All of the public schools are already closed for Friday too. Anyway, does it snow where you live? If so, what happens when it does? Tomorrow or on Saturday, I’ll take a picture and show you exactly how much (how little) snow we actually got.

*A snow dance is a dance performed to encourage cold weather and snow. Dancers, typically, hope that the snow will cause their places of work and schools to close.

This year, I decided to focus on eight special things.

• reading I need to read more books, articles, journals, blogs, etc.
• Korean I want to become fluent in another language ASAP. I want to have the ability to work as a diplomatic translator, even though I’m not trying to become one. Of course, I had to pick one of the hardest languages—but it is what it is. I need to study tons.
• Callistonian.net I’ve had this site for 8 years. I’m not ready to let it go.
• exercise Staying healthy is important.
• traveling Not only do I want to take long trips across oceans, but I also want to visit local hot spots (restaurants, museums, cafes,  and one-of-a-kind stores).
• photography Memories are wonderful, and they’re so much sweeter when there are photos to accompany them.
• writing I’m not too sure about how far I want to push this one. Am I willing to work hard enough to get something (non-fiction) published or is it enough if I just keep a journal and write as I normally do.
• give Last but not least, I want to volunteer and give money to charity.

At day 18, I’m doing okay. I’ve read a novel, at least two dozen newspaper articles, and some blogs.  I’ve studied Korean for hours. I’ve also been giving. I gave money to Doctors Without Borders (for Haiti) and to another organization. I also volunteered.

Azn Song Fest. so fun~ i was one of SuJu’s E.L.Fs. XD crazy, but SJ balloon + SJ glowstick + SJ binoculars = me. http://twitpic.com/ibru7

Did you see this? Do you understand? No? Well, I’m a bit sorry for being incomprehensible, but Twitter encourages seriously brief posts. I could only use 140 characters.

Generally speaking, I type my “tweets” in standard American English, but then I get these threats saying that I’ve used too many characters and that if I don’t get rid of some of them, my message won’t be posted. So I go back, delete vowels, and turn seemingly random words into abbreviations and acronyms. How do you deal with text messages and Twitter?

Anyway—on a Saturday awhile ago, I went to a concert called Asia Song Festival. A bunch of pop artists from all over Asia came to Seoul and performed. The concert was great. It was a lot of fun.

I hardly know how things work where you are, but in Korea, the big concerts are segregated. Normal people sit in one area. Everyone else sits according to the fan club they’re in. Thus, CRAZY enthusiastic female fans of a specific group sit in their special section all by themselves. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that sitting with normal people is nearly as fun as sitting with screaming girls. Screaming girls = awesome. Screaming boys = fun too, but sometimes they’re a little scary.

Unfortunately, my friend and I arrived at the venue late. Whoops. We weren’t tragically late, though. The concert had yet to begin, but we wanted to get inside quickly because something had started. What had started, exactly? Well, we didn’t know because we weren’t inside. T_T

Sadly, we also could not just run into the venue, because there was a gate, and there were lines, and we had to show our tickets, and …

While we were trying to figure out which line we were supposed to be in, I saw the largest, loudest, and most enthusiastic fan club, Super Junior’s Everlasting Friends (SuJu’s ELFs), quickly moving through everything and going in. By the way, Super Junior is a 13-member boy band.

They’re pretty cute, right? Anyway, this was our opportunity, our chance! I decided that we were going to become ELFs. Screaming girls > normal people, remember? So I told my friend to get out her SuJu concert paraphernalia. I did the same thing, decking myself in pearl sapphire blue, and we just went along with them.

Why oh why did we have SuJu concert gear? While we were waiting in a line to get the tickets we reserved, we bought some random stuff. Two Super Junior glow sticks were among the items purchased. What can I say? I have a soft spot for some boy bands and pop music, because it’s deliciously at odds with my “serious” and “mature” personality.

Even though we weren’t real fan club members, once the decision to attach ourselves to the ELFs was made, we committed ourselves 100% to the Super Junior cause. Yeah~ We really really did not want to get kicked out of their area, because that would mean that we wouldn’t get free stuff, and we’d have to go sit with the lame balloon-less people who probably don’t understand screaming, chanting, and proper concert decorum. We tried very hard to fit in. We bought SuJu ELF balloons and binoculars.

Luckily, we did not have any male friends with us, blowing our cover. 99.99 percent of those around us were female. A great deal of them were high school students. The only male I saw was someone’s little brother. I guess guys just aren’t fans of boy bands. You’d think that they’d consider it, though—they’d meet more girls that way.

At any rate, even though we looked suspicious (Hello, I’m in Korea, but I speak English!), everyone was super nice. We did not get kicked out. Instead, we played our role quite well and screamed our love for Super Junior. ♥ XD

I was ill. I had a wretched cough and no voice. I almost died several times due to laughter induced coughing fits. The worst was when a friend forced me to laugh with one of his 2,331,223,294,394,233,231 unsponsored iPod Touch advertisements. After hearing about how this less than one week old iPod Touch was so slim, about how it had wireless, about how it had Skype, about how it could be used to display random facts, about how it could be used as a light saber, about how it could (not) be used as a dictionary, about how it could be used as a flashlight, etc. 12,123, 239, 223 times in a less than three day span, this happened.

An approximate re-telling of the particularly offensive commercial:
setting: the lights are out & its late at night

a: what’s that noise?
b: my iPod Touch makes soothing wave sounds. they help you fall asleep.
i laugh and almost die as the obsession can no longer be denied.
a *after recovering from her own laughter*: o_O wtf?
b: do you want to hear forest noises instead?
a: …

The sound goes on for about 2 minutes.

For the record, there was nothing soothing about those ocean noises. The sound looped every 8 or so seconds. It stopped abruptly, in a terribly jarring way, and then started again. -___-;

a: TURN IT OFF!

Anyway, I was sick. My friend, his iPod, and my other friend took the hotel shuttle to Tokyo Disney early the next morning. As I was sick, I was going to go to the pharmacy when it opened, get some meds, and take the train to Disney (the shuttle only ran from the hotel to the park during morning hours), and meet them in front of the Haunted Mansion in the afternoon. Things didn’t quite work out.

I wen to the pharmacy. I got my medicine (aka souped up cough drops). So far, so good. When I was trying to get to Tokyo Disney, the trains randomly broke down—thank goodness I could understand Japanese—my 30 minute trip turned into 4 hours of … something terrible. I didn’t even get lost, though.

I got my refund from the people working at the station. I walked to another one (yay detour?). I got on another train. I walked to the Disney bus stop and thought, “OMG!”—the bus line was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people long. T_T  After 240 minutes or thereabouts, I finally reached Disney. Nonetheless, it sucked because I couldn’t find my friends.

I spent my time at Disney all alone. I rode one ride (it’s A Small World). I also wasted about 63 minutes vainly searching for familiar faces. Finally, I decided enough was enough. I left.

I spent another 240 minutes getting back to my hotel—Just kidding. Actually, there was no way I was enduring those kinds of epic lines again. I took the limousine bus/shuttle bus back to my hotel. I didn’t know if the driver was going to let me on the bus, because I didn’t do anything you were supposed to in regards to that (e.g. get a ticket). So I was upfront with him, and said things like “Hi! :) I don’t have a ticket. I didn’t make a reservation, either. :) But I’m staying at this hotel. I have a key. :) Here it is. PLEASE let me on the bus. Thank you.”

In the midst of all that, I lost my $400 dictionary. No joke.

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?

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!

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.

Does my odd drawing make sense? No? Either way, let me explain.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is a classic. Almost everyone everywhere knows this game. At work, we played it today, on Friday, and on Thursday. And I think we’ll continue playing. Why? Well … By itself, Rock, Paper, Scissors is pretty lame—but it becomes much more fun when the loser is punished, no? For instance, if everyone who didn’t lose got to take a swing at the loser, wouldn’t that make it more fun? :P Perhaps? Anyway, we don’t hit each other at work. We’re a bit more civilized than that. Instead, we force the loser to spend money. Today, she had to buy ice cream for everyone else who played. T_T Before, it was coffee or some sort of drink.

Today, I played against 3 people and lost. I knew that my adversaries were going to throw paper. I just knew it. Before I made the fatal mistake of throwing rock, I thought, “What happens if I throw rock and all three of them throw paper? Will I lose?” Yes—I did lose, because I threw rock (anyway) and they all threw paper. T_T So, I bought everyone ice cream. That’s okay. I won’t lose tomorrow. Have you ever known (strongly felt) that something was going to happen and then acted as though it wasn’t going to happen, anyway? If so, did you regret it?

Aside/FYI: The stove in mentioned my past entry about setting stoves on fire was set on fire again. I wasn’t there this time, though. Also, I probably won’t be doing anymore voice entries—my last one was too strange. It didn’t go over well.

The volume is low, so turn up your speakers.

Snowboarding 101. Last month, I went snowboarding for the first time ever. I’m not an athletic person, and I was terrible at snowboarding—but it was still amazing fun. I couldn’t get down the bunny slope, but … Next time, I’ll get down the hill without falling? Maybe? Probably not. After my first snowboarding adventure, my legs weren’t sore. My arms weren’t really sore. My back wasn’t really sore. However, my poor butt was terribly sore. Afterwards, sitting down hurt so much, so next time, I want to spend more time standing up and less time in the snow!

Good Things. Feb. 16th is my mother’s birthday (happy birthday!). I got her plane ticket, today! She’s coming to Korea, next month. She’s never been here before. I have to make lists and plan out everything we’ll do. I’m so excited. :)

Other Good Things. I’ll do a voice entry next time? I uploaded pictures (finally!!) to my flickr account. They’re photos from COEX Aquarium that I took at the beginning of December. I need to add a lot more.

Here’s one.