Happy Lunar New Year!

Happy Ox's year!  

One of the major Korean customs for Lunar New Year is to mail/bring gifts to family and friends, as well as clients and partners from work in some cases.  In order to make the most out of this gift buying frenzy, all the grocery stores and department stores put together gift packages, mostly food, ranging from local gourmet beef to bottles of fancy olive oil to ... cans of SPAM (it says For Your Smile above the SPAM logo).

Changing it up a bit

I rearranged my room and did a whole lot of cleaning and organizing over the weekend. One of the reasons I wasn't very happy about the living situation was that I moved into a tiny room that was being used as a storage room, and I never really got to organize it or make it completely my own. So for the new year, I promised myself to do a major make over ;) Since I have a tiny room and a huge bed, there wasn't much I could play with, but the new arrangement makes it much cozier and private. Moving that king size bed was ridiculously painful though, at 2 in the morning. At one point, I was stuck trying to move the bed frame around with the super heavy mattress resting on my back.

While cleaning, I found a lot of old letters from friends and pictures, as well as old papers from 8th grade and on. I also found my AP Art portfolio, which I had been looking for ages!

Now I just have to put up some pictures and posters ... and maybe get new sheets for my bed to complete the make over :-P

A puzzle analogy to my life

I was walking home with Nikki and came up with this brilliant analogy to my current situation -- a more half-way complete Soma Cube.  I've been putting pieces together to build up the cube, i.e. a happy life, but there are a couple of important pieces, i.e. location and boyfriend, that don't fit into what I have accomplished so far.  I want to work it out to fit all the desired pieces and make a perfect cube, which means I have to diassemble the puzzle and start over.  I've been avoiding to make major decisions to move any other pieces and waiting for them to somehow all fit together nicely (or just trying to figure it out in my head), but seems like I'll have to start playing with the cube again if I want a perfect cube.  

Going back to school?

For some time, I've been thinking about the wide range of interests of mine, trying to figure out what would be suitable for my long-term career and what would work better as serious hobbies -- cooking, design, communications, and sustainability.  One thing I know is that I need the following for my job: a continuous flow of learning opportunities and intellectual challenges, interactions with down-to-earth, social and smart people, and lastly, visual, hands-on creativity.  To bring more creativity into my daily job, I considered going to a culinary school but wasn't sure what I'd do with the degree since being a full time chef wasn't the most appealing idea to me.  

While taking a break today, I realized that I could do much more with my passion for cooking and food by combining it with other intersts of mine, e.g. industrial design focusing on the kitchen and its components to make them easier to use and more sustainable.

If I were pursue the goal, I'd need to spend 2-3 years in school ... time to save up $?

Happy New Year!

Having a great vacation in NY and CA! Happy New Year everyone -- it's the year of Ox!