I’ve come to the conclusion that being impeccably organized is a waste of time.

For example, my electronic files are kind of organized. They’re given sensible names. They’re in folders, most of them. At first, it seemed like putting everything into its proper place would be a good idea, but then I decided that it wouldn’t be.

Because if X is not in its proper folder, I probably know that and know where it is, anyway. However, if I don’t know where it is, I can use the operating system’s search function and find it in about .93 seconds (before I can open the folder) and thus there is 0 point to placing things properly.

It doesn’t matter that my files are arranged a bit chaotically. What matters is that chaos works and that chaos works better than being well organized because chaos saves time.

The trick for me though is finding chaotic formulas that work, not just with my computer, but with everything. My apartment needs to be more organized. My plans for conquering Korean need to be more chaotic. I have journals for marking progress in Korean, I have a website, and I have an excel spreadsheet. That’s way too much crap. It’s so much crap that I’ve abandoned the entire system. I’m not keeping track of anything and I’m barely studying.

Things to do/improve:
- apartment (goal: reach a state where I’m constantly ready to entertain and where I’m not harboring useless junk in my closets)
- work (goal: work less (no more than 10 hours a day))
- learn Korean (lulz)
- find time/get organized for other things (photography, travel, music, reading, callistonian.net …)
- figure out how to keep track of things read (goodreads vs. excel vs. website vs. other)

I want to read a lot this month. Perhaps I’ll change my mind as May progresses, but for now, that’s the feeling. I’m not sure what to read next, but it’ll probably be one of the following. Feel free to suggest other things.

• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This has been on my mental things-to-consider-reading list for years.
  

  The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy.

   

• Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks! I love Geraldine Brooks! Brooks’ March is my favorite novel. I also adore People of the Book.
  

  A New York Times bestselling tale of passion and belief, magic and adventure from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author

  Bethia Mayfield is a restless and curious young woman growing up in Martha’s vineyard in the 1660s amid a small band of pioneering English Puritans. At age twelve, she meets Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia’s father is a Calvinist minister who seeks to convert the native Wampanoag, and Caleb becomes a prize in the contest between old ways and new, eventually becoming the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. Inspired by a true story and narrated by the irresistible Bethia, Caleb’s Crossing brilliantly captures the triumphs and turmoil of two brave, openhearted spirits who risk everything in a search for knowledge at a time of superstition and ignorance.

• Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis. HAMILTON!!!!!!! ♥
  

  An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic — John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  

  An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.

  Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
  

  In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

  Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

• The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
  

  In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

• An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson. I need to learn more about WWII in North Africa because I don’t know that much.
  

  In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in WW II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the riveting story of the war in North Africa

  The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal point in American history, the moment when the United States began to act like a great power.

By the way, I’m still reading 1Q84.

The ruler measures centimeters.

I write small. I don’t own any .7mm pens/pencils/etc. .3mm is standard for me.

Is there anything unique about your writing style?

This post was inspired by one of Sarai’s blog topic ideas.

I may not have a violin, but I have a camera.

(Personal) Project #60: become a better photographer. I purchased another lens for my camera. The photos above are the first ones taken with my new “baby” and a fair representation of my current work as a photographer even if they are, more or less, just test shots.

Before this lens, I had gotten quite used to framing the world in a certain way. I saw in 50mm, more specifically in 50mm on a Canon DSLR with a cropped sensor, but that’s enough technical la-la-la for now.

It was like this. My hands positioned my camera to focus on details and faces. My mind pictured them in front of beautifully blown out backgrounds. My eyes considered the light while remembering that my camera was going to seemingly add more. So far, so good but—one other thing about walking around with a 50mm is that it’s like walking around with a regular camera that’s broken and zoomed in all the way, all the time.

Sometimes, I want to capture an entire person, not just his or her face, and sometimes I want to do so without backing up 512,980 meters and sometimes, I want to capture the insides of entire rooms, and not just corners, single sides, or sections of walls. Basically, sometimes, I want to show the environment around me and not just little details here and there.

Thus, out of the six photographs above, the third is my favorite. As a 50mm-thinker, it’s wondrous. If I were standing in the same spot, 50mm would get me the Chanel advertisement and that’s it. Nothing else would fit in that frame, but with my wide-angled lens, there’s so much more.

♥

A wide new world of photographic possibilities is within my reach. With more possibilities, there’s more to consider. I need to (re)think about what I want to capture. I need to think about specific photography projects I’d like to do. I need to think about composition and light and color.

I like photographing pretty things. Garbage, dirt—things that depict the grittiness of life, I don’t shoot them. My desire is to become better at taking photos that depict beauty, that inspire hope, and that inspire an ebullience for learning, living, and adventuring about.

Photographs like the ones above are okay too. I took them while I was playing with my lens for the first time. I have to try different things; I have to practice. Still, I have to think carefully about what I’m depicting. When I look at the photos above, I don’t see beauty. I see consumerism. I like the styling and processing of the images, but I probably need to give my subject matter more thought.

This post was inspired by one of Sarai’s blog topic ideas.

What you aspired to be when you were a child; has it changed? – Sarai

no—it hasn’t changed.

As a child, I aspired to learn, to improve. I never hoped to establish a career in any particular vocation. People, of course, asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And sometimes my aspiration to improve my environment and myself manifested itself in words like “(aerospace) engineer” or “lawyer.” But becoming an engineer was never the point. Improving was.

I am still a near-to-bursting bundle of ambition. I want to do this, and that, and that, and that too … and I want to do it better. I still love languages, history, mathematics, music, helping others, &c. I still frustrate and berate myself for not working hard enough, for not knowing enough about what I love.

My core is very much the same, but details have changed. For instance, when I was a toddler, I liked violins. As a child, I liked (shiny new) violins. As a teen, I fell in love with (old) violins and fantasized about playing the instrument well. I still fantasize about playing the violin well. Now, though, I don’t practice. I also don’t go to museums and stare at Stradivarius violins. In the future, I’ll probably still love the violin. There may even come a time when I practice for several hours everyday. I probably won’t practice with a shiny new violin crafted for elementary students or one of those Balestrieri violins that I drooled over as a teen. However, if my fortune is of extraordinary proportions, then just maybe I can play one of Samuel Zygmuntowicz’s violins. (oh, the ambition is ridiculous. XD)

Violin isn’t the point, though. What I really love is music. I may never play the violin again, but the idea of never playing anything again is too much.

When it comes to aspirations, an unfortunate thing is that they tend to stem from discontent. Aspiring to improve and to learn is particularly disastrous as the amount of things that can be learned and improved upon is infinite or thereabouts. And even though it’s already infinite, it’s somehow infinitely worse when huge areas of things are beloved—I love languages, history, mathematics, music, &c! There’s so much to learn—I think that I will always be slightly dissatisfied.

Anyway, I am realistic, kind of. I love music, but I don’t aspire to play every instrument. I love languages and words and writing and etymology…, but I don’t wish to learn every language. Now, I’m only trying to learn one. Sadly, though, progress is slow. I get frustrated because I want to improve quickly, because I want to do other things, because the quality of my work isn’t good enough, &c. Sometimes, the frustration takes away my words and causes me to partake in emoticons and keyboard barf.

>_< AHH!!! LKDDSFiduoCJCK URGGHHH!!! T_T OTL gg

But!—Progress is progress. At this rate, I think that I will, eventually, become bilingual, just not soon, but I will get there. And even though the false “Oh, your Korean is so good! ^^” compliments are still forthcoming, every once in a while, there’s “Oh, you’re Korean, sorry. I thought you were foreign.” That’s new. That’s better. It’s a sign of improvement, but my Korean still sucks.

As a child, I aspired to learn a foreign language. Then, it was French. Somehow my aim shifted to Korean. Details, details. Now, French must wait, but the refrain with languages and music and pretty much everything else is the same.

“I still suck. I should work harder. This is unacceptable.”

I’ve been writing sentences similar to those above since I could write. My journals, diaries, and blogs have such sprinkled throughout them in a well-documented trail of overwhelming ambition.

Honestly, I haven’t quite figured this one out. If I always write that I should work harder, then I must never actually be working harder? Perhaps, that’s the case, but “work harder” seems to mean the following.

Hurry up! You have other aspirations. [There are violins and there's French to get back to.]

Patience isn’t really one of my strong points.
Regardless, I learn and improve.

I went to Hongdae, home and hangout of many university students. It’s a lively part of Seoul, one of those crowded places where it’s easy to see things together that normally stay separate. Contrasting ideas, funky juxtaposition? That’s Hongdae.

First up—cars and pedestrians move together in the streets. There’s something at least slightly fun about sharing a narrow street with four-wheeled vehicles, motorbikes, and merchandise from overflowing stores.

And second—graffiti is ubiquitous. There’s a park where people hangout, sell artwork, play, etc. It looks dangerous even though it’s not. Well-pierced and smoking, cigarette holding, clad in all-black clothing adults can be seen a few meters away from kindergartens on playground equipment.

As for what’s third—it confuses me. I saw a sign. On the second floor of a building, there’s something cutesy, something that involves cats, probably kittens. It’s probably a cat cafe, one of those places where you get a coffee and play with cats for a small fee. On the third floor, there’s “Fuckfake.” I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound cute.

I spent time debating whether or not to write this brief second entry on juxtaposition in Hongdae. Why? Well, without further ado…

The above, taken at the Trick Eye Museum, is courtesy of a man with a bold sense of humor. But don’t be fooled. The museum is a bit lame. The only thing visitors do is pose in front of 3d pictures. Neither my friend nor I had the guts to go near that painting. We simply were not up to the challenge of pretending to drink pee &c. and thus, all our photos are wonderfully tame boring.

We posed as: angels, Italians, movie stars, shop-a-holics, torturers, King Kong’s food, masterminds of a genius heist, people with their bodies sliced in two, empresses …
Other people pretended to: drink pee, look up the skirts of Degas’ ballerinas, pull the screamer’s pants down …

today, i went to one of seoul’s trendsetting areas. i saw quite a few things, including a cafe devoted to hello kitty and two cafes devoted to cats.

i don’t like capital letters. today, i’m not going to use any. :)

anyway, favorites from tumblr:

everyone loves a corny pick up line.

i like math jokes.

also, happy birthday to me.

1. Rolls of tape are pictured above. Tape is awesome; I collect tape. mt makes tape with the best texture (it neither loses its stickiness nor rips paper when it’s pulled from a paper surface). Regardless, my favorite roll is by MMMG. It’s pink and it repeats the phrase, “You are not ugly” over and over again. I would show a picture, but alas, that roll has been misplaced.

The beauty of mt tape: ♥

Do you find yourself collecting anything unusual?

2. Krispy Kreme > Mister Donut > Dunkin Donuts. Yes? No?

I want this month to be a sort of renaissance for me. I hope to focus on two things: productivity and fun. You know, work and play hard.

One thing I noticed reading past entries is that they often read like I downed 30 pixie sticks and a few Red Bulls (i.e. a pound of sugar) while writing them. I also noticed that I was addicted to ellipses and exclamation marks. The exclamation marks and ellipses can stay in the past, but I want to bring some of that energy, that ebullience if you will, into the present.

I’ll share the past with you now, brought to you by me as a freshman and taken from a friends-only LiveJournal entry written on February 13, 2004 at 05:40AM.

Today (yesterday) I had the best dinner. In the dinning hall, I ran into a random group of pseudo-strangers. All were great people with huge personalities. In the “real world” I probably wouldn’t ever run into such a __________ group of people—ever. (Just pick a positive adjective and put it in the blank.) It was fun, so fun that my 15 minute dinner (I had a tight schedule to follow) turned into a 90 minute affair. Oh well, I was only 1 hour and 15 minutes later to my physics session than I wanted to be…あの…

My companions were a group of girls and a really interesting!!! Polish guy with a cool accent. His friends described him as neurotic. While shaking hands, he wouldn’t release mine until I repeated his name correctly. I only had to say it once. But, supposedly, others had to say it four or five times. Heh.

At any rate, when I’m in Europe, they’re going to be in Europe. And when I’m going to be in Paris, they’re going to be in Paris. So, we can hang out together, ne? ne? ne?

I hate problem sets. It’s like 6…in the morning. I’m going to go. Bye. ^^!!!!

Note: I used about 20 ellipses in the above. I had to remove some of them.

March 20, 2004 at 5:48PM:

and so this is the compressed version of what happened:
walking & more walking & even more walking… louvre at night. the metro. champs elysees. moules et frites. ran into another [-edited out for privacy-] (yay~) at louis vitton. arc de triomphe. fnac. smart cars are cool. notre dame. prisons. churches. cooking. watched asian dramas ^^;. bastille. kids with boats. kids with ponies. monuments. eiffel tower. tgv. chenonceau. chinon. paparazzi-esque. >_<. 1,387+ photos. ran through the louvre. biked through versailles' gardens. versailles. patisseries! gave directions to american tourists struggling with their french - in french ^^;. missed the flight back to the usa ^^;. anthropology homework (reading). spoke japanese on flight to new york with people who couldn't speak english (i can't exactly speak japanese - that was great!)...

I should begin traveling again. I’m starting to feel wanderlust. ♥