A Story

"One day I was feeling really down, and approached my mother. She listened to my problems, then brought me to the kitchen and boiled a pot of water. She took out a carrot, and put it into the boiling water. She pointed out that the carrot turned soft. Then she took out an egg, and again put that into the water. The egg, my mother then observed, turned hard. Finally, she took out a coffee bean, and immersed that into the water and immediately, the water turned brown. My mother said, "You see, child, in life you have three choices. You can turn soft from your surroundings like a carrot, you can turn hard like an egg, or you can change your environment like a coffee bean. It's up to you what to choose, but in life you should always strive to be a coffee bean.”

time to release my thoughts

lsat in two days. today is pretty much the last day to study. since all i've absorbed now is in my head. i just pray to God that i will do superbly on that test saturday. completely no anxiety whatsoever. nothing. nada. and own that test like no other. if God so help me, he'll make all things possible. either way, i'm through with studying these past five months. really. an entire semester of studying to take my final exam. yikes. okay okay, too big, too big. don't think like that quite yet. hahaha

dude. i was looking back at old pictures of myself from korea 2007 and i was helllllaaa fat. okay not obese but i remember after coming back from korea that i gained a lot of pounds. i mean of course right? it's korea. good food, good company. cheap food. but i didn't think i was too bad. no. gaaahh.. seriously after college i lost almost 10 pounds. TEN POUNDS. SERIOUSLY. i haven't been this thin since the end of high school/beginning of college. ddaang. just shows you how bad late night eating was in college. AND i think the plus of having home cooked korean food with lots of vegetables is an added bonus. mmmm yummy yache banchan. deeeelish~


what am i doing?!?! i need to focus and concentrate on the most important test of my life!! okay not really but pretty much right now it is. don't think negatively. think positively. abraham lincoln failed miserably for years before he became one of the most renown and influential presidents of america. if he can do that, i can certainly too. sigh... i think it's cuz i haven't had much contact with the outside world. really. no la friends this past month, just some church buddies. i want to get into an amazing law school. will my life be complete from there? no. but it'll be a lot easier i hope.

i miss my friends. all of you. even tho clara's prolly the only one who knows of my blog and reads it (hi clara! haha). but i like the privacy of this supposedly clandestine blog. it's on my xanga but who goes on xanga anymore? unless you write something, your blog will stay at the bottom of the list. so alll's gravy =)

can't wait for christmas. i want to go to a holiday party. i already bought a dress. hahah it's cute. i actually have two tho. we'll see what happens. already starting to plan what to do after my test. hahah it's been a long way coming. ahhhh~

the roof is on fire

not literally, thank the Lord. but this has got to be the biggest fire that Yorba Linda has ever experienced. lots of homes went up in flames these past two days. it's insane. i've never seen anything like it. when i got a call at 1:30PM, i was taking a practice lsat. i also got a text saying if i was okay but i didn't know what was up. after hearing the voicemail, i realized that there was a huuge fire that was visible from my house. the fire was still smoking but we were still safe. safe enough to mow the lawn apparently. but then the cop came and told us to pack up our things and evacuate. we did just in case. then at around 3:30-4PM, we see a fire coming down our hill. okay, now it was serious. so we packed up our things, got into all four of our cars and boned out of there. the scariest thing was that in just 5 minutes, the fire that was just at the top of the hill ended up up halfway down the hill. SO SCARY. so my cousin and i boned out to our dad's workplace. we ended up staying the night over at a jipsanim's place in huntington beach. it was so surreal. i didn't know how to feel. i felt at peace though. i would be fine if our house burned down of even if it didn't. i guess that's peace is definitely a good thing. for some reason, i knew that our house wouldn't burn down. give it up to God for sure. i know in the house right above us, there was a man who just refused to evacuate. so his wife and children left him while he just stayed with his house/belongings. i mean come on, materialistic things only last for a short time. your life is more important than that.

the funny thing is what i decided to take for the evacuation. here's the list.
-two button up collared shirts. i was gonna take a dress i bought from forever because it was pretty and i never wore it but i didn't. but if you think about it, how unpractical would that be? hahahah ridiculous.
-bible
-purse
-passport
-cell phone charger
-broken laptop
-makeup. hahah
-jacket
-panties
-baby pictures
-lsat books.

HAHAHHAHAH whenever i tell people that i brought my lsat book, they laugh. hahah maan but seriously thinking, i totally didn't take everything i wanted. but i realized that i could live without those stuff too. i mean part of me loves starting brand new and having a new house would've been nice. but in hindsight, if our house did burn down, it would have been so stressful for us. i mean sleeping over at our church friend's place was hard and cold. i don't think i could do that for a couple of months. hopefully i don't die of lung cancer up here breathing in all the smoke. ugh.

oh and you can really tell who your good friends are during tough times. they're the ones you call/text/leave messages. they're the ones who care. thanks to everyone who prayed for us. it means so much to me. i love you guys!

I HATE YOU PEOPLE

I hate people who cut their contracted time short. If you're supposed to be contracted to teach from 5:30PM until 10PM, you better be there the entire four and a half hours. If I have any questions during break, you better be physically present not off buying your tall mocha latte from Starbucks around the corner. No. You work for your 4.5 hours and all of them. I just HATE people who cut the corners, cheat, bend the rules. God will deal with you guys later.

I hate people who think they're "oh so much better" than you. Oh look, it looks like I asked a hard problem. Instead of trying to figure it out, don't pull all this "well, it's commonsense..." UHHHHHHH.. OBVIOUSLY, it isn't common sense if I didn't get it. Seriously, can't you put down your egotistical head and admit that you may not know instead of putting down others and comment on how "stupid" they must be for not understanding your "commonsense" answer. Whatever, God will deal with you too.

-_-;; Look at what the LSATs do to me!!!!!!!!!! GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH I cannot wait until Dec 6. CANNOT WAIT.

what a girl

Okay, so since my last post, I've been doing a lot better. My days are so up and down sometimes because of this LSAT. When I score well, I'm soo happy and elated! But when I score badly, you definitely want to be as far away from me as possible. It makes me feel like a weak little girl who changes her mood based on the slightest notions. Like if there was a boy I had a crush on and he said hi to me one day in high school, I'd be SO HAPPY. But if he didn't I'd be all sad/mad. Okay, bad analogy but you know what I mean. I just need to study my butt off.

And speaking about boys and girls and crushes, I fINALLLY started Twilight from the beginning. And for some reason it's not that exciting. Maybe because I read New Moon before reading Twilight, the first book of the four book series, but for some reason I felt Bella's freakish love interest to be a little.. dramatic. Okay no, extremely dramatic. I mean, COME ON. Yeah, he's a vampire, yeah you guys are attracted because of some strange blood/love connection but to lose all your friends for the sake of this one guy, who btw seems a little too perfect. I don't know. Maybe if I read the books all at once without waiting like three months inbetween it might have been better. Back then, I couldn't, wouldn't let myself stop reading. But now after a few hours, I can simply stop reading and do other things.

Anyways...October is almost up! Can you believe it! Time's a running out. Soon it's going to be Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, then New Year's! WOWzers. Then the end of our graduating year. ::tear tear:: :*( Anyhoo, time to get back to work.

sigh..

i don't want to write in all caps and with correct grammar anymo. so i won't. so all i do is study study study. really. that is it. and it can get pretty boring at times since all i do is sit in front of my desk and do problems. which i guess isn't that bad since i have a roof over my head, a full stomach (like all the time since i'm not burning anything off), and two lovely parents + a grandma. but regardless, i have to look at the future. but every time i look towards the future, i get hella scared and worried about not getting into a good enough law school. but then i can't help but go on facebook and see all the friends i know going off to prestigious law schools, medical schools, pharmacy schools, etc. i think and i'm like, i'm not dumb. i can do it. if my friends who went to the same school as i did can do it, then i can do it just the same! not that i'm should compare but i guess that it doesn't really matter what law school i get into if i really want to be a lawyer. i mean it makes a difference initially but 40 years later, who's going to ask you what college or graduate school you went to? it doesn't really matter in the long run. but i still want to go to a good school regardless. it's for my own self-confidence and worth. i can do it. even if i don't get in this year, i can get in next year or the year after that. i think i need to start working in order to realize how lucky and blessed i am right now. hopefully after that, it'll get my thinking straight.

Joy or Cynicism?

Stupid blogspot thought my blogger was spam so they blocked access to it for a little bit. Idiots. Yeah, read that suckers. Freedom of speech buddies. This is my blog and that's that. =P

Anyways, I wanted to start off my first post with an excerpt from the book, The Return of the Prodigal Song by Henri Nouwen. It was a book that talks about the prodigal son in the bible via the famous painting done by Rembrandt. (Remember FICB Winter Retreat 2008? Yeah, it's from that) Anyways, I really liked this section amidst a number of sections in the book. So I'm just going to type it just as it's written because his words are enough. Presenting Henri Nouwen...

"For me it is amazing to experience daily the radical difference between cynicism and joy. Cynics seek darkness wherever they go. They point always to approaching dangers, impure motives, and hidden schemes. They call trust naive, care romantic, and forgiveness sentimental. They sneer at enthusiasm, ridicule spiritual fervor, and despise charismatic behavior. They consider themselves realists who see reality for what it truly is and who are not deceived by 'escapist emotions.' But in belittling God's joy, their darkness only calls forth more darkness.

"People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that sines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness. They point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God. They discover that there are people who heal each other's wounds, forgive each other's offenses, share their possessions, foster the spirit of community, celebrate the gifts they have received, and live in constant anticipation of the full manifestation of God's glory.

"Every moment of the each day I have the chance to choose between cynicism and joy. Every thought I have can be cynical or joyful. Every word I speak can be cynical or joyful. Every action can be cynical or joyful. Increasingly I am aware of all these possible choices, an increasingly I discover that every choice for joy in turn reveals more joy and offers more reason to make life a true celebration in the house of the Father.

"Jesus lived in this joy of the Father's house to the full. In him we can see his Father's joy. 'Everything the Father has is mine,' he says, including God's boundless joy. That divine joy does not obliterate the divine sorrow. IN our world, joy and sorrow exclude each other. Here below, joy means the absence of sorrow and sorrow the absence of joy. But such distinctions do not exist in God. Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy. We catch a glimpse of this when we realize that the midst of his greatest suffering Jesus is never separated from his Father. His union with God is never broken even when he 'feels' abandoned by God. The joy of the God belongs to his sonship, and this joy of Jesus and his Father is offered to me. Jesus wants me to have the same joy he enjoys: 'I have loved you, just as my Father has loved me. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this, so that my own joy may be in you an your joy be complete."

WOW. that was a long one to write. But if you didn't read though it all, it's just my conviction that I am going to view each and every day, opportunity with joy in my heart. We have a choice: to live in darkness or to live in joy. I have decided to live in joy. Hope you do too.