ready for our BIG night out in rincon. ez pickins anyone?!

me, won, and veronica in rincon

i feel salty

consulting the handy map of sea isle city

we're graduating! WORD

graduation lineup

bedtime at the beachhouse

won at anand and veeshal's graduation party

sea isle city baby!

two steps forward

so isn't it weird how linear the web can be? back and forth? i'm sure that's the dumbest and most obvious thought in the world. but sometimes playing on the internet is just like one big huge video game.

today was my school's field day, which was really fun. actually i don't feel like finishing this post for a lot of reasons but i should also note that on SATURDAY lisa got engaged. o...m...g.

worrying about amnesia

who even knows or remembers how often i've written about my concern about forgetting things that happen to me. in my own life! let alone in daydreams. and my reaction to this sad tendency is so mechanical. for example; making lists. or writing in a diary. or trying to tell myself it doesn't matter. but i never really question why it is that i forget things so easily.

before coming out of my room to type this up, i tried to remember what i could even write here. like, what did i do today? i could make a list if i were so inclined. i went to the fermented food expo which was held at the jeonju world cup stadium. i went to see an english language festival for secondary school students and then went out to eat jjajangmyun with one of my fave teachers , his wife, and his two rambunctious tiny boys. but in doing, i totally forgot the bag with the strawberry wine and president brie that i had bought earlier (at the fermented food expo!) oh no. and all day i was really paranoid about boys in one way or another.

and in other news - i'm such a scaredy cat of spending lots of money at once. i admit. i'll gladly spend lots of money cumulatively on little silly things but it's really rare that i get so moved to buy something big. like an ipod. or an airplane ticket. or a digital camera. okay i just have to work on the digital camera for now. part of me knows that i've been spending too much money on silly little things (like long distance phone calls or like clothes i don't even wear). from now on i am going to try to spend the right amount of money on the right things - like taekwondo lessons and cute socks!

and also i climbed a mountain this past tuesday - it was the "back mountain" behind our school, which wasn't a huge hike but offered great views of southern jeonju (mostly forefront rice fields and background apartment buildings). and yesterday i went to buan and watched as wang saewoo (king shrimp? jumbo shrimp?) were poured live into a pan filled with salt and then roasted, toasted, and burned to a crisp. pretty gross. i wonder about my amnesia and also my being able to eat meat.

i wasn't even AT homecoming and i feel the need to share this picture of tony (alcohol poisoning, HO!)

glamourlicious me. taken at a beach i think?

yummy samgyupsal (3, 3, 3 layers of pork fat!)

jamie and me at the seogwipo cinnabon, examining beads

me checking out brochure at o's gallery

making friends with cute dog at o's gallery

me and eileen at a seogwipo bar

impossible goodbyes

i never thought that the end of my wharton webmail account meant that like ... i wouldn't ever be able to access all those old e-mails! i thought they would just be frozen in time for ever and ever. all those cover letters and english papers and frantic messages from JMHH are gone! and that, more than anything else, marks the sad fact that i am no longer a college student!

not to mention all the alumni events that i am so not attending these days. won and i agree that looking back at penn is startling to the extent that we were so caught up in so many different prevailing opinions and philosophies which otherwise wouldn't have appealed or even made sense to us. so it might be great that this year is being spent away from anyone from penn. on the other hand, so much free food is never a bad thing. oh well...

this weekend was the first i've spent in jeonju for a long time. the school schedule has been really crazy for the past month - first there was chuseok, then field trips, then my gyeongju conference, now midterms and next week field day. the hardest hit are my monday classes, who i won't see for five weeks straight as a result of all of this madness. but in a really sweet gesture, my 2-3 class substituted one of their study halls for my class last thursday and gave me a rousing "i love you" and made hearts for me [hard to describe in words but basically like making an "M" like in YMCA].

i'm being challenged in lots of ways here, but i can't help but wonder whether these challenges would be arising wherever i were. and although really funny, precious, memorable moments do make me smile or laugh here, i'd hope they'd do the same anywhere! well, on a day to day basis some of my co-teachers at school do make me feel like a fun and interesting human being, esp. mr. chung and ms. oh. my students are generally great. i can share random silliness with other ETAs like ej blowsquad. and "what if you couldn't distinguish between the taste of mint and the sense of something increasing".

but it's just one year. i'm still trying to figure out travel plans and future plans and how i want to have changed by july 2005. totally fresh and totally futile...