As the Bee Flies

Try the following. List out the things you've pursued most over the past year. Then make them into a little sketch and relate them to each other. For example, maybe I spent several months studying for an educational statistics class. I wanted to learn the material to understand more of the world around me, but I also wanted to get an A. The reason I wanted to get an A was partly out of self-value, partly because it contributed to my goal of getting a master's degree, and partly to nurture a relationship with the professor. I want to get the master's degree because I want to get a job teaching math. That job will partly be to fulfill my desire to make an impact on the community/students, but also to earn money to maintain my relationship with JooYeon. Etc.

After you sort out the tangled mess, do your underlying goals seem to synchronize well or do they diverge in contradictory directions? Are you a crow, flying in a rather linear path (I'm calling upon the old saying here; I don't really know if crows fly straight) or are you a bee, zipping all over the place? Or maybe a cricket player undulating back and forth between two main points? Or perhaps a stone who is not pursuing any goals?

I think I have been a bee, at least for the past 7 or 8 years, and with the caveat that my flying radius has been quite short since JooYeon and I moved to Athens. My paths from hour to hour seem chaotic, and yet, at the same time, it feels like I'm acquiring pollen and depositing it in the places it needs to go to cause things to blossom.

So, enough analogies. Drew and Laura came up for another visit recently. Since Drew had become hooked on sushi when he was in the air force but hasn't had much opportunity to eat any around here recently, Joo led us in rolling some kimbap.

The end result was a beautiful mountain of rice and seaweed...

Roxy crawled around looking for TaeGeom, but alas, he had already flown back to the west coast. Jusu and SangOk are still planning to head to Korea, although the legal paperwork turns out to be a bit more complicated than they originally thought so they are sorting through all that now.

I celebrated a wonderful birthday, receiving a slew of unexpected hellos on Facebook from all the corners of my past. Bob sent some silly string, streamers, and a music box along with Heather who spent a night with us. Joo had never seen silly string, so that was rather fun to introduce her to it until she got ahold of the can.

In the afternoon, I received a call from Joe who had baked me a birthday cake. It was perfect weather to just sit out on the front porch for a couple hours and hang out while munching on the cake. Since I'm doing the Boat of Knowledge research assistantship (more on that in the next blog), I haven't been around the office much and so I've felt kind of separated from the math men of 564 (the 7 of us who have our cubicles in the same office in the math department).

So, it's a bee's life for me for now; and I'm quite happy with that. :)