People keep asking me what I'm doing and what kinds of adventures I'm going on. Dudes, I've been to Seoul and to Cheongju, but I work a 40-hour-a-week job (re: the differences between living in a country and traveling to a country for a short period of time?) Teaching is an adventure in and of itself.
I will be going on more travels, fear not, but until then, my life is pretty similar to before except...I'm living in Korea, working in Korea, learning Korean, pointing at things a lot more, and being a lot more productive. I've also succumbed back into my internet persona activities (social networking, and the like.) I don't know why, but I do this every once in a while and I'm no good at it.
My current goals are:
-Teach myself Korean via--guess--social networking! Aaand a textbook that teaches me super formal Korean and is only helpful until my co-teachers tell me not to say it like that. I can say 저는 선생님 입니다 ("I am a teacher." Hopefully there are no mistakes, hah!)
-Finished NaNoWriMo (BEAT IT! 50,000!) so my next goal is to continue writing. I've set a goal for myself, 500 words per day or an equivalent amount of work planning. Today is the second day I've taken off, but my throat is sore and I woke up ten minutes before work today (the excuses begin.)
-Plan some weekend adventures for next month, when Ariel comes to visit!
-Try to get some care packages together and send them to people.
Okay. Yep. Sore throat leads to a very lackluster blog post, which leads to me laying in bed and watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as my next activity, because my original intention of watching Old Boy is already dead due to tiredness and sore eardrums.
What else would I choose for my first photo but this:
I finally got to see a temple, though I think it was a replica since the original was supposedly burned down, but whatevs. Went to Cheongju for the day one weekend and got to see this place, which was attached to the Printing Museum. The museum was quite fun for me, because I'm into that kind of thing, but also because of the robots. I will attach a video for evidence. There was also a nun walking the circle path around the grounds here (I'm going to go ahead and assume it was meant for Buddhist walking meditation, but don't quote me,) which I found to be an interesting mix of things.
At this point, I would like to revert back to the topic of social media. This has nothing to do with Korea, but everything to do with blogging.
It has been several years in the making, but I still can't get over connectivity. To start with, I am a very private person. Being on the internet intrudes on your privacy basically no matter how you do it. So fine, I'm going to share some things on the internet that you probably have to be good friends with me for me to tell you in real life, because social media is strange like that. However, there are different venues for this. I have always been an internet person, but circa 2000 when I was in my prime, everything was anonymous. You posted on forums with different identities, you could have different AIM names and AOL accounts (lol,) different Neopets accounts for different personas, different Livejournals for different story-tellings. This list proves that I am kinda old and it also exhibits how I used to spend my time, but that's neither here nor there.
When MySpace came along, it was a very strange thing to me that anything about my real self was on the internet. That was fine, though, because Myspace was not connected to anything else. Youtube was great, because even though you were putting your face on the internet, it was--at the time--a small community of people who were just messing around with new technology. Then Facebook happened. Then there was a social media explosion and I'll be honest, I've joined so many of them...Twitter (never could get the hang of it,) Tumblr, Instagram, Google +, VYou and Dailybooth (which have since shut down.) Through all of that, I struggled to keep each profile's identity separate and I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHY except that I know myself and I know that's how I like to exist.
These days, Google owns everything. My Youtube and Blogger account are linked to my Gmail, which is linked to Google Plus (obv) and I don't know how I feel about that. I guess I feel fine about it, since it's not stopping me, but every once in a while--when I post a slew of photos on Facebook--I go into massive panic mode about how every facet of my life is being tracked, recorded, and shared with the world. Of course, this is only true to some degree but it's the fear that never lets go (kind of like the fear that I have when I think about the journal that I lost somewhere in between my trek from Massachusetts to Seattle, awkwarrrrd.)
This turned out to be long and convoluted, not to mention off topic. Some days, the fear makes me delete all of my Facebook friends. Other days, I don't care and post videos of myself on Youtube.
Anyone want to respond with any helpful tips on how to not think about it? Let's see.
