What can I say except that chaos suits me?

Every time I make concrete future plans, my life falls to pieces and I start again from scratch. Sometimes it's my fault, sometimes it's not, and often it's a combination of the two. If you've read from the beginning, you were there for the first to disintegrations of my adult life. I'll give a brief rundown and move onto the third. Like Edith Pilaf, I regret nothing.

Intransigent Transience in California

I've recently begun the process of opening a home bakery. I've been baking my whole life, and recently quite a few people have asked me to bake for their occasions. I filled two paid orders, and the state of California requires that I do all the paperwork to fulfill a third. The environmental health department requires labels for every product I'll sell, but it's a fully custom bakery so I don't know what I will sell. That means I have to cover all the bases, and that's a mind-boggling number of permutations.

Californians are the first to jump on "health" food trends: juice cleanses (do more harm than good), superfoods (not really that super), organic (misnomer and misguided), etc. The ones that affect my bakery are gluten-free (very few people actually have gluten sensitivity), milk-free (legit; sources vary but ~75% of the world population and 25% of the US population lose the ability to digest lactose after weaning), and egg-free (religious, moral, or sometimes health-related). This is making my life very difficult at the moment.

America's Fracturing Political Parties and Terrifying Election

I'm a real estate agent in Silicon Valley now, and as such, I have to keep politics off my Facebook page to avoid offending anyone. Because this blog isn't the first thing I want popping up when people Google me, I've distanced my actual online presence from this. Therefore, I can talk about politics here.

 First of all, I'd like to take a moment to apologize to the rest of the world for Donald Trump. I'm so sorry. He really doesn't represent the American people; at least, not all of us. Obviously, he's doing surprisingly well, so he does represent a large number of people. That scares the hell out of me. My firm opinion in this election is best summed up by a picture of a campaign sign that says, "IDK Just Not Trump".

Toastmasters Contest Speech: "Chasing Failure"

Recently, I won my club speech contest and competed at the Area contest level, which is a first for me. Another first for me was that I managed to make this speech without using notes. Although I didn't win the Area contest, I did get a lot of compliments and gained confidence to continue entering contests. Here is the speech I made for the annual International Speech Contest:

Chasing Failure

Happy Ending

I am not an ESL teacher this year. I quit my last ESL teaching job (hopefully) ever in December. This year, I am starting by getting married. As you have come to expect from me, my wedding will not be a normal one. The ceremony itself will be in my fiance's hometown in India at the end of this month. We leave from the San Francisco Airport next Friday. After we get back, we will have a reception here in California for friends and family who can't or won't make the trip to India. After the reception, I am going into real estate. There is a man in my Toastmasters club who is a real estate broker, and he is excited to get me set up with his firm. I just need to take three classes and a test. Unless I'm the worst real estate agent ever, I will never have to teach English again!

Marriage of Different Cultures

Toastmasters CC Manual Speech #6 Vocal Variety - December 19, 2014

Marriage of Different Cultures

In less than two months, I will marry my Indian fiance. Many people, including my mother, have warned me that it's more difficult to marry someone from another culture than from your own. But every marriage is a marriage of different cultures.

The Evolution of Incubus, Brandon Boyd, and Me

When I was in high school and college, my favorite band was Incubus, hands down. I have never stopped liking them, but as life happened and I paid even less attention to media than the little I'd paid before, I just kept listening to the albums I already had. Not that it's not much. I have everything from Fungus Amongus and Enjoy Incubus to Light Grenades. Today I realized they made another album in 2011, and Brandon Boyd made a solo album. I immediately looked them up on YouTube and they are awesome. Of course they're awesome. Some bands sound the same album after album after album. For example, Maroon 5 is great, but within 10 seconds of listening to one of their songs you know it's them. The musicality is the same, even the lyrics are the same things said with different words. But Incubus (and now Brandon Boyd on his own, too... next thing to Google is his new band?) is a sound constantly in flux with an underlying personality that ties everything together. Every song resonates with my heartbeat and respiration in a different way.

Forging New Paths

It is becoming increasingly clear that despite my fleeting ambitions otherwise, I am most likely going to end up teaching ESL for the rest of my life. It's been my safety net, my fallback plan, often my main career, for the past 6 years. I'm good at it and I enjoy bonding with students and watching them improve. That look that plays across a person's face when understanding dawns is priceless, especially when the thing being understood is useful in daily life or more complex than the person expected to be able to understand. Many ESL teachers treat their adult students like children, which often doesn't go over well. I aim to learn as much from them as they learn from me, and I show them the respect they deserve for working hard to learn another language. I could build many good relationships and be content as an ESL teacher. I guess that's all I can ask for in life.

How Salsa Saved Me (and helped me ruin my life)

I wasn't going to post this because I've done my best to keep this blog rated PG and keep the exploits I'm ashamed of off. But, as I was reading over it and fixing things here and there I realized how important salsa was in my life in Korea and how it's become an integral part of my life. My friend, Kiki in this story (all names are aliases), asked me to write about the impact dancing has had on my life. She said it could be any length, and as I'm very wordy, it ended up being 10 pages in MS Word. To my regular readers, some of this may be repetitive, but I guarantee there are some things I never told you. Enough of my introduction. Here is the story of how salsa saved me (and helped me ruin my life). Nothing is embellished or fictional.

Fragments

Shattered
Fragments scattered across the world
My sanity littered around the universe
Multiverse
Confused verses
Uttered curses
In tongues
Screaming in my brain
To drown out the thunderous shame
At the memory of what could have been
And what I chose instead
The fighting in my head
My life in tatters
Glaring daggers
At the mirror
The future's looming nearer
I am unarmed and ill-prepared
I don't dare try again what I dared
Luck was on my side
But now I hide
No confidence in my stride
No definition in my character
A smiling caricature
Ready to burst

Insomnia and Fogged Windows

I am not neglecting this blog because I'm busy or forgot about it. I merely have nothing to write. The days are blurring together. I have no idea what to do with my life or how to do it. I don't know where to start. I feel useless and small, unimportant and afraid. I am a child in an adult's body. The day after my 21st birthday, I was on a plane to the other side of the world to start a new life. The day after my 25th birthday, I felt like I was still 21 and that my time in Korea was a dream.

Settling In

I am no longer miserable. I no longer despise living in my own country. I can't believe I'm saying this after how vehemently opposed I was to returning from Korea, but I am happy to be home.

The moment I realized this was yesterday when my roommate in Korea sent me a message saying she found a job that could give me a visa, and it wasn't English teaching. That's exactly what I wanted, what I had been waiting and hoping for. But when I saw the message, my heart dropped.

Spreading Myself Thin

I've been looking for a job unsuccessfully in San Jose since I got back from Korea in mid-December, so I widened my search to include the whole San Francisco Bay area.

But in the meantime, a friend from Korea asked me to go to Dubai, and I've wanted to try living there since I worked at Samsung C&T (which was the main contractor on the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world). So I'm also looking for a job in Dubai. Turns out I have more connections in the UAE than in the US. Funny how life works.

And, of course, I'm still trying to get back to Korea doing anything but teaching English. I really miss Seoul and all my friends there, and I miss the culture and food and everything but the weather, really.

I realized through all of this that I don't like living in my home country.

Where to Work?

San Jose is a global city. It feels small but don't be fooled- there are brilliant people from all over the world gathered here in Silicon Valley. And there are a lot of job seekers and not enough jobs for all of us. Happy New Year everyone, from an unemployed, soon to be homeless, Kristin.

But don't worry! I will get back on my feet! Speaking of feet, I was walking to a mall that's about a 40 minute walk from my current place the other day and I smelled something familiar. The stench of rotting ginko under my feet brought me back to the streets of Seoul in the fall and early winter. I never thought I'd close my eyes and take that in as a pleasant fragrance, but I did. I stopped in my tracks on the sidewalk and sucked the stench into my nostrils and was transported to my walk to the subway station from my studio apartment in Gangnam (Yeoksam). I remembered the crowded subway line number 2 and the station two stops away (Samseong) where I worked in Trade Tower above COEX mall. I remembered how in the summer my life was right on track: a great boyfriend, a great apartment, a great job, great friends, walking distance to great salsa clubs.... What happened? Life happened.

Reverse Culture Shock and Reminiscences

Now that I've been back in the US for a few weeks, there are some things I've noticed about myself, about my country, and about Korea that I had taken for granted. It still aches to think about what I've left behind and I still feel my future is a black hole. It's like my ribs are made of rubber and every time I breathe my lungs and heart bend them backwards to try to escape from my body. I scream with no sound alone in my room and sob myself to sleep silently. I am homesick for a country that was never mine and a family with which I share no blood. But it's not all bad. I'm breaking the barrier between the present and the future with baby steps, and eventually I'll get my training wheels off and ride forward on my own again.

Name Change: No More Kristin's Korean Life

Yes folks, that's right. I've made it back to the US. I'm now in Silicon Valley, which is like a country of it's own.

I have already passed the written driver's test with flying colors and failed the behind-the-wheel test with a jerk of a tester, and I've found the bus stop that takes me to downtown San Jose, where I might get a job.

I have discovered the ups and downs of house sharing. I live with my brother, his girlfriend, a gay guy, and two straight guys. There's an Austrian girl coming in January so I'll either be kicked out or I'll be her roommate.

I have made a bank account with Bank of America and am scared of their overdraft fees.

I have a funny accent.

Welcome home, me. Welcome home.

I wish I were still in Korea.

The Future is a Black Hole Full of Promise

Will the job searching never end??
First I was job searching in Korea from January to March, then again from August to November, and now I've been job searching online for jobs in the South Bay area for about a month. I'm right where I started- nowhere!

The future is a black hole waiting to swallow me up and the next step I take will define what's on the other side. I hope it's not angry aliens. Ha!

Shameless Advertising

Dear readers,

I will move out of my apartment at the end of this month, and I still have a lot to get rid of. If you're in Seoul, this is a unique opportunity to meet me by buying my stuff. Just go to this website and see if there's anything you want. If there is, follow the directions on the home page to email me.

Thanks in advance for your financial contributions (I'm broke) and your help in lifting my material burdens so I can leave with less stress!

Kristin

Choices and Failure

Preparing to go home is a lot of work.

I can't seem to find a new tenant for my apartment, and I'm having trouble selling my stuff (although I came up with an online auction idea and asked my friends to bid for items).

My plane ticket is for December 8th and I will leave my place probably on the last day of November to stay with a friend for a week. I will work until December 5th.

But the hardest part of preparing to go back is preparing emotionally.

Korean Everydayness: Dental Hygiene

I can't believe I haven't written about this yet. Koreans and their love affair with toothbrushes: it's one of the strangest things about living here. That's not to say their teeth are any better-looking than Americans' on average, because they're about the same. It's just that Koreans spend so much TIME brushing their teeth... loudly. And in public. Often.