from a distance/disjointed perspectives

They couldn’t stop arguing, she thought, even an ocean away, the same old problems had followed them. Of course, back at home there hadn’t been this added problem of the motorcycle. It hadn’t been her fault that the travel agent had provided an old half-rusted scooter, and it definitely wasn’t her fault that it broke down in the middle of the street on a moonlit Sicilian night. She had wanted to stop and look for a place to stay, but he insisted that they keep going. And then when she tried to point out that they should have taken the other curving, almost identical, small road, he had started to ignore her and finally walked off.

Two pairs of eyes watched his back as he had walked away, soon there was only one. She stood there, where they had been arguing over directions – or was it something more? – and where he had left her with their broken down transport and she had refused to follow. She would go after him soon, she knew her sense of direction was awful, and even on an island she would be hopelessly lost, but let him wait awhile. Looking around the street, well-lit even at night, and taking in the narrow curving road that seemed barely wide enough to fit a car, but the Italians drove them in a mad-dash fashion anyway. A quick glance of light distracted her tourist’s gaze for a moment, the moon or some stray light reflecting off a piece of metal, off some everyday household object probably – but she stayed in the middle of the road, thinking about how her companion would have been frustrated by her daydreaming, he would have insisted they go quickly and straight to their destination. He was always in a rush, and everything was always about the job; if not the current one, then the next one, the elusive big one that would let them leave and finally go wherever they wanted, to see the sights of Italy, not like they were seeing it now. It was all such a lie, she thought, and he could never admit that it was. He was too prideful about his honesty; as she finally started moving, pushing the scooter along, she thought it was good for both of them that she never let a little thing like honesty hold her up.

As he made his way away from the train station, he knew he was being watched. Not by her – she would find her way to the church and he knew pushing her would just make the situation worse; better to just let her stand there and do what she wanted, think or sightsee or whatever she had been saying, as long as she was where she was supposed to be when they needed her – and so far, she had always shown up, at least when it mattered. When the job was as important as this one, it mattered. It was his fault, he kept thinking, that they had gotten involved. He didn’t want her to know how badly he had messed up this time, so he left her to think that the fight was because he didn’t trust her sense of direction. He didn’t, anyway.

Slowing around another corner, he tried to get a glimpse of whoever was watching him. Maybe it was just nerves, or that second cup of espresso on the train; they made it stronger here. Everything was more vibrant, the moon was rounder and even the storms were more ominous. Not that there were any clouds in the night sky now. He couldn’t catch any movement behind him, but he decided it didn’t matter even if there was someone. Any minor nuisances would be dealt with, and he shuddered at the implications. Better not to be a nuisance, at least not this night. He walked on faster, not giving a second glance back and so completely missing the quick glint of light that momentarily caught on metal and was hurriedly covered over again.

After a few more seconds of pretending to push the scooter, she had left it by the side of the road, taking care to act the part of the casual tourist, admiring the night view, and being particularly careful to remain just out of sight of the boy who, she considered musingly, was doing an admirable job of attempting to tail someone as well. It was careless of him, an amateur mistake, to keep such a tight hold of that piece of metal especially on a night with a moon this full. Too bad for him that she was the one they had decided would stay and follow; if she decided the boy was a threat, she wouldn’t hesitate to do what was necessary for the sake of the job. It’s always about the job, she sighed without noise, but that wouldn't stop her from enjoying it.

They would be at the church soon.

First seconds of second thoughts

I think I am the only one who will be consistently updating this thing, haha (minus the never-ending story). Oh well :)

Working at the intersection of the Daley Center and the Thompson Center, I get to see a lot of protests and picketing on the streets. Usually, the groups are amateurs, with hastily put together posters and horribly rhymed chants. Yesterday, though, my co-intern and I saw a big group clad in purple t-shirts. But something was different. The local Fox News station was there, and some policemen kept an eye on things. I mentioned how organized the group seemed to be, and then I saw the "SEIU" logos on their shirts. No wonder. Unions have their bone-headed moments, but when I saw the One Voice, One Vote logo, and the group shouting their demands in unison, I admit -- my heart skipped just a little.

I've noticed that you always get a good perspective on things when you chat with support staff or peripheral parties. A court reporter and I struck up a conversation today while waiting for a damages hearing to start. He'd been doing the work for 30 years, so he obviously had a lot of stories to share. He was one of those people who would be a great subject for a profile article. Chatty, yet authentic; takes liberties with small embellishments, but is faithful to the substantive story. He talked about how the job too often revealed the absurdities of life. In a patent case between two bicycle companies, he mused about how six-figure salaries depended on successfully litigating a case on this tiny screw in the Y-bar of a bicycle. Talk about banking on a screw. He declined to share the rest of their jokes, but you can imagine what they might have been. In another instance, he mentioned that he met Mr. Vitner of Vitner Chips, in a case that centered around Mr. Vitner's $2 million yacht. He apparently pays his captain a yearly salary to stay on the yacht year-round, steering it to various ports and generally caring for it. How cool would that be for a living. Unless you get sea sick. Then it wouldn't be so charming a livelihood, I guess. And then I think about how teachers get paid so little to teach the likes of us, and how they never get paid the worth of inspiring little kids to become great kids. Ah well.

It's amazing how you never notice the things that are right in front of your face. Today, I was walking out of my building and noticed this Poseidon-looking sign on the building across the street from us. It's like I'd never seen it before. I just stared at it in a type of trance, and wondered what other things I've been failing to notice.

I love walking down the street with the sun shining down on my face, and the silhouettes of the trees flitting behind my closed eyes like grainy film scenes. Sometimes I wish I had the courage to rely solely on my four senses and keep walking, but the fear of hitting a tree or a pole keeps me peeking every few seconds. Ah.

reminiscing on a blade's edge

He held the blade by its tip, tilting it and watching the moonlight glisten off it's edge. The ray of light reflected onto the wall across him and he moved the metal back and forth, watching the light dance. Flicking his wrist upward, he easily flipped the letter opener through the air and caught it, flat and cool, across the palm of his hand. Strange, he thought, staring intently into the small sliver of reflection in his hand, how the person staring back always seemed to change, shifting with each unannounced tick of the second hand of the clock on the wall.

He was shaken out of his reverie by a loud "pop" and the muffled sound of arguing. He sighed. There were moments, moments like this, that he wished he didn't live so close to the train station. There were always people arguing. People he would like nothing more than to throw kitchen utensils at.

But that was illegal.

He squinted out the window to see what had disturbed him. A woman stood, arms-crossed and annoyed, glaring at her companion who seemed to think something was much more amusing than she did.

Angela, are you happy now?

She hurriedly followed the sound of his footsteps as she stepped off the urine-smelling train. The train had been scheduled to arrive in Sicily forty-three minutes ago at 8:35pm, but the conductor had suddenly collapsed from extreme dehydration. It had been an unusually humid summer, and many an elderly couple found itself sitting in the canteen drinking late afternoon Spritz. Half an hour was spent looking for a substitute. No one knew what the hold-up was for the remaining thirteen minutes. They reached the edge of the station, eyes searching for the brand new motorcycle that their friendly travel agent had promised would be there.

THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Hi kids - sorry for the delay, but let's get this show on the road!

So here are the rules for our awesome-fun-story-blog :]

1. The following is the order of people posting (ahem PAY ATTENTION PLEASE)

• Sunhee
• Angela
• Young
• Crystl
• Frank
• Anna
• Dlu
• Kathy
  
• Cchoi

2. Each person must post within 24 hours after the previous person on the list to post. Since this blog automatically emails new updates to everyone, no one has an excuse NOT to post xp.

3. If you cannot post, please email the next person on the list and give them a heads up. Otherwise, if after 24 hours has elapsed and the next person hasn't posted, then the next person has another 24 hours to post.

4. Please do not kill plot lines and characters arbitrarily unless you contribute something substantial that pushes the plot in another direction. It will be no fun if every other post is a "AND THEN A FREAK METEOR SHOWER KILLED BOB" or "AND THEN ANDREW GOT EATEN BY A BEAR." Don't be lame please.

...and I think that's it. If more comes up I will update this. In the meantime...post post post! :]

Letters to You

In ninth grade, one of my teachers gave us the typically corny assignment: to write a letter addressed to ourselves, to be opened at our high school graduation in three years. I found myself continuing the tradition, probably for sentimental (and egotistical) value, and have accumulated letters through college and work. I’m supposed to open the next letter to myself this August. Sifting through the old ones, I notice there’s always something that I was worrying about – in high school, boys, grades, and k-pop (it’s good to know some things will never change); grades, friendships, and faith in college; family relationships, work, and self-esteem post-college. In a few instances, it was a good way to motivate myself by seeing how far I’d come, but usually, I realized how ridiculously easy it was to let the trivial side streets lure me away from the main road. Not all detours are made the same after all.

During college, I used to write down so many thoughts on Xanga (aren’t you glad I stopped taking those side streets?). I miss pondering some of the questions I struggled with back then. I used to err on the side of too much introspection and not enough reality. Now, tapping into my thoughts is like opening up a rusty old chest of drawers, pulling and yanking, airing out each thought like wet laundry. Life has a way of spinning cobwebs around your mind, and your brain succumbs to the lull of each thread if you’re not careful. But then again, others will say such introspection is a luxury. Reality is not so generous to some, and often decisions on how to spend time, and thoughts, are made for us rather than by us. But insofar as it is a choice, I hope to make it deliberately.

With another year under my belt, I figure there will always be an endless supply of things that will take the place of previous worries if I let them. If it’s not grades anymore, it will be relationships, and if not relationships, it will be work. If not work, it will be kids. And so on. Then where’s the happiness in the journey? Is it hidden in the cracks, where the little things make a day just right? Is it found in the spontaneous, novel, or unexpected? I don’t know. But I’m feeling more and more that the peace I find in connecting with others makes me the happiest, rather than novelties, or traveling to exotic places, or even intellectual stimulation. A bad experience shared with the best of friends becomes a comical memory. Eating the best meal in town with a bunch of strangers probably wouldn’t even make the memory bank. This was most likely true before, too, but I was reluctant to accept it.

All this to say, I'm thankful for the gifts I've received in this life. I just hope I make fitting choices. It's always harder to be kind than clever.

Polishing my stone

This is a story of a humorous misunderstanding in my life that yet yielded important and interesting results.

I first learned about Taoism when I was somewhat young, not that young but say, middle school or so. When I was told its central tenet of (roughtly translated from the Korean) 'polishing the way/path', I mistook the word for way (도 'do') for rock or stone (돌 'dol') and did not realize my mistake until somewhat recently. So for several years, I thought it was actually 'polishing a stone'. But this made perfect sense to me. In many ways this still kept the same principle of Taoism that I inherently understood, however different the actual phrase became.

I found this fascinating. Thinking about it now, after I realized my misunderstanding, I think the original imagery I had of polishing a stone as metaphor is still extremely powerful and makes the concept easier to understand than some abstract notion of 'the way'. The path to enlightenment is paved by polishing my stone everyday, whatever you might think the 'stone' is--the stone of oneself, the essence of one's being, the soul, the idea of the 'self'? Maybe the difficulty in putting into words precisely what the stone is makes this just as vague as saying 'the way', but everyone can picture what polishing a stone is like and further, from such imagery one can understand this for themselves without a need for such exact definition. Everyone can point to a concept of 'This is me. This is my stone. This is my stone I polish each day'. 

The days go by one by one, a little faster than the one before as I get older. But each passing day I continue to polish my stone.

On an unrelated note, I realized I don't have the focus and willpower to be a writer. But undergrad also destroyed my succinct clarity to be a lawyer, perhaps.

A musing from the road

When driving for 10 hours straight, remove "How I Could Just Kill a Man" from your playlist first.

Of stairwells, evictions, and the morning commute

I find it ironic that of our little group, the noisiest (and arguably the most annoying) two people seem to have the least to say online.

I'm talking about you David Lu (and myself of course).

Anyway, I have a few fun stories I'd like to share. However, because my father is periodically checking in to see whether I'm in bed, I will make this quick -

1. Work is fantastic - the people are nice, the projects are interesting, and I have a lovely view of the lake from my office

2. I got locked in the stairwell on the second day of work - typical Angela, I know. Believe it or not, it was actually not my fault. During orientation, no one seemed to remember to mention to any of us that the southern stairwell had a password protected door on each floor. So naturally, when I wandered in, I had no idea how to get back out. Fortunately, the stairwell architects had enough foresight to contemplate such a situation and had installed a phone by the door. Unfortunately, I did not have enough foresight to pay attention to "phone usage 101" on the first day and had no idea how to make a phone call. Thus it took twenty panic-filled minutes, much frenetic button pressing, and a phone call to a baffled co-worker - she was thoroughly confused when her phone said she was getting a call from "stairwell" - before I was happy and rescued.

3. Eviction court is chaos; chaos filled with the unadulterated crazy of pro se plaintiffs who insist on blithely arguing with the judge on issues they clearly don't understand. There was even this one guy who attempted to give the judge a vocabulary lesson. Needless to say, his case got dismissed.

4. Commuting is terrible. Buses are terrible. I wish I had a flying pony. Or a dragon. That would be fantastic.

On another note, does everyone like the way this blog is turning out or do you guys want to go back to the story idea?

I am definitely okay with either.

Stories From the Bahamas

After four days in the sun, I am outrageously and severely sunburnt. I mean, I am R-E-D, red. I am redder than Texas during a presidential election. I am so red that I could be South Korea’s number one fan in the world cup just by being shirtless. (Be the Reds!) Washington’s football team has changed their name to the Frank’s. Crayola just called to inform me that my skin mixes with blue to make purple.

True story.

But worse than the color, my skin has the texture of a leather couch from the eighties. And my burns are radiating heat the way the seats would after some 400lb guy has been sitting on it to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy - with alternate endings. My shoulders are burnt the worst and whenever I move my arms, I have mental images of browned fallen Autumn leaves crunching under a heavy shoe.

And the pain! On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being barely noticeable and 10 being severe, it is a solid un-effing-believable. For the sake of credibility, I am the guy who consistently describes having the tip of his finger torn off at the bone as “meh, it kinda hurt.” It is like the pins and needles of your foot falling asleep but for three straight days and every once in a while, the pins are like needles and the needles are like broadswords.

So all in all, considering the sun damage that has now turned into sun blisters, my trip to the Bahamas was absolutely, undeniably, unequivocally …… fantastic. Yes, all hyperboles aside, the visit was awesome and even with the second degree burns, I’d do it again. My experiences were amazing.

For example, the water park there had this body slide that was four stories high and during the initial drop, you literally catch air. When you blast out of the tube at the bottom, you’re going fast enough to skip on the water’s surface.

The skies were an incredibly soothing blue, like pepto bismol for your soul. It was like God hadn’t invented clouds yet.

I also got to snorkel in the Atlantic. But, you wouldn’t even need a snorkeling mask to see the fish because there were schools of fish just hanging out in the tide. If you walked in so that just your legs were in the water, they would swim by and brush their surprisingly soft smooth and somewhat oily bodies on you.

Another incredible moment was standing in the tide drinking a Guinness and smoking a cigar. This actually turned out to be not as relaxing because whenever the tide came in, I had to break my gangster pose - arms folded, chin up, slight scowl - to abruptly raise the beer and cigar high enough for them to stay dry.

But yes, even with the sunburn, I would do it all over again. If every time I went there, I would get burnt the same way, I would gladly take the trip. The pain is worth the pleasure and I would not forgo the pleasure to avoid the pain.

And I realize that it is the same with law school. My grades do burn quite a bit, and this time, I’m even redder in the face. But I think the experiences I’m having and the things I’ve learned, whether it is actually about the law, or about myself, or whether it is the good times made by even greater people (pssttt that’s you guys, fellow contributors), make the journey worthwhile.

Plus, next time I go there, I’ll just try harder not to get burnt.

Figments of my imagination

Everyone (or almost everyone, some people could've just been really hardcore little kids I suppose) can remember spending sleepless nights after watching a scary movie when they were young. I also remember asking my mom either before or after such an episode why this never seemed to happen to grown-ups. She replied because adults had much more pressing and scary things to worry about that were real. I didn't totally believe it at the time, what could be scarier than the fears I could make real in my head? Reality was at least bound by some limits, my imagination was boundless.

But it turned out to be totally true, of course. All the worries and responsibilities that come with growing up soon far overshadowed the imaginary fears of childhood. I wondered is that what maturity is--the acceptance of the real over the imagined? Yet the imagined is sometimes more real than reality, I don't want to let go of that completely. 

A verse I came across recently while reading something else struck me and I think it's an important expression of something I try to keep in mind related to this: "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." 2 Corinthians 4:18. We all worry about these things in our lives but ultimately, should these worries trump the intangibles of our selves?

I don't regret that I no longer lose sleep over scary movies and I even catch myself thinking exactly what my mother told me all those years ago, 'How can those things be scary when there's so many immediately real things I have to worry about everyday already?' Thinking this way is necessary, even. But I'm also glad there are still times when it's hard to distinguish between dreams and reality. And I hope I'll always be a dreamer.

I'm a little frustrated at the imperfect expression of myself, and I think there's more I want to say. Maybe I'll work on it a bit more when I don't have the frightening prospect of having to do journal staring me in the face. That's ironic.

Back Home Again in Indiana

No particularly fun stories yet... but the summer is young and there will be more time for mischief-making once we turn in those silly notes.

I'm having a brief fling with government work this summer in the Indiana governor's office. I answer directly to the General Counsel, who is also in charge of overseeing a couple of the state agencies. At the end of the day, I'm pretty much splitting my time between legal work and policy research. The legal work is interesting, but it is definitely more mundane than what I thought would make its way through here. Lots of pro se complaints against administrative judges and government property sales. Also, every change to the Indiana Code has to have the Governor's official okay and signature (which boils down to the law clerk signing off with the autopen). Additionally, one of the justices on the Indiana Supreme Court is retiring in the fall, so we're in the process of trying to find a replacement. Not surprisingly in a state like Indiana, the court is currently all male, and all over 70. We'll have to see if that changes.

When I was in college, a friend of mine used to remind me that the KKK was based in Indy during the Civil Rights movement. Unfortunately that's largely true. What's also true is that some of the biggest cover ups in KKK history were run right from my office. Kind of gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling when you walk into work. We're better today, though. As the only state in the Midwest that is currently running in the black, the Governor has succeeded in bringing new business to the state even during the recession. We're all speculating about his potential run for the presidency in 2012. No matter what he's saying to the newspapers, here in the office the UG interns keep a file with every time he is mentioned for the ticket. As for me, though, I will be long gone by then. I'm not political enough to want a job working for a politician.

I just had my first official meeting with Mr. Big this morning. It's sort of funny, because of all the people in the office, Mitch Daniels is probably the most dressed down and relaxed. Of course, he's scary smart, but he still retains a certain "hoosier charm." I'm trying to make my peace with the fact that he used the word "y'all" three times this morning (I counted). But he gets brownie points for indulging me in a decent discussion about protecting citizens' and companies' expectation interests.

A brief note on commute: One of the nice things about living in a medium sized city, as opposed to Chicago, is that it's a 20 minute commute in the morning from my sleepy suburb to the bustling city. Definitely something to keep in mind in the coming years as I try to decide where I want to practice. Getting to work at 8:30 here in Indy is painful enough...

Aside from work, my little brother is graduating next Sunday. I feel old.