the art of memory: a short post

I don’t typically work early morning shifts, but I’m covering for another barista today because, well, even most baristas would rather not work on December 26th. Catching the 522 bus at 4:55A.M isn’t necessarily what I would call “fun” but the upside is that now I work for a coffee house where I can make and consume all the espresso I want. And, it’s quiet here. I can turn on Edith Piaf or Emiliana Torrini and read Lewis or Lee; or, I can skype with Korea. That’s what I did this early this morning while most of Seattle was still asleep and the Christmas lights on 6th Avenue were still shinning in the black, I skyped with my friend Michelle. I even made her a latte. A long distance latte, which I consequently had to consume myself. 

Later today, I’ll meet up with J. Fast at The Crumpet Shop in Pikeplace. The only complaint I have about today is that I’ve somehow left my analogue camera at my other coffee house and I’m without even my little digital. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll have time to pick up my camera later, but if not, I’ll make use of the one thing my fathertried 
to teach me: 

the art of memory.

All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.

I've recently rekindled my love for C.S. Lewis. While I was sitting on the bus on the way to work recently, I read the following from Letters to Malcolm and it really touched me. I thought it was worth sharing. 

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkiley, reject the good that God offers us because, at the moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On  every level of our life- in our religious experienc, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience- we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depricating all other occcasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselfs open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we're still looking for the old one. And of coruse we don't get that. You can't, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in it's own way as good.

This applies especially to the devotional life. Many religious people lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away. They think- sometimes rightly, but not, I believe, always- that their sins account for this. They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have been the golden days. But were those fervours- the perative word is those- ever intended to last?

It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest canidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once. 

And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are contenct to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down ina  past which we do not mersably try to conjure back, they will send up exquistie growths. Leave the blubs alone, and the new flowers will come up....

North Korea.

(Copied from my tumblr.

On facebook, I follow this guy named Shin Dong-hyuk. He’s famous for having escaped from the North Korean prison camp where he was born. His story is tragic and heartbreaking. He often tours with the memoir he wrote about his escape and his time in a North Korean camp. I have not yet read his book, but I’ve watched a few documentaries  on him and his life. 

Today, North Korea launched a long-distance missile over Okinawa. They say it was part of a “space program” but everyone, including Japan and South Korea, are saying it was nothing of the sort. Mr. Dong-hyuk has been on facebook today and he is sort of freaking out. Nobody can blame him for that because his heart is in North Korea. Nobody has seen the inside like he has. Nobody knows how bad it is like he does.

I’ve been shocked and surprised at some of the responses I’ve seen to Mr. Dong-hyuk on facebook. He posted a status earlier that said “Crazy NK dictator. I am so very much angry”  and in response, somebody said to him “Care to discuss? We are your friends and we are here for you. But you must admit, this is a proud moment for Korean people everywhere!” What is even more surprising, is that this comment seems to be coming from an ex-pat living in South Korea.

How could anyone think what is going on in North Korea is something to be proud of? And, if this person is a follower of Mr. Dong-hyuk, how could they be so insensitive as to not see the situation from his point of view? AND WHY WOULD AN EX-PAT THINK HE COULD INCLUDE NORTH and SOUTH KOREANS INTO THE SAME GROUP? They are not the same. They once were, but they’re quite different. Ignorance makes me really upset. 

Mr. Dong-hyuk posted another status, “NK one missiles to $ 1.3 billion/ Crazy crazy crazy/ North Korean citizens starve to death.” And in response, somebody commented “I don’t mean to disturb you, but even America, to a degree, is like this.”

I know America spends a ridiculous amount of money on things it doesn’t need. But we’re not launching military missiles over Canada in the guise of a space program while most of our people are starving to death. What’s going on inside of North Korea is nothing short of genocide and to compare that to what is happening in America, that’s ignorance, too. 

The problem is that the majority of people don’t really know what is happening in North Korea. We don’t see it. Maybe because we’re not looking. Maybe because those of us who DO see it, we don’t want to muddle up the facebook feeds of our friends by posting depressing, doomsday posts about North Korea. That doesn’t fit with the holiday atmosphere. I know I don’t really like it when people get political. I can’t imagine that my friends want me to be reminding them of all the terrible atrocities happening in North Korea. 

But if I don’t do it. Who will? The news? No. We’re talking about the fiscal cliff on American news. 

I love Shin Dong-hyuk’s posts. Other things he said recently include “North Korea missile launch. Idiots” and “Forgiveness? Too tough words.” I love his posts because he’s an ESL learner. An adult learner at that, because, as you can imagine, they don’t teach English in North Korean prison camps. I love how his simple use of words conveys so much emotion. That’s part of what I’ve always loved about tutoring and helping ESL students, they don’t have many words, but they always use them beautifully. I love his posts because he has hope, heart, and anger about what’s going on in North Korea. I think he’s a light. An ambassader. 

I’m worried about my generation. I’m worried about the fact that we’re ignoring what is going on in other parts of the world. What is happening right now in North Korea isn’t any different from what happened in Nazi Germany. The difference is what? The fact that the problem seems to be contained to small country in Asia? Is it really political? Is that why the UN continues to let North Korea do as they please? I read somewhere that maybe the powers of the UN let North Korea continue to be a threat, because with their threatening presence, we Westerners have a reason to have a huge military presence in South Korea and Japan. Without that threat, our presence would become increasingly unwelcome. Is that it? Are we letting people starve to death because of politics? Is that the country I live in? And the starving to death, that’s just the beginning. Brutal, brutal things go on every day in North Korean prison camps. Things too dark for tumblr. 

I grew up reading about the famine that wreaked havoc in North Korea in the 1990’s. I remember the pictures, they made an indelible impression in my mind. Around that time is when I first became really interested in documentary photography. Although I love photography as art, I think the camera is most powerful when it’s telling a story, especially if that story is for a person who can’t speak for themselves. Documenting the tragedy in North Korea is one of my oldest, most deeply rooted ideas. (I can’t say “desire” or “dream” here, because it isn’t like that. Those are the wrong words).  I don’t know if I’ll ever do it, or if I even want to do it, but it’s still there, in my mind. America needs to know what’s really going on in North Korea. We can’t use ignorance as an excuse anymore. Not when the information is right there, on our facebook feeds. We’re not sitting idle because of a lack of information. We’re doing it because we’ve turned our faces away from what is going on in North Korea and there’s nothing more shameful than that. 

I don’t know what to do. I feel completely helpless when it comes to these things. But for Shin Dong-hyuk, for all the millions of others still prisoned in North Korea, I do the only thing I really know how to do: I pray. For now, that isn’t a cop out  and it isn’t cliche and it isn’t being lazy. North Korea is closed to private citizens like me. I can’t go there now. And until I can, the only thing, the best thing I can do, is pray. 

-Tasha Swinney, 12/12/2012. 

7 myths I believed as a kid

7.) This solid Palmer Easter Bunny is much better than any of those prettier, hallow Easter Bunnies because it's, well, solid and mom says it will take me longer to eat it.

Right. No. Not exactly. I'm pretty sure all those hydrogenated oils from the Palmer candy I ate as a kid are still inside of me...

6.) When kids grow up, boys have to get jobs and go to work and girls stay home and take care of the babies and sometimes, just sometimes, a girl will get a job, like being an Elementary school teacher. But that's o.k. because jobs are never fun...

Thank you, 90's. 

5.) Kids like pizza but adults don't really like pizza, they mostly like salads.

I still love pizza as much as I did when I was 7.

4.) The grown-up world is organized and, well, orderly. Grown-ups have a handle on what is going on, and that seems nice because the kid-world sometimes seems a little chaotic.

It's the other way around.

3.) College is impossible. Only really, really, really smart people go to college and it's probably all math and I wouldn't like it anyways.

I honestly thought this. 

2.) It's rare that a kid grows up and gets to do what they really want, like acting/writing/painting/being an astronaut, ect. Mostly, only a few really special people get to do that.

1.) Grown-ups don't have adventures.

conversations with clothes

The other night, I was digging in my closet for something I'd lost, when I heard a somewhat forced sounding cough coming from somewhere in the back. It was my sweater dress.

"Ahem," said the sweater dress.

"Can I do something for you?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

"I was just hoping for a status update," said the sweater dress.

"A status update? I updated my status this morning," I said.

"I'm not talking about facebook," said the sweater dress.

"Well, what then?" I said.

"I was told we were going to Korea. I was wondering about the departure date," said the sweater dress.

"Oh, are you in some sort of time-contraint? I didn't know that sweater dresses had time-contraints," I said.

"I don't. I'm actually rather timeless, despite what some might say... why are you smirking?" said the sweater dress.

"No reason," I said.

"Alright, well, I'd just like to know how long you want me to wait. Some of the clothes in here say they were purchased in August and they've yet to see the inside of a suitcase," said the sweater dress.

"Do you guys talk about me when I'm not here?" I asked.

"Not exactly, but still, we'd like to know. We were told we were going to teach English," said the sweater dress.

"I think I'm the one who will be doing the teaching," I said.

"You know what I mean," said the sweater dress.

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but it might take some time," I said.

"I'm afraid I don't quite get your meaning," said the sweater dress. "I mean, I understand that there have been hiccups in the plan, but I believe you had two hopeful interviews last week, and a job offer with a rural school, what happened?" she asked, rather condescendingly.

"Sweater dress, did you really WANT to live in rural Korea?" I said.

"Not exactly. Did you?" asked the sweater dress.

"I don't think I would have minded. I think the idea of being near a tea plantation is rather romantic," I said.

"So what was the problem?" asked the sweater dress.

"The job felt rather rushed and a little desperate and I've been told that desperate isn't a good colour on anyone," I said.

"I wouldn't know anything about that," said the sweater dress.

"I'm sure you wouldn't," I said. "Anyways, I would not have had the time to tie up loose ends around here. It would have meant a total rush to take that job. And, I was thinking of you, sweater dress. I was afraid you would have felt out of place in a rural, nameless village in Korea," I said.

"Well, that's very kind of you. But I'd still really like to go to Asia and I'd really like to be worn," said the sweater dress.

"Well, so would I," I said.

"You'd like to be worn?" she asked.

"You know what I mean," I said.

"I think I do" she said. "But what are you going to do now? When are you going to wear me?" asked the sweater dress.

"I could wear you to metropolitan market while I make coffee," I offered.

"No, thank you," said the sweater dress.

"Well. I'll be teaching eventually. I'm going to apply to JET, you remember Japan, don't you? That was the original plan, anyways, and the application process begins in October. It seems silly to rule out JET when I never applied to it the first place and October is right around the corner and..."

"What a perfect month. So blustery, so windy, perfect for..."

"You're interrupting me," I said. "Anyhow, if I don't get an interview with JET, I'll apply to be in Korea in February, that's the main hiring season for Korean schools anyways and there's likely to be more options available and it should be less stressful. Who knows, we might even get to PICK our city, wouldn't that be nice, sweater dress? Wouldn't you like to go somewhere metropolitan and sophisticated?" I asked.

"I'd like to go to Sapporo," said the sweater dress.

"That isn't in Korea," I said.

"Do you expect me to know geography now?" asked the sweater dress.

"I suppose not," I said. "Anyways, while we're at it, I'd really like to take the trans-siberian," I said.

"Now that would be nice," said the sweater dress. "And wouldn't it be lovely if you wore me in Red Square and we walked right up to Saint Basil's?" sighed the sweater dress.

"I thought you didn't know geography," I said.

"Did you forget about putting the Russian literature box in the closet right under me?" asked the sweater dress.

"I suppose I did," I said. "Anyhow, Moscow would be lovely, and don't think I don't plan on it," I said.

"But what about the meantime? Am I just going to NOT be worn all winter? I've noticed you favour the threadless shirts. God only knows why," said the sweater dress.

"Meantime. Such an interesting word," I said.

"Stop being philosophical," said the sweater dress.

"I'm going to study for and take the GRE in the meantime, sweater dress," I said. "I could wear you while I sit in the Snohmish Starbucks and study for it. How do you like the sound of that?" I asked.

"Well, it does sound quite nearly high-brow. Will S.K be there?" asked the sweater dress.

"I rather think she might," I said.

"Then I'm in," said the sweater dress.

"Thank goodness," I said.

"But seriously, other than that, are you just going to leave me hanging?" said the sweater dress.

"Sweater dress, that was a little low," I said.

"I know," said the sweater dress.

"Besides," I said. "I wouldn't want to make promises I don't intend on keeping, that would be like pulling the wool over your eyes," I said.

And then I turned off the light, and closed the door.

sweater dress ambivalence

The sweater dress w/tag still on it. When I find matching tights, maybe I'll post a real picture. If I don't return it first.

Let me paint a picture for you.

My bed isn't made but clean sheets are sitting at the foot of it, waiting. There are empty water glasses on the dresser and a half-full coffee cup on the nightstand. Boxes are strewn everywhere, some are filled with books and meticulously sorted and labeled by genre. For example, one Fat Tire Amber Ale box with a vintage bicycle printed on it is filled with children's literature, while another empty Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout box is waiting to be filled with Russian literature, it's tipped over on it's side on my study futon. New teaching clothes with the tags still on them are hanging on the armoire, papers are everywhere.

I'm standing in the middle of the chaos in front of a giant mirror propped up on an old Army trunk and I'm wearing a new sweater dress with the tags still on it and I'm thinking the following things:

1.) Jessie and Kaitlyn would both be upset if they knew what I was wearing right now, but Korea is supposed to be cold with no central heating! 

2.) Will I ever become a teacher? How many times will Korea change her mind?

3.) Should I have bought the orange sweater dress that made me look like Velma instead of this one?

4.) At least, if I stay in Seattle, I get to hang out with Sarah Karnes.

5.) I like the pleated shoulders on this dress, but, I wish it was green.

6.) I want to get rid of everything I own.

7.) I am going to miss my stuff if I ever go overseas.

8.) So, this is what wearing teacher's clothes feels like?

9.) I wonder if I'm doing the right thing.

10.) I wonder if I'm doing the right thing.

11.) I wonder if I'm doing the right thing.

12.) I wonder if I'll ever actually get to Korea.

In my defense, I went into the discount department store looking for a thick winter coat a few days ago because everyone keeps touting the tales of frigid Korean winters and my peacoat is slightly threadbare from 6 years of use. But the store didn't have coats. They did, however, have sweater dresses of every colour and pattern. I could not help myself.

Last week, I was offered a job with a private Korean school and I accepted it and started to get really, pretty excited. On friday, I paid lots of good money to send all my documents to Korea to start the visa process. I only told a few people and announced nothing on facebook because I figured, you don't really know until you're there.

Last night I was watching Spirited Away when I got an email from my recruiter saying that the school cannot hire me anymore because of "financial problems." I cannot really convey to you how I've felt the last 36 hours.

Korea. You are more fickle than Seattle's summer sunshine. You're like a middle school romance.

This afternoon, I stood in my closet, seriously considering taking back some clothes that still have the tags on them. Teacher's clothes. Clothes that might be out of season before they see the light.

Right now, I'm ambivalent about everything, including that sweater dress, despite the fact that my mother says I look good in it.

thoughts on waiting/ korea update

Yesterday evening I was expecting a call from overseas, so I took my phone out into my mother's garden (I get shoddy reception in the house) and I waited. I inspected the blueberry plants and I pulled big lemon balm leaves off the bush so I could rub them between my fingers for the smell.

I waited for the call. Every ten minutes or so, I went back inside the house to check my email. Nothing.

My mother came out to water her garden.

My little brother came out and hopped on a bike. I got on the other bike and we chased each other. Then I picked some little unripe apples off one of the no-good trees hanging over our fence, and we threw them at each other while riding.

Of course, after a few apples to my leg, I was done, but my brother kept it up and so I did as well.

I kept checking my phone. I kept going inside to check my email.

Eventually, I brought out Anna Karenina and sat outside to read, one eye on my phone the other eye on my brother who was still throwing apples.

The call never came. I emailed my recruiter and finally came inside, still kinda waiting for the call over two hours after it was supposed to happen.

Although I'm unhappy about not getting the call. I'm really kind-of glad that I got to spend the evening with my family and it was fun and because I knew I was waiting for something, I didn't feel obligated to be doing something else or "get something done." That, I think, is why I sometimes enjoy waiting more than any other thing.

This morning I got an apology email from my recruiter full of blah-blah-blahs and I-don't-know-what-happened's. Oh, well.

For those of you who don't know, the process of getting an English teaching job at a public school in Korea this fall is going quite slowly. Everything has been delayed by my August 17th graduation date and really, it's nobody's fault. It's just how the timing has worked out. But the difficult thing, which I'm just now discovering, is that the PROMISE of a diploma means nothing in the world of Korean recruiting. The promise of a diploma will not get you a job or guarantee you a spot even if you're qualified. It actually won't really even put you in line for a position.

There's a whole paperwork process and without a (physical) diploma you cannot get a teaching visa.

When we first started this process back in May/June-ish, my friend Michelle and I made an agreement with our recruiter that he would place us both in the same program and in the same city so that we'd be nearby. Our recruiter said that he could do this for us and he knew from the beginning that my diploma would be a little later in arriving. Since Michelle has a fantastic resume and she has her diploma already, she was placed around mid-July in a city called Suwon. We were both stoked because Suwon has a an ancient wall, and real history, strawberries, galbi, and it's a big enough city that surely there would be another job for me (after all, that's why we have a nice recruiter who is going to put us both in the same city!) and so it all seemed really settled and really fantastic, and dammit, I even bought connected with Suwon.

Meanwhile, I still had to wait for my position. So, I did.

Near the end of July, the South Korea branch of our recruiting agency called me and told me to prepare myself because a school in Suwon really wanted to interview me and had chosen me out of a number of candidates. I prepared, I had the interview, and it went well. But later that week after I had asked, and asked, my recruiter finally told me that since I did not yet have my diploma the school could not hire me and they did not want to wait. It had been a long process that included me canceling my birthday plans to have the interview via skype and now it was clear that it had all happened in vain.

About a week later, I realized that my recruiter was sounding more and more ambivalent about finding me a placement in Korea, not only in Suwon, but with a public school in general. So, I went online and I emailed a few other agencies and now I have a few more recruiters working for me. But things on the Korea front still seem a little bleak. In fact, according to a few of my recruiters, most of the public school positions have already been filled and there are many, many applicants fighting for the few positions that are left.  To make myself more marketable and more available for other positions, I've enrolled in a 100 hr TESOL program. Private schools are a little more open, but the pay is sometimes not as great and it's really a gamble. Now, I'm applying to both public and private schools whereas before I was only considering public schools.

Right now, my best bet is a position with the EPIC (public school) program in Cheonan. This position is good because it isn't far (I'd say less than 45 minutes by train) from Suwon and the pay is really good and the position is supposed to open up in October, according to my new, wonderful recruiter, Rachel. If you're the praying type, you could pray that everything goes smoothly with the EPIC Cheonan position, and that my relationship with my recruiter Rachel flourishes (because that seems to be important) and that I'm in South Korea by mid-October.

In the meantime, I'm waiting and I'm still hopeful because I know that, as cliche as it might sound right now, it's really all in God's hands.

"And since we've not learned how not to want, we've had to learn, by waiting, how to wait..."
-Li Young Lee

천국의 우편배달부 / Postman to Heaven: A Korean Movie Review

There's an old red mailbox in a vacant grassy field and hurting people come here to send letters to their dead loved ones. One man is taking the letters, reading them, and trying to make answers to questions where maybe there are no answers.

               천국의 우편배달부/Postman to Heaven is a 2009 South Korean-Japanese film, part of a telecinema series of films made for Asahi television and directed by Lee Hyung Min. It also happens to be the very first Korean drama that I've ever seen. Although Postman to Heaven starts out a little rocky with a poorly written storyline, what saved the film for me was it's tantalizing photographic cinematography. This review contains no spoilers. 


The basic storyline of Postman to Heaven is compelling in it's way, but it starts off really slow and isn't helped much by sub-par writing. For the first ten minutes of the film, I honestly felt like I was watching Korea's version of a Lifetime movie and I seriosuly considered walking away. But cheesy lines are much easier to swallow when they're uttered in a beautiful foreign language and you're reading the subtitles and hoping the translation is what's making the characters sound so chiche. I forced myself to get past the first 20 minutes and I was quickly hooked. The postman, Shin Jae Joon, is portrayed by K-pop singer Kim 'Hero' Jaejoong in his first ever acting debut and co-staring with him is Han Hyo Joo who plays a girl by the name of Jo Ha Na. Jae Joon and Ha Na meet in a lush green field where Ha Na has come to mail a letter to her dead ex-boyfriend. She discovers Jae Joon removing all the letters out of a red mailbox where people have come to send mail to those who have passed on before them. Curiosity and anger about Jae Joon's removal of the letters forms the foundation for the couple's blossoming friendship. What happens from here is a complicated, sometimes disjointed storyline where Jae Joon enlists Ha Na to help him in answering the letters in curious and unusual ways, and, well, you can only guess what happens from there.


 Ha Na as a character is a bit difficult to stomach in the beginning. She's whiny and fully of classic Korean aegyo while Jae Joon is sullen and all serious with his hair always in his eyes and his wearing all black all the time. What saved Ha Na for me was that it was visually really fun to watch her frolicking around empty fields and adorable Tahitian coffee shops in lacy skirts, leather boots and long flowing scarves. Fair warning: by the end of this film, you too will want to frolic around an overgrown field while wearing a lacy skirt and a long flowing scarf. Visually, I couldn't be as entertained by Jae Joon as I was by Ha Na and perhaps this was because I'm still not entirely comfortable with the super-skinny, lots of chest-area-showing fashion statements made by the majority of K-pop artists. Call me crazy, that's just how it is. However, when Jae Joon put on some clothes, and a peacoat, and a scarf, and some glasses for the final scene of the film, I did in fact gasp in sheer delight.


At the beginning of this review I noted that what made this film for me was it's photographic cinematography. Postman to Heaven is shot in a muted, natural colour sceme and most of the film takes place either in a grassy field or in one of many little coffeeshops. The feel of the movie reminded me of film photography. The cinematographer employs shallow depth of field throughout the film as a way to focus on particular moments and feelings by putting everything but the character who is speaking out of focus. I liked this method. I also liked how much time the characters spent in coffeeshops, photography studios and the post office. Basically, every conversation that took place in this movie was over a cup of coffee and there were so many close-ups of various brew-methods that my barista-self was squealing with delight at Korea's beloved coffee culture.


The only confusing part about the cinematography was a red cherry necklace worn by Ha Na for different, disconnected parts of the movie. Although Ha Na is always wearing many, many layers, the red necklace stands out quite a bit because her colours are always natural/beige/off-white. I was trying to figure out the significance of the necklace, but I couldn't, and what made it more frustrating was the fact that it just showed up again halfway through the movie, halfway through a scene! Jae Joon wears a trademark necklace in the film as well, but the symbolism for his necklace and his colour-sceme is obvious, Ha Na's red cherry necklace is not. I thought the cherries were a random movie mistake at first, but she ended up wearing the necklace for most of the second half of the movie and in a few scenes she's seen fidgeting with it. I can't quite figure out if there's some significance that I didn't fully catch. If you know, please tell me. 

Postman to Heaven is a touching movie for anyone who has ever lost a loved one, but beware, it is a bit heavy at times. It's full of little sub-stories and intimate moments that literally had me tearing up from beginning to end. To be honest, I actually paused the film quite a bit to made coffee/go outside/ walk around, so it might have had an even greater impact on me if I had watched it all in one sitting. 

Things accomplished.

Today:
1.) Woke up.
2.) Worked 8 hours.
3.) Drove to Seattle and parallel parked in the tightest space.
4.) Brainstormed self-introduction lessons for Korea.
5.) Easily found my way from downtown to Ballard without getting on i-5
or getting lost.
6.) Discovered amazing new coffeehouse in Ballard called Ballard Coffee Works.
7.) Drank a $7.00 cup of drip coffee! Eep! I had no idea! The barista asked me what kind of slow-brew I wanted and I asked her what she recommended and then she rang me up! It was a delicious cup of single-origin Sumara brewed with a Chemex, but still, the price was steep!
8.) Had a thoughtful theological conversation with a friend.
9.) Sang 'Be Thou My Vision' and 'Nothing But The Blood of Jesus' at Mars Hill. It was wonderful.
10.) Got totally lost because of a detour coming home.
11.) Tried out a new way to get home from Seattle and discovered that i-5 North + 405 South + 522 East is maybe just as fast as going from i-5 to Lake City Way, but it is really, really the long way around. This just  confirms that I've been going the best way all along and I'm alright with that.
12.) Climbed in bed at 10:30pm. That's leaves about 4.5 hours of sleep before I need to wake up for work again.

There are some things that I simply won't miss about being a barista.

Mythology. Or something like it.

Every family has it's own legends- stories filled with the heros and larger-than-life characters of our pasts; the kings and queens we descended from. Sometimes, these are actually mythologies and not a bit of truth is in them. Sometimes, they're true.

My grandmother, Lois, at 15.

This summer my grandmother turned 100 and it was my job to scan the photos and make a slideshow for the gigantic party we threw for her. In the process, I spent a lot of time mediating on her story, which is connected to this other big thing which I rarely talk about.

My grandmother was fifteen when she felt called to preach. That was in 1927. A few years earlier, her father, a pastor, had gone down to California, to a place called Azusa street and everything had changed for them since then. Her father was subsequently kicked out of leading their brethren church and the whole family was branded as "holy rollers." After she was finished with high school, my grandmother went to the closest Bible college she could find which was all the way down in San Francisco. There, she worked in a street ministry and on Sundays she sang on the radio and did a Sunday school lesson. My grandmother was really close with her sister, Verna, and they were in college together.

After college, my grandmother and her sister became the pastors of a tiny church in Oregon. The town had 500 people and the church had 5 members but soon it grew to over 30 people. They rented a tiny house in those days and since it was during the Great Depression, the rent was $5.00 a month.

One winter my grandmother and her sister went out in the snow with some of the young people from their church. They had been invited to go skiing, but since it was so cold, some of the boys lent them some jeans to wear under their dresses. The very next Sunday, they found their church padlocked and it was explained to them that since they had worn boy's clothes, they'd lost their jobs. Early pentecostals, you know how it is.

Lois & Verna as pastors

After that, my grandmother and her sister worked in a mission in Oregon, and soon after they moved to California where Verna fell in love and got married.

My grandmother was alone after that and ministry seemed impossible.

She moved back to Seattle and got a job in a restraunt. One day, a soilder came in. They became acquainted and the soldier said he could find my grandmother a better job. Eventually, they fell in love and got married.

I guess this is the crux of the story. My grandmother felt "called to the ministry" ever since she was 15. As the legend goes, she knew she was never supposed to get married and certainly not to someone who wasn't a Christian. When she met Galon Elihu Prater, she knew and felt it in her heart that it would be wrong to marry him because he wasn't really the right man.

But she loved him.
So, she did it.
She was 24 years old.

This was once just a story to me. Things are different now. I feel as though I understand the story better. What terrible disillusionment my grandmother must have felt when she was fired from her role as a pastor just because she wore men's jeans in the snow. How lonely she must have felt after Verna got married and she was left alone in Seattle. As I was scanning the old photos of my grandmother in her 20's with her new husband these past few weeks, it all became so real to me. I get it. I get where she was coming from and I could never judge her harshly for the choices she made. Who doesn't want to fall in love? Who doesn't want a family?

I don't always understand God. I don't know why some people seem to land on this earth with a dream as far away as the skies and a lifetime of jumping toward the heavens to reach it. I don't understand why others are a bit more ambivalent about things like destiny or calling. Why do some of us feel like there's so much to do while others don't? What will happen if we don't follow our vague inklings?

It's something that we scarcely talk about. Even with my closest friends, it's a subject rarely breached. Oh, I've seen snatches and glimpses of the stars that some of my friends' are jumping for. But I know I can't expect them to be completely transparent when I, too, do most of my jumping and reaching in the dead of night while nobody is watching and when no one can see if I happen to trip and fall.  

I think about it all the time. I wonder if I'll make it, if they'll make it, if any of us heard right about what we're supposed to be down here doing. It's awful important for something that's so hard to talk about.

Maybe we're talking less about our dreams because of the dead economy. Maybe because some of us have become so disillusioned and confused about what to do with this thing called The Church. I certainly miss the days when I didn't question so much, when I didn't find fault in so many people.

There's a happy ending to the story of my grandmother. Years after she got married, after her husband had lived a long life and after she had raised kids and had many happy years, after all of that, she did follow her calling into the ministry. She sold everything she had a started an orphanage in the Philippines and it's still in operation today while my grandmother, who is 100 years and one week old lives at home with us and still whispers a prayer over every plate set before her. I hope that God is pleased with her. I'm sure that He is.

Some days, I'm full of questions that I don't know the answers to, but that's okay for now.

I wish that we all had the courage to talk more about our dreams.

He fought in both World Wars.

My grandmother.

Husband & their 3 little girls in Virginia.

Together.

The hotel they owned in downtown Snohomish.

The start of my grandmother's adventures in the Philippines.

Part of the orphanage...

In the public market..

Transportation. Does that little girl look familiar? 

Dinner time at the orphanage..

image stories

I have not had much time to write anything lately, so, I present to you a blog in pictures. I recently did some reorganizing/cleaning and I'm borrowing a really nice camera from a friend right now, so I thought I'd take pictures of some of my belongings and post them. 

My baby shoes. My mother always talks about how I fit into newborn shoes until I was like, two or something. 

I keep this little purple clown in an old film canister. He's from one of my earliest, strongest, and fuzziest memories. I think I behaved myself while my mother was in a bank one day, and this was my reward. Anyways, it's always seemed important. 

From 2000, in a journal. Around the same time I took a painting class and did a big watercolour of a similar scene. I'm not sure where that is now. 

I forgot that I had left so many drawings in my original journal. This is from 12/2/2000. Oh, so glad I'm not a teenager anymore....

What I inherited when my birth mother died. It's used to water plants.

Coloured pencil drawing from April 1997.  Scene from Prince Caspian.

An attempt at organizing earrings and other such things....

All but one of my film cameras,  I mostly use the two on the right.

Paint by numbers

Train station in Tokyo. Summer 2010. 

Sometimes life feels like a paint-by-numbers kit. Like, it starts off slow and it doesn’t make sense and it’s not always beautiful at the beginning (and all the new mothers stopped reading my blog at that last statement....) But, if you follow the directions, if you just keep painting, everything seems to turn out alright in the end.

I know, I know, of course this isn’t always true. Sometimes life is more like a surrealist painting than a paint-by-numbers, but go with me on this.

I’ve been reflecting on the fact that recently I’ve made a number of full circles.

This week I finished my last test in Japanese at Bellevue College. Golly, it was difficult. After the test, I walked straight to the little piano room that I used to spend so much time in back when BC was my college. That was, of course, before I ever enrolled at Northwest, before I ever decided on my major. I used to play the same two songs over and over and over as I talked to God and didn’t know what to do with my life. I couldn't figure out if I wanted to major in photography, or philosophy, or music, or, God-forbid, I had been tossing around the idea of English. I was always in that piano room. I was often playing that piano even though I was never any good. 

Yesterday, I sat down at the same piano bench and played.

The difference, of course, is that now I have a much better idea of what I’m doing and what *the future* looks like.

I’ve been thinking about the beginnings of everything. And really, recently, I’ve been feeling so grateful.

I took my first literature class at Bellevue in the fall of ’07. We read Life of Pi, James Joyce, Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House,’ poetry by Kim Addonizio, and so so so much more. It all stuck with me; permanent. That fall, I brought my anthology home to my roommates and read to them poems and paragraphs that I loved. They laughed, and I think were maybe a little annoyed with me. They could think of better things to do with their time.

I couldn’t.

I aced the Introduction to Literature class, but I wasn’t seriously thinking about becoming an English major. Not at the time.

At BC, I took my first philosophy class and my first photography class and the world opened up to me in a new way.

In spring of ’08, I took a combination class called Whosespace which focused on immigration in America. It was fifteen credits of photography, expository writing, and political economics. We read The Names, and Catfish and Mandala, and The Beautiful Things The Heaven Bears, and Breath, Eyes, Memory. But my favourite novel that we read was Native Speaker by Chang- Rae Lee. It’s about a man struggling with English as his second language, it’s about language and culture and the alienation you feel when you don’t entirely belong. The class made me think about Genesis and the story of Babel. At the end of the class, we all had to write something. I wrote a poem and it came to me, like nothing else had ever before. It was the first time I’d ever written in an inspired frenzy where the words just poured out of me. And, to top it off, for the first time ever, something I wrote elicited a standing ovation from a classroom of my peers and my professors. 

The piece I wrote had lines like this:

She scribbles black on white figures

and I can’t imagine what that could possibly mean

and

And do you dream in Japanese? Or think in English?

Are you constantly translating your thoughts?

Now, here I am, at the end of all of this, and I’m the one who’s spent the last year scribbling black on white figures learning the language I thought I’d never understand. What was once a wall to me is now a bit of a door. Mind you, it’s a big heavy door that takes all my strength to even crack open, but it’s still more of a door than it is a wall. Now, I’m the one who has been dreaming in Japanese, I’m the one who is always translating her thoughts.

Recently, I’ve been thinking so much of how I didn’t know then what I know now. I’m so grateful to be able to look back and connect the dots. I’m in awe over how much my own words, my own artistic expressions, have guided and steered my life. I didn’t know when I wrote ‘persimmons & bamboo shoots’ that I would go on to study Japanese,  go to Japan,  delve deeper into this whole cultural assimilation mystery. But in many, many ways, it’s because I wrote it that all of that has happened. That's why I named my blog after that poem from Whosespace. In ways, I feel like writing it was the seed for so much of what has happened since then. 

The summer after I took Whosespace, I turned 22 and a friend took me to Korean food for the first time. I was introduced to kimchee, barely tea, and the cute guy who waited our table. The moments of that day are indelible to me because the dinner was expensive and it was my best friend paying and it was just us and that’s how I’ve always preferred to do things, in small groups.

That fall I took a geology class at Bellevue. We learned about rocks using a very simple textbook. It was science for liberal arts majors at it’s best. My lab partners were two Korean guys who were fresh out of ESL classes. The professor didn’t partner us up, we choose our own partners and I don’t know what drew us all together, but we met the first day of class and after that we were inseparable. From them I learned about Korean drinking culture, Jeju island, and the two years required in military service for every Korean male. I learned about Korean names and, gosh, it was a lab class and we had time on our hands and nowhere to go. I learned a lot, and none of it was about rocks. Among other things, they talked about homesickness and how you gain weight so easily when you move to America. I became their English tutor. We’d keep in touch for years afterward.

At the time, Korea was this fearful mystery to me because I only ever heard about North Korea. I knew nothing else about it. I certainly wasn’t ever going to go there, although, I had to admit, Jeju island sounded nice.

The next summer I moved out of the house on Juanita drive and into a house where the main language was Japanese. I became the go-to English expert. I also became the foreigner. I mean, literally, they called me the gaijin. It was incredibly difficult at times because it was literally like living in Japan, but at the same time, I loved it. I didn't realize then how strong that experience would make me, how much I would need that strength later on.

That fall, I enrolled in classes at Northwest. The first class I took was Slavic literature with Martha Diede. There was only four of us students and I was terribly nervous about everything, but I loved it. I loved listening to Diede and I loved our class talks. After Dr. Diede returned my first paper to me with the words YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR scrawled in bold in one of the corners, I took a trip to her office and I changed my major. Sometimes I think maybe all you need is a little encouragement to act on what you already know.

A word after a word after a word is power. That’s Margaret Atwood, for you. I love the power of words. Specifically, I love the power of encouragement I’ve seen my teachers yield to change lives. It’s part of what has inspired me to be a teacher.

I had no idea that fall that the members of that tiny little Slavic literature class would come together to form writer’s workshop two years later; Jessie, Michelle, Meghan, even Sarah who was just down the hall in the writing lab at the time; life is full of such beautiful surprises.

The next fall I moved in with new roommates, and Jessie, from Slavic literature was one of them. It wasn’t really something that I wanted to do because I didn’t really know those people, but it all sort of worked out since, in time, I found out that they liked to read aloud from books, too. Another full circle.

Now, it’s almost three years from when I first started at Northwest. When I started, I was purposefully not trying to make new friends. I already had enough friends from being part of a megachurch and I felt like it was hard enough to keep in touch with them. I didn’t want anymore. I know that sounds terrible, but it's true. 

Gosh. I’m so glad it didn’t work out how I planned.

In my opinion, the best thing I’ll take from Northwest won’t be the university diploma, even if it is a first in my family. Rather, the best thing I’ll take will be the people I’ve found who’ve changed my life along the way; comrades and mentors who were completely worth the fact that I overpaid for my private school education.

I’ve been connecting the dots and thinking about how I never could have figured it all out on my own, but looking back, it all makes sense and I fully, completely, 100% believe that Providence had everything to do with it. Paint-by-numbers. I was simply following the vague directions and hoping to God that it would work out alright.

And it did.

I’ve tried to tell as many people in person as I’ve been able, but for those of you who don’t know, I’m currently going through the process of applying to teach English in South Korea with Michelle Meade. That’s part of what makes all of this a full circle for me, the fact that we’re going together, the fact that when we first met, neither of us had any idea that we’d embark on such an adventure together. I couldn't be more grateful. I couldn't be more surprised at where life has taken me. 

I’m excited for the future. I’m excited to share new things. That’s why I started this blog.