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.

Nevertheless, for a brief moment, I’ve decided to press the pause button on life, and share two random events that happened between now and my last post. 

Setting a Stove on FIRE Sims Style I didn’t think it was actually possible, but it happened to me yesterday. I hate cooking; I’m a terrible cook. BUT, this flaming stove incident was not my fault. My friends and I (mainly them and not so much me, because I hate cooking) planned to prepare tacos for dinner. After some thought, we decided to warm up hard taco shells. To do this, we decided to use the stove’s “oven” feature. None of us ever used this feature? before, but we decided why not? So, we turned the “oven” on, and put the tacos in the “oven.” 49 seconds later, the stove was breathing fire from its top vents. After seeing the rising flames,  someone quickly opened the “oven,” unveiling charcoal-black flaming tacos.  

Moral of the story: NEVER put anything in the “oven” ever again. I don’t think the thing we used was an oven. It didn’t have a place to set the temperature. It was more like a small drawer with an open flame in it, hence the fire. Hmm… Have you ever set something on fire while cooking?

Seeing Christmas Lights in FEBRUARY I love Christmas and the holiday season, but they’re over. I understand that Christmas decorations are expensive, and that people want to get as much use out of them as possible, but it’s February… They need to come down. The holiday season is over. It’s been over. I don’t like seeing almost as many Christmas lights and Christmas trees in February as I did in December. Am I right?

Aside/FYI: I can’t draw well. Sorry. Also, I don’t have a wacom tablet or any other kind of tablet. My laptop is a tablet. I drew directly on its screen.

Lastly, should I do a voice entry next? I’ve been thinking about it.

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.

Girly~! I adore cafés with fresh and delicate atomospheres, so I dragged my willing friend to this fancy one a few days ago.  The cafe’s color scheme consisted of muted reds, browns, greens, and yellows. Its theme seemed to be dolls and flowers;  there were several dolls in lighted glass display cases, and the place was decorated with red and yellow flowers. Small couches paired with large pillows replaced the stiff wooden chairs of typical café chains. AND 99.9 percent of the drinks were served in dainty cups. The barrista drew a bear in my tea! 

Logophilic Today, during a break at work, I performed figurative CPR on my vocabulary at freerice.com. I incessantly badgered my colleagues too. It always went something like this.

me: What’s a rhyton?
them: What?
me: r-h-y-t-o-n
them: o_O

word: hippophagy
me (thinking): eating hippopotamus?!?! what?! kind of word is this?
them: hmm… crazy.
me (looking at the options): it’s eating horses
them: i don’t think so

So, in the end, everyone ended up on freerice.com… I wonder how long it will take me to get to level 60. Forever?

Other News I have been taking pictures. Wordpress has been deleting some of my comments. I learned how to make decent paper stars. I need to write letters (I’m so sorry, guys!) I’m being promoted?! My dictionary’s Internet browser displays sites as is (see snark and callistonian.net).

Perhaps, you’re thinking, “Come on, you’ve got to be kidding. It’s a dictionary. It’s just an electronic version of one of those brick-sized books that dorks use. What can it do besides look up words? It’s not like you can watch movies or use the Internet with it…”

Actually, I can watch movies with it (mpeg, divX, Xvid, wmv…). It also has a non-jacked up Internet browser. I can get live-streaming TV-quality TV on it too. :P I’m not lying.

First and foremost, though, this thing of mine is a dictionary. So, it has what every dictionary must have, a swiveling touch screen!? The screen can rotate 180 degrees, folding flat on itself. Screen rotation sometimes leads to scribbling which sometimes leads to random image creation …

I drew the image to the right, on my dictionary, without installing any applications or modifying its hard/software in anyway.

Moving right along— my dic. has an MP3 player, a calendar, a photo viewer, a radio, a voice recorder, a notepad, a memo pad, a scientific calculator, and converters. It can view PDF files, office documents, text files, and spreadsheets. It can read e-books out loud. It has games, plays flash files, blah blah blah…

All of that stuff is interesting, but by now the cynics must be thinking, “The actual dictionary on this thing must suck” because, well, nothing I’ve mentioned so far has anything to with a dictionary, in the traditional sense of the word. So, let’s go there.

There are lots of dictionaries on my dictionary. I’ve Chinese dictionaries—I don’t even speak Chinese—English dictionaries, Japanese dictionaries, and Korean dictionaries. There are also grammar books, vocabulary builders (i.e. Power Vocab 100,000), other helpful things, and other weird things. Anyway, the dictionaries themselves have all sorts of words in them, as one would expect. But, look at some of the words I found!

:-) is in the dictionary. Do you believe it?

At any rate, my dictionary is real. This is not a joke. It’s i-station’s udic. It costs about $50 more than an iPod touch. Some people give their phones, iPods, computers, and other electronic things names. My dictionary needs a name. Any suggestions?

On a final and truly facetious note, my dictionary can be used as a mask. The girl in the photograph below is clearly using it as a mask. Have you ever seen anyone use an iPod as a mask before? I don’t think so…