List of things about myself

1.     You think I like to draw.

2.     I actually don’t like to draw; neither do I often draw. It’s strange how a large portion of the population here sees me as the ‘girl that draws’ when I don’t make three complete drawings a semester. I know I used to like drawing. I used to use up 20 pieces of paper a day and draw with concentration and vigor I never woke except for this activity in trying to endow life to whatever being sprang out of the tip of my pen. I liked it because it was simple and fun, and because I enjoyed the feeling of the moments it worked out well—as if the drawing created the rest of itself on its own.

I got older. I started caring about getting the biological structures of people realistically correct. 99 percent of the subjects of my drawings being people, I had to care a lot. I got tired. From some point on in middle school, I never could finish a drawing I started. I would begin on a piece of paper excitedly but then lose the force to see the end of it. I grew more tired, and no longer could derive much fun from the activity.

Now I am in pretty much the same state, but I have discovered a way of caring less. It is starting from a single meaningless, shapeless blob or a stroke. Imagining heads and limbs onto random blobs and out of random strokes and evolving them out is fun. I don’t have to structure and figure—I just have to see weird things in random places, and I do that well.

3.     I’ve never been quite able to keep my hands still while listening to or watching things (like class or TV). I doodled in the margins of textbooks and the back few pages of notebooks all through middle and elementary school, played with eraser shavings until they turned claylike, carve little holes into wooden desks with pencils and tried to fill it with the ink from gel-pens, and created very detailed small fake scars on my hand with pen and glue. I somehow stopped doing all these things, but I have one habit remaining. I like to create rows of regularly spaced tiny rips the edges of a piece of paper.

4.     I am extremely, extremely slow. I will never do anything on time. Like this here. I write in 2 thirds the speed of most other kids, walk in half, study in a fourth, and talk in slow motion. Freshmen year, I think I got 30 penalty points just for being late. I was once at court for being late for school 6 times, although not all in one week. I always come to classes in the English building the latest.

When I do work and schoolwork, like making a page for a month to be in the school calendar or writing an essay, I am always the latest to submit. I procrastinate, too, but it is more that I am slow in the process. I think the problem is in that assign much more work to myself than other kids do; I plan too extravagantly and never finish in time. Slowness is seriously a killing attribute in school. But it’s okay. I’ve survived.

5.     I like to write. I always found myself enjoying the process of writing for all the various writing assignments given here; although I suspend beginning till the very last moment, I like it when I finally do. However, I’ve recently discovered I also like writing random things at random times for my eyes and my pleasure only. It could range from a word to a few sentences to a whole story.

6.     I like to write in Korean better than in English because it feels to me, ‘dry’. I noticed in the days of my first encounters with full sentences in English that it sounds and looks much more ‘wet’ in speech and on paper. None of native English speakers I’ve tried explaining this to understood what I meant, but all of the native Korean speakers did. I can’t quite pin it, but I suppose it has to do with how the tongue and teeth work and how the letters are shaped.

7.     I cry very frequently. I don’t think it’s that I cry on a small doses of sadness, but that I get very sad very frequently. That sounds sad, but I’ve grown quite used to it. But I’m trying to get out of it because the people that I like don’t like me sad.

8.     I sporadically get obsessed with recycling and picking up trash on the street. I think when we all learned in kindergarten that picking up trash is a thing that very nice people do, it stuck to my unconsciousness like tree sap and afterwards, even when it fell off, it left some stickiness there and makes me act that way.

9.     I like violent images. I draw ghosts, Death, bloody girls, and hurt. I recently found I write about them, too. The most recent thing I wrote for fun is a passage in the stream of consciousness of a girl in the moment of death by car accident.

10.   I love the world outside—I think this characteristic started to develop during my days in Canada, most of which I spent climbing trees, flying leaves, digging an irrigation system by a pool, concocting perfume out of roses outside my house, and etc. I came here and started to take photos, and so learned how not only fun but also beautiful nature is. I like staring at things. I like sitting amongst and under trees. I like acquainting flowers.

11.   I love the smell of approaching winter. Frigidity, at least so far as I have perceived, very literally possesses a unique scent. Around November each year, I step out one day to find that this fragrance has hung itself slightly in the air. The sweet surprise and melancholy is one of the fairest sensations I encounter ever every year. I suddenly feel as if I have been painted brutally white with a very large and mildly bristly brush. I love standing face covered and stiffened with paint, but with a mind hallowed in the sudden striking sense.

12.   I love snow. The first snowfall every year is a huge event for me. But since last winter, I lost a bit of interest in snow. I think it’s because it’s too cold here. I found myself longing for summer the first time in my remembered life last year. It seems to be settling in as a pattern, because I am feeling so again this year.

13.   I hate homophobic people. I can’t really frame why, but whenever someone saying hateful things about homosexuals catches my ears, I feel disgusted and disappointed.

14.   I don’t have a religion. I believe some God exists somewhere in the universe (or out of it) and controls some things, but I don’t believe in the Christian God or that of any other religion. I used to be thoughtlessly Christian until one Monday morning in 2^nd grade. I was going to a Christian private school, and we had service-assemblies every Monday morning. Like any other week, we were singing new hymns. Then in one hymn, a line of the lyrics said, “it doesn’t matter if you’re a bad person or a nice person; if you believe you will go to heaven!” I realized something was wrong with this religion. So I started being skeptical.

15.   I’d thought in middle school that if I were to take up a religion, in would be Zoroastrianism because I liked the idea of the coexistence and unity of the good and the evil and how they could not be separated; that they were in fact in the same thing. Now I don’t care.

16.   I believe extra-terrestrial beings must exist, just because the universe is big enough.

17.   I often am very tired. I don’t find much joy in any activity, because the things I planned with joy I never can complete and therefore just tire me out more. After coming to KMLA, I am always sleep deprived, and this does not add positive to my mental tiredness. I was really depressed for a while thinking life is a series of patterns repeated and the only state you become at the end of each cycle is more tired, but I decided that thought was as meaningless and tiring and so of no help at all. I asked a lot of people why they live and concluded that people live because they’re already living. Why shouldn’t I?

18.   I used to have a couple of very suicidal, negative, and depressed friends. They both got better, then one regressed. It’s draining and heartbreaking to keep telling someone you care for that they shouldn’t die and to shake in fear of losing him or her the whole while. But it helps, too, because it forces me to be extra positive. I really wish the people I care for would be happy, though.

19.   I like skin transparent enough for blue veins to show through, long eyelashes, and bright eyes curtained in dark. Unfortunately, I’ve never met anyone with all three characteristics at once.

20.   Sometimes I get uncontrollable episodes of mouth-hunger where I have to immediately eat everything I see (that, of course, is mine to eat) the moment I see it. It’s not that I am stomach-hungry, but that I get a burning desire to bite and chew and taste. I don’t like it.

21.   I respect Hyun-A of 4minute. She makes herself different. She becomes a whole different person on stage, wears a new face, and moves herself like she’s not from this world. It’s really an eerie experience to observe videos of her dancing with the other members of the group or with back dancers; the disparity freaks me out. If you watch a video of 4minute, you should instantly be able to see that she moves differently from the rest of the members though at least 3 of them are reasonably good dancers.

22.   One day in 5^th grade or something, I was thinking about dimensions. The 0th dimension is a dot. 1^st: line, 2^nd: plane, 3^rd: sphere, 4^th: time. What could be the fifth? Then I realized a sphere is like a dot. And time is a line of those spheres. So the 5^th dimension should be a plane of lines of time. There must exist parallel lines of time. Alternate histories of our universe. The 6^th dimension would be a collection of different planes of lines of times of a universe. So each plane would be a different universe. I still haven’t imagined what the 7^th dimension would be like.

Later I learned many other people had hypothesized about parallel universes, too.

23.   So my theory is that ‘deja-vu’s are glimpses into our parallel lines of time. When we experience something that the ‘we’ in another line of history near to ours have experienced already, we form for a moment a connection to that near line and get the feeling that we’ve seen and done this before.

I get ‘deja-vu’s so frequently I needed a theory.

24.   I hate arguing or fighting (except like when logically discussing a non-personal issue). I always bend in rather than strike up an argument. I have been mostly obedient to my parents and teachers, but now I’m learning that I can’t live like that forever.

25.   I normally can’t care enough to hate somebody for an extended period of time, but I absolutely hate some of the teachers here.

26. I really like milk, too. And now I'm living beside a milk factory. It's like a dream come true.

27. I want to live one day in a white house with a garden that blooms full of white flowers all year around.