On Saturday I

a) Went to pilates for my 80 minute class with my super cute instructor.  I think after three full months of exercising with this method I'm FINALLY understanding what muscles I'm supposed to be using per exercise.  Previously I just did what they say but now I can tell when I am using my glutes or hamstrings and when I'm not.  Good ( Read more... )

We went to the place where we keep my grandmother's ashes, and did a series of prayers for her from an old prayer book, with some lovely formal language of a past age, with the original 18th century transliterations of the names of saints.  I can figure most of the out except for one we called Ban-Zee-Guh.  This apparently was "Francisco."

Two ( Read more... )

I actually had some free time on this trip so I was in Manhattan Monday morning.

It was weird to be back in the city I thought of as home for six years (which is weird because that entire time I actually lived in New Jersey).

I think when I packed up to leave I really thought I was leaving forever.  It felt somehow wrong and inappropriate to be back ( Read more... )

Having been in school for 21 consecutive years makes it so that every fall feels like the start of the new school year ( Read more... )

My grandmother died on Tuesday night, and after a 2 day wake we cremated her body this morning, collected her remains in a decorative jar, and placed her at a nap-gol-dang, a sort of above-ground cemetery building that holds cremation jars.

I don't know how funeral things happen in the West, but I really liked the Korean way of doing things.

On the ( Read more... )

At the end of this 10 year period I will be forty.

I have kept a fairly good record, possibly better than many people (those of the non-diarist kind), because I keep this sort of paper journal:


( Read more... )

Workers in Korea are very difficult to fire, short of decapitating their cubiclemate and setting the building on fire all in the same day. That's what I've heard. Executives' careers end on a dime, but an employee is forever. Or so the general cultural understanding is 'round here. This mostly doesn't apply to me - after six years as an at-will ( Read more... )

I've been going through tons of changes in the past 3 months, and I think I need to own up to some things.

I've said the below things about myself quite a bit ( Read more... )

I just signed up for the gym lotto - there's a lovely fitness facility in the basement, but you have to go through a lotto system to get the privilege of joining ( Read more... )

Back in February, before I left New York,I made a list of things I wanted to do in Seoul, and at the almost six month mark I want to check in.

( Read more... )