My name is Young-Kyung Kim. Nope, I have no middle name or nickname. My grandmother (who still gets up at five in the morning to begin work) gave me that name, the former part of which means “forever” and the latter “cultivate.” I usually take it as “hard worker” - which I think I am, although sometimes it goes into overdrive. Homework and I have an interesting relationship.
There are other things about myself - I am an avid book nerd, a writer, and possibly Korean. I'm on the Speech and Debate team. I laugh and smile a lot - maybe extravagantly, but I like to think that it's good for me. I have a collection of owl figurines. I hoard notebooks. I'm optimistic, sometimes to the extreme. I love traveling, meeting new people, summer weather, food, clean space, and the ocean. I hate the dark, cliche plots, not knowing things, and trying to figure out what kind of person I am, because it feels like an endless and impossible task. Saying that, I feel like I’m tagging myself like a Facebook post of some sort. Lots of people use hashtags, no? Well, there’s a first time for everything: #booknerd #writer #Korean
Yup, I really don’t like this either.
Most of the time I used to spend reading has become time spent at school. When I am not at school, I usually do homework. Which is scary. Seeing what I’m writing, you guys probably think I’m the #typicalAsian (okay! I’ll really stop) and that I have major problems. I guess I do. My academic goals are probably apparent by now: I want get good grades and AP scores but at the same time study efficiently, with as few hours spent on it as possible. I want to be able to pursue other hobbies. I want to become a better writer, if not to write assignments more quickly but to also conclude the book I first launched in fifth grade. Writing is strange and beautiful - how you can put little scribbles on paper that shape a portion of reality, or realistic fantasies at the very least.
I want to be able to read other people’s thoughts because I want to fathom how other people think, see, and understand their world. It’s hard to imagine, because how do you really, truly think like someone else? I really want to know, but it’s too different. It’s impossible.
But my favorite books cut it very, very close to reality. New installations of my cherished series make me geek out. I don’t think I want to describe what happens because it resembles one of those #hypercat gifs plus the appropriate audio track (little squealing mews). Well, now I’ve done it.
My favorite website is Google because it gets me to the
other sites I want to go. Sometimes it has awesome games!
I had lots of meaningful moments in the past months, one of which happened in the humid heat of summertime Korea. I discovered my grandfather in the old shed. He was pulling out bubble wrap, this giant roll of solid air and plastic. It was the super tough kind of bubble wrap, the one with plastic on both sides of the bubbly part; but the edge of a nearby lawnmower was tougher. He ripped a piece off and put the rest back and I followed him out the door of the shed. Things like this had no explanation. He could be refurbishing the old couch, fixing the boiler - heck, he probably could fix a boiler with two pieces of bubble wrap.
But he sat on a chair overlooking rice paddies, rocks, flowers, and a local screen golf location and handed me one piece. I sat down, looked. Was he massaging the plastic?
“What are you doing?”
“It won’t pop!” Laughter, working his smoky lungs.
A moment of meaning with no explanation.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.