Entries for May, 2005
I had a nice, quiet dinner with family for my 18th birthday. It's strange. I don't feel any different than I did yesterday or last week, but all of a sudden, the United States is saying I'm an adult now. I am legally free from my parents' responsibilities, free to live my life as I please.
Why has society let me loose on the world? It doesn't know me. I could become a burglar, a rapist, a murderer; I could betray my family, my community, my country; I could dramatically change the course of history through my actions, because I know I'm meant to do great things. But what kind of trust, what kind of hope, what kind of gamble is society taking on me? By telling me that I am now an adult fully capable of affecting myself and others around me, they've empowered me with the opportunity to shine my light to the darkest corners of the world.
It's sort of humbling to think that whatever master plan is out there for my life, it's been in the workings for eternity and put into motion eighteen years ago. Jihwan Kim, the adult, solemnly swears to take the responsiblity now bestowed upon him and to show the world what he can truly do.
Written by jihwan at 09:31 PM.
This is a love letter.
We are complete opposites, you and I. If a machine processed a match of compatibility for two people, you and I would be the last ones to be paired up. Our personalities, our likes and dislikes, our dispositions - nothing adds up. But there's something else that fills up that gap, some intangible element that brings us so close together and refuses to let us apart. Over the years we've built upon this element, not acknowledging it for what it really was, and through thick or thin, through periods of emotional and physical distance, and through years of stubborn suppression, we've made it this far.
This phase of our lives is coming to a rapid close, and there's a whole new world opening up. We're not kids anymore; childlike nondirectional wandering is an excuse we can't use any longer. We have to choose what to do with our lives - majors, careers, relationships - and there's no more room for fooling around. The choices and decisions we make now will steer us toward the rest of our lives.
It's interesting how things work out, isn't it? As the years creeped past us, our relationship underwent stages of maturation and growth as we did. What we have isn't simply a hormonal teenage tryst that waxes and wanes with each lunar phase. What we have is different. We had so many opportunities to call it off, to give it up, to let it go; yet after everything we've been through, when the smoke cleared, we were standing side by side, your hand in mine.
I'm not a romantic. I'm not pursuing this because it's the cool thing to do or because I'm trying to assert my maturity. I'm doing this because what we have simply feels right. I couldn't disagree with you more on the literary merits of Nathaniel Hawthorne or the so-called "sophisticated beauties" of chemistry, and we couldn't be further apart on the way we deal with certain problems and behave in certain situations. But all our differences and uneven edges fit together so perfectly into the world's most intricate two-piece jigsaw puzzle. What we have is so comfortable, so perfect, that I can't imagine anything else.
I love the determined, high-strung way you work toward your goals. I love that extra octave in your voice as you vent about your latest spaz episode. I love the sparkle in your eyes as you recite your favorite line from Wuthering Heights or describe the perfect blueberry muffin you had that morning. I love how you chastise me about my study habits and how you support me in whatever I do. I love how distance has done nothing but draw us closer together than we've ever been.
This summer will have been four years for us. I know that I will work my hardest to make this work and for us to be together; I know that it will all be worth it because you'll patiently wait for me, whether it be a couple months or a couple years. People call me naive, idealistic, and hypocritical. They say I'm chasing after nothing but an ungrounded emotion. But they don't know the whole story. They don't feel what I feel. They don't understand how when we're together, some kind of abstract cosmic order re-establishes some sort of divine stability. This relationship might not work out, but I'm willing to try. And I'm finding that all pessimism tends to pass right through me and float out the window when I think of us and how happy we are.
I miss you. I love you.
- Jihwan -
Written by jihwan at 04:35 AM.
In the span of a few months, I've slowly wandered into a phase of my amateur writing career in which inspiration, unlike Chrysler's summer clearout sale, does not come standard. Maybe it's because I have so much to deal with right now. Maybe it's because I have so little to deal with right now. It's just that I'm finding it more and more difficult to tap into that mystical golden well of writing material and draw out content about which I can truly express myself.
Sure, I get little spurts of pure goodness once in a while. For example, yesterday, while I was taking the AP Physics exam I was watching everyone else take their AP Physics exams, I was carefully scrutinizing the simple complexity of my AP Student ID barcode. After about 15 minutes of staring at the array of vertical ink dots, it was like my muse had slapped me in the face with a glorious epiphany of inspiration. I swear I heard the sweet fanfare of an angelic chorale radiating around the cold walls of the windowless testing room. I left school yesterday with what I thought was solid entry material: barcodes. I was going to write about how one little change in one little black bar can radically change what one's purchasing. [Theoretically, of course. I'm not really grounded in reality - just the false, arrogant sense of it.]
I could, for instance, pick up a bottle of shampoo, take it to the cashier, and end up with a full-grown dominant male silverback gorillia in my shopping cart. Paper and plastic, please. But when I got home and began to write about it, the idea that seemed so utterly brilliant just hours ago seemed so incredibly stupid that I punished myself by repeatedly slamming my keyboard into my face. I lost a lot of keys. Or teeth. Same difference. Now the rght sde f y eybard snt wrkng and face hrts.
Someone inspire me. I want to write again.
EDIT: Inspiring me does NOT mean annoying me. Which, by the way, isn't working. How you people made the connection from inspiring to annoying is beyond me, but try to be more original, won't you?
Written by jihwan at 10:10 PM.