Positivity Circle

Amidst some recent late evening visits from our friend John Thornburg, the three of us felt that we had some excess negativity going through our minds. Therefore, we passed over our idea to start an Incan-style corn-worshipping cult...




And decided to start a Positivity Circle. To be honest, I just crave small groups and, having not been in one for about five years, it was refreshing to have one again, even if it was just three members. We decided we would focus on holistic health and so that entailed beginning each session with some yoga/meditation...


And then we would move onto some discussion and perhaps even an activity/lesson. In this inaugural session, we discussed "samskara" which is a Sanskrit word describing the "trails" through our minds that are heavily travelled and generally get deeper and more habitual as we age. They are generally viewed in a negative light because they create a situation where we are controlled by our past rather than taking a more pro-active stance and creating our own life. So, we made a list of some of our samskara and then discussed ways to address them...

It was a fun and encouraging evening and start to a new club, in part due to the actual content whereby we had gameplans for our lives by the end of the evening, but mostly just to have some good heart-to-heart discussion time.

Cupid's Cuisine

For Valentine's Day this year, Mom and Dad took Joo and me to Whole Foods for a full seven course meal served up by a French chef and his culinary students. The menu was cryptic and modern including items like "Caesar's salad, revisited" (shown above).

Just in case we needed a rest during the two and half hour meal, there was a refreshing intermezzo (intermission) where we had a cute little cabernet sorbet served on top of an original ice sculpture...

The guy beside me was pretty quiet all night long until he heard that Joo and I had been to Peru. Then he excitedly told us all about his business scheme to start raising and selling the Peruvian delicacy of cuy in the United States (I'm not sure what his prospects will be considering that cuy is skinned and cooked guineau pig...)

The meal ended with an appropriately titled, "Death by Chocolate" designed especially on a couple's plate to be shared by two.

A scrumdiddlyumptious evening!

Rainy Evening

Can you spot the two beautiful things in the picture above? This was taken right after some fierce rains flooded the area...

After finishing up my entire OU application and mailing in my Wesleyan one, my final task before diving full-on into the waiting process was my final interview (the fourth and final stage) with Teach for America. I was told to look professional, which isn't the clearest instruction for a fashion-bungled young chap like myself...





...but luckily I have a wife now to help me make all those difficult early-morning fashion choices!


It was the longest interview I've ever been to and included delivering a lesson, participating in a group project, taking a test, writing an essay, solving some problems, all capped off with a final hour-long interview. That said, it was quite an enjoyable time - there were 10 other applicants and two interviewers all with a passion for education. The next day, Joo and I celebrated by playing some frisbee golf with my friend Jordan...

We've been trying to do a lot more making of our own food so we can have control over the ingredients that go inside. One example is bread. We are already at a point where the taste and health level is quite satisfying, but we still need to work a bit on the shape...

In other news, Dad had a birthday. Apparently, he was cheated out of some barnyard animals years and years ago as a child and has never forgot that scarred memory; therefore, we organized a barnyard theme and gave him all the animals he could want!

Joo, who is getting increasingly adept at computer graphics in her free time, changed my parents into cartoon characters and made a pair of couple shirts for them in addition to making a Cleveland Indians pillow for Dad.

Couchsurfing in the U.S.- que buena onda!

Last week, we found ourselves bound for Athens, Ohio with no place to stay. After some very heartwarming first experiences with couchsurfing in Chile and Ecuador, it was a natural choice to go ahead and try it here in Ohio as well. There was certainly a wide range of choices as couchsurfing.com listed over 100 "couches" in Athens. I picked out five who I thought we would be the most compatible with and four of those five responded either with an invitation to stay at their place or connected me to someone to meet with in the graduate school. We ended up picking Bubba for our first place to stay. Bubba was very hospitable...

And was more than willing to let Joo sleep on his couch.

Bubba also had an owner who lived with him, named Becky (shown below as the black-haired female that is not my wife), and she was quite hospitable herself! Becky was a true woman of passion who had followed her love for cooking, sewing, and horses into careers in all three. Most prominent is her work with equine-assisted psychotherapy (www.eapathens.com) which basically utilizes horses to work with a variety of individuals as a form of therapy. She welcomed us warmly and took Joo to thrift stores, yoga, and a coffeehouse while I was meeting with professors. She even connected us with a real estate agent so we could check out some of our potential living options if we were to move down to Athens. She also lured us out of bed each morning with tantalizing scents from the kitchen downstairs as she cooked us breakfasts...

Her house was plastered with mannequins she had somehow inherited as well as various other arts and crafts she's put together. Considering that she was our first impression of Athenians, it's no surprise that our entire trip was positive and encouraging.

While Becky was more than willing to offer her home as long as we wanted to stay, I had already made contact with another couple for a place to stay on our third night. Greg and Regina. Greg reminded me of my good friend Justin and Regina had an almost identical personality to Joo's older sister Jusu. Maybe that was why we fell in so easily with them and had lots of engaging conversations over music, psychology, psychics, sports, and relationships. The funniest moment for me as a math major was when Regina (who is a psych PhD student) was talking about certain experiments and how they had to intentionally induce stress in a research subject. Can you guess their method that was by far the most effective? That had to sit in a chair and continuously subtract 7 in their head from a four digit number... complete with time constraints and scolding. So you see, math really is useful in the real world ;)

Athens went on a Level 3 Snow Emergency and so we ended up staying an extra day. Greg whipped us up some pancakes and Joo returned the favor with some of her famous kim-bap. We also picked up some helpful tips on economical living in Athens as "poor grad students." For example, the Athens branch of (www.freecycle.org) is a website where people constantly post things they want to give away for free- from books and appliances to computers and cars! All in all, it was a very successful trip and now the wait begins to see whether enough scholarship money will roll in to pursue that option or if it will be elsewhere...drumroll please...