luck favors the prepared.

i hear the clock ticking. i feel the night falling. i see smiling andrew in a photo. jeffrey is jumping in the scene. my i-movie. almost done. have a lot to show. ms. p, 10 minutes is too short. the selfish giant, quite adorable. 4 GB. that’s how big my movie is. editing is fun. i love it. should i become a movie editor? i guess it may work. well, no enough time to think about the far future. too busy handling the current issues. the near future? makes me crazy. i dearly hate mac. why does every teacher want an i-movie? i-movies are fun. but it just takes too long. too long. stacy and yura’s i-movie. i cannot wait to watch. they are the ones who began writing this type of post. i think it’s fun. this may seem pointless, yet, hey that’s how life is. meaningless and absurd, life is suffering. buddha said, according to college-board exam. life, oh life. cynicism, nihilism, epicurean-ism, romanticism–choose the one you like. series of choices, that is what life is. freedom of speech. natural rights. laissez faire. they all make adam smith happy. ap world history is over. but the history continues. ah, odd circle of life. i’m already sixteen. it is roger’s birthday today. i love roger. he’s so sweet. he said thanks for the gift. seventeen, he has become. wow he is old, and i’ll be old. we’ll all grow old. the old man and the sea. i read the book last saturday. i enjoy reading. but travesties. oh, travesties. that was a disaster. i love and hate dadaism. easy to create, hard to understand. let’s laugh at the audience. if you are reading this in a serious manner, i will laugh at you. don’t feel lost. although i am lost. lost. lost, my favorite tv show. the island is weird, but kate is gorgeous. sawyer is wildly sexy. i miss charlie, please bring him back to life. and i wonder why john locke has such name. i saw the name in my ap world history book, and now back to the painful school. finals are coming, assignments are waving, and i am drowning. i cry out. someone help me. someone save me. and now i know. no one’s coming. no one’s helping. let’s help myself, dabin. blogs are due, but i am ready. yes, i improved. a lot. let me fly. let me fly. ah, this was fun.

Stream of Consciousness. It depicts a character’s mind flow. Everyone including you and I constantly think about things. Let’s suppose you are going to Greece. A thick volume of novel can be written covering less than 10 hours of your flight. The physical process of reaching Greece itself, in the case, is not the main focus of the novel. What’s important is what kind of thoughts hit your boundless brain. You may think about your grandmother who always has wanted to go to Greece. You may think about your previous trip to somewhere else. Writers who use the tactic of stream of consciousness include and write about the things that are sometimes somewhat random.

Everything begins in the brain: this literary technique starts inside a head of the main character or a narrator. Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jane Eyre possess long plots full of happenings that become main composition of the novels. However, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, only covers a single day of a woman. The book, although it is based on a normal day of a woman named Mrs. Dalloway, does not tell its audience about her day. It is all about what she thinks about during the day.

Some argues that stream of consciousness is illogical because it often leads to abrupt and random flow of writings. It does not emphasize the practical world as well. However, famous writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Earnest Hemingway considered such randomness and ignorance of the physical world represent the true realism, because people do have their own world revolving inside their head that is separated from the outside world.

After confirming reservation and passing through a turnstile of Seoul Station, I was welcomed by a gorgeous train waiting on the railway platform. Entirely covered by purple, the train was veiled beneath an image of a wine bottle with a glass of wine. As I stepped inside the train with odd excitement, the ceiling and windows entwined with grapevine entered my vision.

“David Copperfield, the magician with worldwide fame, has visited Korea twice and was embarrassed in both visits. All of you’ve heard of those incidents, right? Foreigners usually wait for David to show them wonderful magic tricks with curiosity, but Koreans stare at the magician fiercely to find out how he deceive them. Now, that kind of attitude will ruin the mood of today’s wine-train.” The wine-train singer Sung Ho Lee began the recreation that would last for two and a half hour with directions for an enjoyable trip from Seoul Station to ‘Chateau Mani’ in Choong-buk Young-dong. He made his debut at a university song festival and published 3 albums; however reactions were not very positive. After working as a country singer in Misari for a while, he was marked out for the current job.

The wine-train operating by ‘Wine Korea’ has been running for 2 years. With the impact of increasing popularity of wine in Korea in last few years, the number of operation has increased from one per week to two per week. The trip heading to ‘Chateau Mani’ includes recreation, wine tasting, and lectures about wine. The train practically functions as the winery of ‘Wine Kroea’. Serving, preparing for appetizers, and lecturing are all done by staffs.

The staffs usually travel around the country during the weekdays and get on the wine-train on Tuesday and Saturday. The efficiency almost reaches perfection with staffs performing double to quadruple roles. ‘Wine Korea’ had been rejected several times by beverage buyers of department stores and big markets saying there first should be promised consumer pool looking for the product. Yet, as it was introduced through several television programs and gained popularity among people, its business condition improved incomparably. “All the phone in the company get paralyzed when the wine-train is introduced through TV programs such as ‘VJ Corps’ or ‘6 O’clock My Home’. Thankfully, it is now a lot easier for us to conduct business in big markets. There is a huge difference between the rate of orders in last year and that of this year. With upcoming Choosuk holiday, it is even hard to supply all the demands.”

Recently, the most threatening factor of the grape industry is climate. “20 years ago, apples of Taegu were considered most delicious, yet now, those of Choo-pung-ryung are known as the best ones. This shift is taking place in grape industry as well. As the temperature slowly rises, in order to produce grapes in good forms, we have to cultivate grapes in the higher elevation.” said Sun-Goo Lee, a farmer who has been cultivated grapes for 30 years, sighing with overripe grapes in his hands. He claimed that weather gives greater damages than the FTA does.

This year’s festival in September was a complete disaster attacked by rainfalls with the wrong timing. On the last day of the festival, I encountered a farmer rooting about in a box of grapes. “I am struggling here, but no one knows. We poor people have to cry all the time because of rain, money, government policies, and FTA. What did we do wrong? Apparently, I have neither time nor capacity for any interview.” He didn’t lift his head up, but focused in picking the grapes that became inedible.

There are 4200 families cultivating grapes in Young-dong. Only 5% of the total production is used for wine distilling. Yet, this 5% means a lot. If something goes wrong just as it did in this year, grapes in inferior quality can be utilized through wine manufacturing.

Some people say the world is corrupted, full of evil, depraved. However the warmth, or the humanity, still continues its powerful heartbeat in this harsh, cold world. Recently, I was impressed by certain people’s love and their strength.

I volunteered my services for an international organization—helping people in foreign land such as Africa—named “World Vision”. The organization’s main role was to assign each Korean sponsor a foreign child who needs financial help. Then the sponsors supported their assigned children financially and developed relationship with the children by exchanging letters. My job there was to translate the letters written in Korean by sponsors into English or the other way around—translating English letters into Korean. Last Monday was the first day for me to go into the office and actually perform my duty. My task was quite simple; yet it was not a trifling job at all.

There was total number of fifteen thousand people in Seoul sponsoring the poor kids. I was astonished by its fairly big number; however this number, although surprising, was not the thing that made me feel the warmness with my heart. There was one letter written by a sponsor with relatively long length and a piece of yellow Post-it on the top. At first I was busy, translating the letter into English; therefore I did not really pay attention to the Post-it. The content of letter was not so unique or different from other letters, including the three common substances that all the other letters included: complimentary comments about the kid’s cute appearance (I guess all the children have sent their own pictures), questions asking for the child’s health, and an apology for writing back so late. As I finished the translation, I looked at the Post-it unconsciously, read the notes, and couldn’t stop myself from being extremely emotional. What that small note saying was very touching. It said that the one who wrote this letter is not an actual sponsor, yet a new owner of the house where the real sponsor was living it. The sponsor had moved out; however the new owner had no way to contact him. Therefore, she, an ahjuma who wrote the letter and the note, received the letter written by 8-year-old African kid instead of the original sponsor. After reading the letter and looking the child’s picture, she felt something deep inside her heart. Then she decided to become a new sponsor for the kid, replacing the original one’s spot.

What a beautiful world it is. How beautiful the people we live with are. She did not pay a significant amount of money. Most of the sponsors, according to the letters, are not very wealthy. Yet they are taking care of the ones who are given less privilege than them, providing the poor kids with financial help with their best. These people do have warm hearts, they do appreciate what they are given, and they are the true happy ones, I thought.

We Should Marry Mr. Bing.

My English class—Ms. P and all of us—had a fevered discussion over a practical issue: marriage. The question of what kind of man a woman should marry seemed quite vague for me. Of course, it was. How could have a sixteen-year-old girl, who hasn’t even imagined putting herself in a wedding-dress, create a structured standard of her future husband? However, it is a question that I must end up with a clear answer in the near future.
Despite its ambiguity, the question brought several adjectives in my head that would describe “the man”: tall, rich, polite, well-mannered, concise, respectful, humorous, active, clean, attractive, courageous, wise, smart, charming, sweet-sounding, tanned, organized, muscular, assiduous, decisive, and short-haired.
What a long list of impossible fantasies. It is not possible for a man like this to exist on the same planet with me. Well, luckily he may exist. But why would this Renaissance man want to marry me? There is no way for me to marry that man, and I know it so well. So, I decided to tear down my nonsense delusions.
Let’s be more practical. Let’s think of a person, a man, a character, whom I would want to grow old with. After a while, I was able to think of a fictional character named Chandler Bing from my favorite TV program, Friends.
Why would I marry this man?
First of all, he has his plan. Mr. Bing is a man who looks after for his future and prepare ahead for it. He earned money and continuously saved small portion of it in order to save budgets for his dream house in the countryside with a small yard where he can be with his children and Monica.
He owns true courage that makes him a real man despite the absence of manly body. Chandler is capable of expressing his love in front of his partner. He is a man who can show his wife his tears to tell her his sincere feelings. He is not a pretentious coward who is busy taking care of one’s own pride. Moreover, Chandler is brave enough to quit his job in order to achieve his real goal. This decision may seem risky, yet his passion and effort are trustworthy of grabbing success.
The very profound evidence of Mr. Bing so appropriate for a life partner is Chandler’s possession of his friends: Monica, Joy, Ross, Rachel, and Phoebe. I think looking at one’s friend is a fine way to determine what kind of person the one is. Having such worthy friends for such a long time evidently proves his good traits as a human being.
Chandler Bing, this man is not very rich. He is neither concise nor muscular. His appearance is portrayed as unattractive (although I personally think he is charming). Mr. Bing is not necessarily smart, clean, or organized. He is definitely not a Renaissance man. Yet, I would still love to walk down the aisle holding this lovable man’s hand.

It was such a long day; I was bored. I turned TV on, so naturally as if I was planning to watch it. With the remote, I changed channels several time, and there it was. Cinderella. When I was young, I watched that film for more than ten times, and I just loved it. So I decided to watch it again with the remaining sweet feelings from old memories. Familiar songs made me smile. However, as it went on, I realized something; something new.
Currently, Cinderella is definitely one of the most loved and popular stories in the earth. Its sweet love lines attracted little girls all around the whole world. Walt Disney Productions had selected the fairy tale to make their 12th animation film, and its successful picturization caused more girls to fall in love with the prince.
Cinderella is the main character in this story. She is the one who was in charge of all the minor housework and she is the one who bears all the pressure from her stepmother and stepsisters. She is certainly a nice, polite, and virtuous girl, yet not a naïve one. The dress and her glass shoes that the fairy godmother has magically created for her perfectly fitted her size. If so, how is it possible for one of the pair of her glass shoes to come off? If she didn’t really have ambition, why would she want to go to the ball? Yes, she said “yes,” when the prince asked her out for a dance, and she was the one who later stepped out and tried the shoe on when the prince was searching for its owner. Love at first sight, people call it, yet loving someone after a couple hours of dance is certainly not enough for them to get married.
Although some people call Cinderella as the pleasant love story, the real truth about the story is quite bitter. The book directly handles lookism and importance of material possession. The prince fell in love with Cinderella since she was beautiful, not because of her inner personality. Cinderella loved the prince, knowing his background and wealth he had. They knew nothing deep about each other. What the prince recognized about her was her outer beauty, and what Cinderella noticed was his position, prince of a nation.
There is a new term called ‘Cinderella complex’. It is described as a desire to be taken care of by others, fearing being independent, which nearly occurs in women. This desire is originated from Cinderella, the story in which it values outer beauty, dressing pretty, and having wealth, but gives idea of a character that cannot be strong enough to be independent, waiting for a man—a prince—to rescue her.
Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast. What a coincidence! Every main character in the story is beautiful, young lady. Young girls do watch these things, and they do accept these things. Why do girls put on their make-up since young ages? Why do they want to shop all the time? Why do they consider plastic surgery? No wonder.

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