Callistonian.net

Three slightly random tidbits from the last 60,840 minutes of my life (i.e. what’s been going on since I last blogged).

JAPAN—I’ll spend a few humid days during July and August in Japan. My tentative list of things to do is quite schizophrenic (because I’m going with friends and our personalities are different). So far, must-dos include visiting Tokyo Disneyland, the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, and an aquarium. Mountain climbing is also under serious consideration. If you have any suggestions let me know.

VOLUNTEER—Maybe I’m a little psychotic, but I haven’t done any noteworthy extracurricular or volunteer activities for a few months now. I haven’t been bored, but me not volunteering (or participating in some kind of crazy thing like sacrificing my fingers and learning to play an instrument no one has ever heard of) is like a caffeine addict going for weeks without coffee or soda. It’s unsustainable and enough to make me crazy. So, I’m ecstatic that an opportunity has finally presented itself—it involves teaching English, which is definitely kind of bleh and run-of-the-mill, but it has potential. I’m skeptical about the whole thing working out, though, because I’ve had things fall through before.

RANDOM OBSERVATION—Keyboards. I realized something. I don’t know where the keys on my keyboard are. My fingers know, but on paper I cannot draw a keyboard with correctly placed keys. Is this strange or just a by-product of never looking at the keys while typing?

Hi! How are you? I’m good, I guess. I’m just—figuratively—wiping the dust off Callistonian.net and its antediluvian (but still beloved!) layout. It’s only been approx. 530 hours since I last blogged.

Of course, I dislike the idea of beginning every blog entry with an apology for being MIA, but I keep disappearing. I hate this blogging once-a-month thing, but it’s what I’ve been doing. We’ll see just how possible blogging more consistently is for me—have you ever wanted to do something consistently only to not do it?

Books. So, in terms of books, I have done the unthinkable. I, a Pulitzer-Prize-obsessed-literature-loving-logophile, read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. I didn’t just read that one. This month, I finished it as well as New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. I read all 5,212,323,875,213 2,515 pages. And guess what? I like all four books. Have I lost my mind? Perhaps. Maybe I’ll post reviews explaining myself later, maybe I won’t. At any rate, I have no real intentions of watching the Twilight movie because it looks stupid to me.

Is it any wonder that my favorite song (for the moment) is 8eight’s lovely vampiric ballad 심장이 없어 (Without A Heart)?

Academics I need to study Korean. I hoped to have my proficiency in Korean tested in April, but since that’s become impossible, I intend to take the test in October. Now that my test has been pushed back several months, I’ve decided to tackle the insurmountable. I’m going to—I use the term “going to” very loosely—learn 3 to 4 years worth of Korean between now and then, and sit the highest level. -_-;

Academics Part 2 Sometimes, I play English teacher. For extra credit of sorts, I challenge my students to find non-technical English words that I do not know. For awhile, I was doing quite well and warding them off, but then one of the little geniuses got me with floccinaucinihilipilification. T_T

I’ll be more interesting next time. Ciao!

For the first time in months, I finished a letter. It’s in my bag now, waiting to be transported to the post office. It’s 2009, obviously, and a lot of people prefer email to tangible mail delivered by human mail carriers. But, I’m different. I dislike email. I love computers, blogs, the Internet, technology in general, and have an unneccessarily large collection of gadgets, but email?—no thanks. 

I’m bad at responding to friendly emails in a timely manner, anyway. So, I beg my friends living thousands of miles away for their addresses and try to send them mail. I say “try,” because I have lots of addresses and lots of people to write but … I’ve sent only a handful of letters and postcards in the last few months. I’ve been busy, kind of. Do you write letters? Have you ever (in your life) written a letter or postcard?

Writing letters was one of my better hobbies. I should write more often. If I don’t, I may find myself shipping obscenely heavy boxes filled with nothing but stationery to the USA from Korea. Collecting? things is great, but … hundreds of dollars in shipping fees is not. T_T (The picture to the left is a poor hodgepodge of 9 letters/postcards/envelopes I’ve put through the mail).

FYI, my favorite postcard ever—I turned a photo like this one of my friends and I toilet-papering another friend’s car into a postcard, photoshopped a caption on it, and sent it to that other friend. I’m so nice. ;)

In other news, I haven’t lost Rock Paper Scissors since that rather unfortunate day when I screwed up and played rock. Scissors ftw.

So, like the title says, this is a voice entry about … books? paper? an abacus? As for what it’s about, I’m not really sure. It’s 5 minutes long. Listen if you dare, and then comment.

The volume is low, so turn up your speakers.

Holla’ I’ve been MIA, because I’ve been busy. To make it up—ok, not really—but here’s a Christmas comic for you. One of my students drew it. It’s awesome. Don’t you agree?

Note: English isn’t her first language, so the English is a little odd in places—it’s still great.
Click for a bigger version.