visit him and his wife in China (with my friend Alizeh) since December 2013. I wasn't sure I'd manage to pull it off, especially with the China visa turning out to be so exorbitant for US citizens. $160! As it turns out, China sets the price of their visa according to how much the United States charges Chinese citizens for visas.

To make the visa more cost effective, I decided to go to China before and after summer camp.

Summer Camp

It's hard for me to believe, but it's been half a year since I first came to South Korea.

How do I know this?

Because I just finished summer camp and will be starting the second semester next week.

Learning Languages (and everything else)

Last night I went to a language exchange where I was asked how to study and get good at Korean.

I said, "I study every day."

"What?" said the guy. "For like two hours?"

"No," I said. "Twenty minutes."

He seemed surprised by that. The conversation got me thinking about my current approach to learning Korean and getting good at most anything: playing the guitar, writing, singing, whatever.

I don't consider myself to be good at Korean. I still feel more helpless than not in trying to communicate in this new language and am still more likely to gesture wildly at the store clerk than to bust out anything intelligible. I am slowly realizing that I am improving day by day though. It's a realization that comes at the most surprising times and arrives in the moments when I'm not thinking too hard about it. When I suddenly know that I've got the vocabulary and grammar to tell my language partner about what I did the previous day or inadvertently understanding that a teacher at my school has just playfully said she's so busy she could die. (It sounds much harsher than it is when you translate it!)

There's a lot about my decision to learn Korean that might be considered strange or unique: I'm an aspiring diplomat who was once obsessed with North Korea and Korean economic history. But I still started from the beginning like everyone else. Sure, I've learned languages before but Korean is nothing like any of them. It shares some basic similarities with Chinese but this has proven more likely to confuse me than anything else.

Here's how to start from the beginning just like everyone else.

Daegu Stories

I. Event Planning

"Watch this, Jen! I'm gonna visit you in Daejeon in March. I've declared it, I'm creating it, it's going to happen!"

"Uh huh."

Korea: Q & A Edition

Haeundae Beach

Greatest apologies for the two months of near radio silence on the blog.

I've been traveling: I visited family in the Philippines and have settled down in South Korea to teach English for a year. (That's two out of five for the 2014 list!) Korea, in particular, has been such a shock to the system that I've only really gotten my footing now, two months after arriving here.

Let's catch up on those two months with a Q&A (feel free to ask me more questions in the comments/on Facebook!):

A Complete & Apostilled FBI Background Check

There is no document that gives me palpitations quite like the FBI background check.

They warn you when you start your EPIK application that the FBI background check takes the longest amount of time to complete of all the required documents. When I tried to join EPIK in August 2013, I applied for it in November 2012. Two fingerprint rejections later, I received the completed document in June 2013, well after I needed it. I didn't make it to South Korea in August 2013.

When I decided to apply for the February 2014 round of EPIK, all my documents were settled except for That One: to my great anxiety, my recruiter requested I obtain a fresh FBI background check. Just in case I'd committed any new crimes in the 6 months since the last one, I suppose. This time, I was determined to punch the FBI background check in (the face). It was the top priority of my life-- turnarounds on my end would be swifter than most sneezes. The FBI and the US State Department could take their sweet time, but no lateness would be caused by ME.

Sticky Notes & Being My Own Best Friend

from Louise Hay's facebook page, via Wayne

This is weird and really stupid.

I think sharing and being open about what your life is like is powerful and beautiful, even when what you're revealing is horrible. That's why I blog what I blog and talk about what I talk about. I've had those conversations where my self-dating project doesn't land with a person, where I "have issues" and I shouldn't text myself the running score of the playoff game (which is still one of the sweetest things anyone can do for me so why shouldn't I do it for myself?)

Heck, I have this conversation with myself every time I work on this project. But instead of discouraging me, "this is stupid" has become something of a prompt that there might be something worthwhile here. Much like "this scares me to death" means I should probably go for it.

Self-Dating

One of the craziest things to come out of taking the Communication Course was the realization that I don't actually like myself.

I like the things I do. I like snowboarding and singing and doing improv and trying new restaurants. I like challenging myself and consistently pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I like helping people and creating events that leave people loved and happy.

But I realize a big reason why I do those things is because I'm trying to escape myself. Or I'm trying to make up for something I can never ever make up for. When I don't do those things, when I'm not doing anything in particular and just being... I don't like the creature that's there.

In some ways, it's sort of funny because I love a great deal of you just because you're you and sometimes in spite of the crazy shit that you do. I don't even know half the things you do outside of our time together and I love you just fine. I just haven't given myself the same space.

I still relate to myself as someone who's violent and insensitive even though the incident that I got that from happened about 20 years ago. (I was playing a prank on a kid. Instead, he got stitches in his forehead.) I live a great deal of my life in fear that I'm gonna hurt someone accidentally, or that I don't understand human beings enough to be able to deal with them.

It seems fitting, considering the title of this blog and declaring #5 for the new year, that the first challenge of 2014 is to fall in love with myself.

I am now officially in a relationship with myself and I'm going on at least one date per week. There will be loving sticky notes and affirmations, laughter and forgiveness.

How to Date Yourself in 10 Ways
The Secret to Self Loving
31 Days of Self-Love

Thank you to Wayne and Ruth for the guidance, encouragement, and ideas. :)

Kiss Me Goodbye Seattle!

My farewell party has probably been in the works since July, when I first planned to make it to South Korea in August 2013. I wanted to create this mega event where I could gather up my entire life and put them all in one space at one time. It was a chance to look hard at where I'd been, where I was now, celebrate the journey and acknowledge all the people I met along the way who helped me get here.

I pulled out all the stops. For once in my life, I thought about what I wanted and actually allowed myself to have it. I set aside all my thoughts about how I didn't deserve getting what I wanted, that getting what I wanted was always worse than what my imagination came up with... and let it all go.

My initial thought was to see if there was anyone I could hand off the actual planning of the event to, but by the time I got around to thinking of who I wanted to ask, I already knew what my party was going to look like and what I wanted to do. I put my vision down in a spreadsheet, along with any actions I had to take to make it happen. Now it was just about getting into action and shaking the universe down until what I wanted fell out of it and at my feet.

This is how it came together.

2014 (Look Forward)

Resolutions aren't just for New Year's: they're for every day. So is living with intention, with integrity and with courage.

So here are five things that will happen in 2014. Because I say they will.

1. I will be fluent in Korean by my birthday.

2. I will visit at least five countries in Asia.

3. I will finally go bungee jumping.

4. I will be famous.

5. I will collaborate and create a beautiful romantic relationship with someone amazing.