hand-holding

So this past weekend, with much fear and anxiety, I attended my first girl's football practice. And of course, I ended up hurting my finger while catching (or not catching) the ball:


Even though it's a tiny injury, it's kind of amazing what kind of toll this itty bitty finger can take on a person. Though it's on my left hand (and I'm a right-handed person), it's been a bit of an annoyance to type (since that's all I do both at work and at home). I realized being right or left handed really doesn't make that much of a difference anymore in this keyboard-prone age.

Anyway, when I went to go see the doctor the following Monday, he just shook his head at me like a disapproving parent, completely baffled that I didn't come in to a hospital or doctor's office right when the injury occurred. I ended up having to run across town in the rain to get x-rays (which showed that there was no fracture to the dismay of my doctor), and with a little bit of p.t., my finger will be supposedly back to normal.

But aside from all of that, this all made me realize how sheltered and even babied I've been my whole life. Every sickness, every stomachache, every minor injury- my family has been there for me. Even when I sprained my ankle in Korea, my aunt took me to get acupuncture with my cousin's insurance. I guess there is some hint of truth to what Alexandra Wallace said about Asian children not being able to fend for themselves because their parents are cooking food and doing laundry for them every weekend. To be honest, my parents did this for me every weekend during my UCLA years, and I never thought there was anything wrong or unusual about it. And though I was a bit of a brat at times, I think there's some sense of filial duty and a deeper joy for Korean parents to do these things for their kids. It's the labor of love, and I just hope I can practice the same type of selflessness for my kids (though that just means they have to give me massages at my beck and call...muhaha).

Oh, and I actually texted the above pic of my finger to my brother.
His reply-> Broham: "Stupon 걸. You were meant to read books not do sports!"

Oh, you are so right.

must-read (esp all you californian/new yorkers)

Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That"

"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years."

rest of the article

a larger world

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison.”
-C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

caution: stupidity ahead!

So, a few weeks ago, I decided to sponsor a child from Compassion, a Christian children advocacy ministry (my boy is from the Philippines!), and I had to fill out and send back this little information pamphlet, sharing a bit about myself to my kid. So today, after finally remembering, I started filling out my pamphlet until I came upon a portion where I had to draw in a star on a map to indicate which state I'm from.

Okay... this is kind of embarrassing for me to admit in the huge realm of the blogosphere (and I know I'm going to put every UCLA grad to shame), but I didn't know where NY was on the U.S. map.

But in my defense, geography was never my strong suit! And it's not as big and distinct as California! And as many souvenirs and memorabilia there are for NY, I don't see anyone with a shirt with the shape of the state on it!

Okay, fine I'm dumb. I'm down to the level of those people who are in the "Jay-walking" segment on the Tonight Show, where they don't even know who the president of the US is.

All right, so I actually googled the map of the East Coast. Funny thing is even after seeing NY, I couldn't believe that was how New York looked like. New York isn't supposed be that big. And New York City can NOT be that tiny. I could not believe that the five boroughs of NY were that tiny compared to the rest of New York. And what are these other places? Onondaga? Cattaraugus? Chemung? - They sound as foreign as African tribes. Delaware? Isn't that a separate state?

My ignorance of the greater world (or even Greater NY) astounds me. I'm gona go study a map now.

And I remember seeing this the other day in my feed:

Sad thing is, I'm not even a true New Yorker.

jhumpa lahiri's "trading stories"

"It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”

This was where I faltered. I preferred to listen rather than speak, to see instead of be seen. I was afraid of listening to myself, and of looking at my life."

read more

social networking junkie

After joining Google+, I came to the scary conclusion that my cyber imprint in this world is too large. I have an account on:

• google+
• facebook
• twitter
• blogspot
• tumblr
• yelp
• foursquare
• dailymile
• livejournal (though pretty inactive)
• xanga (though same as above)

I am ubiquitous and highly stalkable (though I'm not sure why anyone would, considering that I'm a pretty boring person). I was originally writing this post because I wanted to trim the fat and get rid of at least half of these accounts, but I realized that they all serve such unique purposes. I was initially going to part ways with facebook (and wholly google plus it... is that too much of a risk?) but then I realized there are still some aspects of facebook that I really will miss (i.e. looking at pics of people's babies... sounds kind of creepy of me, but they're all people I - somewhat - know!) Anyway, as I was typing, I changed my mind again and really decided to deactivate my facebook, because most of the people I truly care about it and care to keep in touch with are on google+ or will be on it shortly (it's all a matter of time...) Yes, I'm a fickle creature. Ok, so I just deactivated my facebook, and it's showing me pictures of people who will miss me, which is pretty funny, because I highly doubt they'll miss me. In fact, they probably won't know that I even left. And now Facebook tells me that I can sign back into my account anytime I want and that they hope I'll come back soon. Oh, what a sentimental bunch.

ps. new pet peeve: when people call Google+ "Google+1"... Google +1 is the little button (similar to the Facebook "Like" button) not the social network itself.

lord knows best

song has been in my head for a good three days.

pourquois moi?

life has been unkind to me today.