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.