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...

He who is limber falls like timber!

I have to admit that this is by far the most enjoyable "limbo" period of time I've had in my life as I wait to hear back from grad schools. Within weeks, the course for our next several years will be determined, but now that I've done everything in my power, it's just hanging out with Joo and the fam, translating, and enjoying the increased flexibility of yoga!


Mom and Dad are also getting more flexible too, not just by having us around, but by some of their own version of yoga too as you can see!

Our friends Wes and Jenny came and spent a weekend out with us recently - we filled it with making buckeyes and various versions of hot cocoa, sledding, hiking through the woods, and thrift store shopping. Wes also came to meet with our friend Jim who has headed up the Digals fund (the money to help educate the tribal girls in the area we lived) and discuss how to proceed with the situation. If you hadn't heard, most of their village, including their house was burnt by some mobs in the recent wave of violence in India last fall. We got an email from Simon at one point so we know they are safe, but now we are trying to figure out what to do with the money we had designated for their education as they are suddenly in the middle of a big city instead of the tribal mountains.

Joo, falling increasingly in love with coffee, has been quite the little barista. You can see here how high she has gotten her milk foam level (that's only hand-whipped milk...no whipped cream!)

And I continue to gaze in awe at the beautiful winter landscapes...

Surprise Birthday Party!

It was 4:00 am on a brisk autumn night in Seoul when I took a taxi home from my first "date" with JooYeon. It's not that it had been that long of a date- it started around 2:00 am- it's just that both of our work schedules were insane at that time and we had to meet whenever we were both free. Anyway, in the euphoria of the cab ride home, I made a spontaneous resolution. For the duration of our relationship (which even at that point I was confident would lead to marriage), I would always have at least THREE surprises brewing for Joo in the back of my mind.

For example, that very night I stayed up until 5:00 am designing the beginnings of a book which would come to detail our first 40 dates. In the months before I actually gave her this book, I planned it out carefully - how I would attach a pigalo, her favorite flower, and drop it off for her at work on a day when she was feeling glum. More interesting than the book itself is the psychological effect this process had on me. Knowing that I had a surprise for her that she would like made me extremely happy. In a sense, that could be the same as the "Christmas Spirit" of the month of December for those who have already bought or made gifts and are excited for their loved ones to open them. Or, let's say that you are frustrated or angry with someone; if you also are anticipating giving them a surprise, it somehow softens that frustration or anger.


The only thing I found bittersweet about Christmas is that it builds up to a big climax and then it's over. Which is why I decided to constantly have three surprises in the back of my mind for Joo (so that even when I unveil one surprise, I still have two more in layover until I come up with a third again). By the way, they aren't always big surprises - some times it's just knowing that I will bring her a cup of coffee unexpectedly when she wants it - nor are they always in the near future (I got this Amazonian weaving for her secretly seven months ago and hid it at the bottom of my backpack during our whole travels).

On a tangent here, I never really got the point of throwing a "surprise" birthday party on someone's birthday - obviously they're going to be at least a bit suspicious of people hiding smiles and trying not to laugh. That's why I chose to throw JooYeon's surprise birthday party 25 days AFTER her birthday when she had no idea. Granted, part of that was that I needed time to hunt down the traditional Korean birthday meal - seaweed soup...

Surprises are fun for everyone- Dad had fun distracting Joo by walking her to the end of the driveway to get the mail while Mom and I prepared the party and Mom got Joo some gift cards to her favorite fast food chain, Subway...

Keats once wrote a poem entitled, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" where he focuses on how anticipation can hold even greater power than an event itself. For instance, in one section, he examines a picture of two lovers facing each other on a piece of pottery and claims -

"Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"

And I've found this to be true. While of course it's wonderful to see Joo's face light up at each new surprise, it's even more constructive in the long run to spend hours while I'm driving or falling asleep (if any future insurer is reading this, let me clarify that those are two separate occasions) thinking of what Joo enjoys and brainstorming out the next surprise. It helps me to stay closely connected with her interests and surmount some of my own selfishness (which I've discovered had accumulated quite significantly over my first 28 years of life devoid of any long-term relationships).

January Reflections

Oh to be a child again! I remember one day in Korea after teaching a particularly energetic elementary class, my co-teacher told me that there is an Eastern belief that all of us have energy fields and that the energy fields of children tend to be much stronger, wild, and lively. While few people would argue this point, the interesting twist was that simply BEING in the physical proximity with such a vivacious energy field actually increased one's own energy. Incidentally, by "energy" here, I'm not referring to how hyper you are at any given moment, but rather a more persistant part of your being. Simply put, being around children literally makes you younger.
If this is indeed true, I think I'm continuing to reap the benefits of working with children/youth over the past eight years. I find myself with an abundance of energy these days, and a joy for life that leads me to do things like jump out in the snow with Joo (and my parents) and sculpt an igloo just for the fun of building something and then sitting in it.



However, while I may possess a renewed youthful vigor, my mind is much different from when I was a child. The Romantic poet William Blake wrote two parallel collections of poems entitled "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." The former discusses the joys and freedom of childhood innocence before they become corrupted by the world. latter discusses the human experience of working through all the disillusionment and evil encountered in the world to eventually reach a second, higher innocence. In other words, while we may at times want to return to our childlike innocence, this is simply impossible without wiping away our memory of all the heartache and suffering we've seen and experienced. However, it IS possible to plow through to an acceptance of suffering that would have the same spirit of youthful trust and innocence. So I would say that's one goal of mine these days. To have the awareness, responsibility and maturity of an adult with the blissfully free spirit of a child.


While my tall stack of journals and lifestyle of self-reflection may have laid the foundation for this life, my relationship with Joo has been a huge part of finally figuring out how to actually flesh it out in my day to day life.

We've continued to spend some lovely and peaceful nature-filled days here. Joo and mom alternate turns to make sure the brave birds who decided to stick out the cold winter have enough to eat until the Spring comes...

Our Christmas tree (the little pudgy one) has moved on to its next stage in the cycle of life by providing warmth for those same birds.

And as the nation (and world) waits anxiously to see how the Obama administration will shift us all in our next political stage in life, I am encouraged by some words from his inaugural speech, "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task." My cousin Daryl who was fasting until Israel withdrew from Gaza has ended his fast today (Day 17) and his devotion and personal responsibility for peace exemplifies the same path I aspire to journey. More specifically, my main focus of these past few months has been on investing less energy in "being right" and more energy in listening to what others are saying to me.