my funny valentine

My funny valentine
Sweet comic valentine
You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet you’re my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than greek
Is your mouth a little weak
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?

But don’t change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay little valentine stay
Each day is valentines day

the importance of failure and imagination

From J.K. Rowling’s 2008 commencement address to the graduating class of Harvard University:

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default..

Failure taught me things about myself that I could not have learned no other way.. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”

from Harvard Magazine

“Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared..

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.”

the odd cultural idiosyncrasies of Korea

• Subway seats are heated in the winter. Welcome to a hot butt sauna in the early morning.

• Not so much gifts, but sentiments are expressed through money. Money = the best gift? At weddings and funerals you congratulate or express condolences by giving money. On the Chinese New Years Day you receive cash from all your relatives. (Once you have found yourself a proper job, then this day becomes your turn to give money to your parents.) Even on graduation day, relatives give you money.

• I think Koreans are awkward huggers. I always find myself holding back when I see people – either that or I pull the other person into an awkward embrace. Hugs aren’t so common, even among close friends; it may be awkward. Yet there’s nothing awkward about (heterosexual) girls holding hands.

• Awesome service! Late night deliveries at any crazy hour. Employees streaming to your side like bees sensing a ripe flower at a mall, wooing you with more questions and compliments than you want to hear. Waitresses and waiters on their knees at certain restaurants to meet your eye-level. All this without any tip whatsoever.

• No translation for “God bless you” or “Excuse me” when you sneeze or burp. In Turkish we say, “Çok yaşa” (“May you live long”) after a person sneezes to which one replies, “Sende gör” (“May you live to see it”). In Germany, they say “Gesundheit” which literally means “Health.” Here, you don’t need to be excused nor do you receive blessings on your health – you are merely ignored as if nothing happened. Nice.

• Koreans are very practical people (as you can probably guess with the monetary gifts). If you’re going to a housewarming party or someone’s house for the first time, the gift to bring isn’t wine or flowers. Are you kidding me? You are not a good guest unless you bring toilet paper or diapers (if the family has a baby) or something everyone can feast upon like fruit or cake.

• Although the common etiquette of standing in line and not intruding in other people’s spaces exists, it does not apply to a certain group of people: ‘ajummas‘ (older married women in their late 30s-50s). These ‘ajummas‘ have so much physical strength, not to mention social power in their homes, it’s sometimes even to the point of being scary.

• Not quite so much of a dutch-pay culture – older person (almost) always buys. Woohoo

• In Korean couple culture, every 100 days is deemed worth celebrating. “How long have you been dating?” “A little over 100 days,” “Almost 500 days.” How do you keep count?!

• You need only one thing in this culture to melt another person’s anger or frustration, especially when it’s directed towards you: ‘ae-gyo‘. This untranslatable word is the act of purposely performing like a child with all the cuteness you can muster. It sometimes requires altering one’s voice to sound like a 5 year old (no offense to 5 year olds) or gestures with your hand (see pictures below). But surprisingly, it works (especially on the male gender).

examples of 'ae-gyo'

leavening

His hands meshed the dough making it look like a child’s play with play dough and he used a can of tomatoes to flatten it out on the kitchen counter, not forgetting to spread a thin layer of flour. I asked him his recipe, but being the good cook that he was he simply smiled and said that it was a secret. The flattened dough was placed on a pan over the fire and began to slowly leaven taking its naan form. The smell filled the tiny kitchen making body and heart warm.

“What do you want to do?” I asked, after playing the words around in my mind. It seemed such an innocent question, but in the circumstances I realized that it was loaded with hope. Hope which may appear far away for someone who has been forced to wait endlessly. Was it too cruel to ask about an uncertain future? ‘What do you want to be?’ was another similar question on my mind, but it seemed too rude to ask when it was obvious who he currently was – an asylum seeker, waiting to be recognized as a refugee. But genuine curiosity slipped my tongue before I could measure how much I was prying or how much of hope he was not wishing to reveal.

“What do I want to do?” he repeated, as if this was not something he was asked very often or had given much thought.

“Yes, after…” I paused. ‘After you receive refugee status’ was what I wanted to say, but in this new world that I had only stepped into a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t sure if I should sound so matter-of-factly, again worried about how much of tangible hope my words should allow. In the weeks since I joined the NGO, I had witnessed several instances during interviews in which staff members sat across from refugee applicants and began their sentences with, “To be completely honest with you…” It is a hard task to be both empathetic and firmly objective. I didn’t want to create an elephant in the room, but here I was being true to my overly-sensitive worrisome character. I quickly rephrased to get across what I meant.

“Do you want to study more? Do business?”

He seemed to consider the possibilities. “You know, I tried to open a restaurant here. But some Korean people stopped me everytime.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it. And Korean people always side with Korean people. Even when they do something bad, because they are Korean, they say it is okay.”

I instinctively frowned at the thought of the injustice committed and the bitterness that could be heard in the tone of his voice. The fact that he identified me as a ‘Korean’ revealed the defensive daggers behind his words. How many people I wondered had falsely told him so or chosen to justify the injustice or how many times had his story fallen upon deaf ‘Korean’ ears. I tried to tell him that not all Koreans were like those malicious men that he had had to face, and not all Koreans were forgiving of such acts, but my mumbled fading words had already lost an audience. I couldn’t ask any further questions because I realized that our conversation had come to an end as long as he only associated me as a ‘Korean’ – if only he knew that I (along with many other ‘Koreans’ out there) value humanity over nationality.

My mind briefly recounted back to a conversation I had overheard in the office about how some Korean gang members had harassed Khalil[*a psyeudonym] and forced him to close his stall every time he attempted some sort of livelihood.

It cannot be easy to be discriminated for having a different skin color or being of a different nationality. And having written and read that sentence, I realize that that could be the biggest understatement of a lifetime and what do I know when I, the yellow-skinned, small-slanted eyed Asian blend in so well in this largely homogenous society, when I do not know what it is like to have people dart suspicious glances at me on the streets or walk away when I sit down on the subway.

I realized that endless waiting cannot but dim hope and a foreign country and culture are not so embracing or warm. But I hope that I don’t always have to be embarassed of being a ‘Korean’ in front of guests from other countries.

taken from http://www.bbcgoodfood.com