Crossing off the Bucket Lists

Poor Kyo

2016 is the year of the Red Fire Monkey. I can tell because every where I go, every store I go to, is covered in monkey toys, monkey merchandise, monkey posters...Starbucks, where I'm currently sitting, has some hella cute mugs for sale all covered in the same little red monkey, smiling and looking cute. Before I came to this half of the world, "Lunar New Year" was a thing that existed on chinese food placemats and set up manga that fifteen year old me was absolutely obsessed with. Now it's become one of the only two vacation holidays I get with my job, and is a Really Big Deal.

A Long Time Coming

Every morning I wake up and say, "Today's Sam, you need to write a blog post today."

I always scrunch my eyes up and curse and continue, "you spent last year taking two trips to Japan, you're almost done with your second draft, you've developed a horrendous tea habit and even learned to drink it plain, what gives? You've had a real Christmas and even had a friend come visit you - look at how much you have to write about!"

Every night I go to bed and say, "God damn it. Tomorrow, then. Maybe tomorrow's Sam will be better."

And she never is.

A Tale of Two MOBIs Part 2: The Worst of Times

Ancient philosophies believed that in nature, it was impossible to create without also destroying.

Yin and  yang bring an eternal harmony. Dropping a stone in to a calm pool sends ripples radiating outwards, the water forming itself into a natural balance of ridged high points and low points, all in order to maintain balance. Other ancient philosophies agree with this. As one ancient philosopher so eloquently puts it, "You take the good...you take the bad...you take them both, and there you have...the facts of life."

We cannot create without destroying, and we cannot destroy without creating, much as a grassland fire leaves green sprouts in its wake. For every up, there is a down. For every right, there is a wrong.

And for every amazing book, there is...one of these.

Let me introduce to you what is one of, if not maybe the actual, worst book I have ever read.

Elfin, by Quinn Loftis.

A Tale of Two MOBIs Part 1: The Best of Times

To Begin

I didn't start this blog with the intention of reviewing books. I have a post getting ready to be vetted and published talking about some of the things I discovered last year doing my Goodreads book challenge, but this has to take precedence. Being a writer with a fragile ego, I didn't even want to talk about other people's writing. Karmic retribution and all that. But the past two weeks have been interesting. In a powerful one-two punch, I found myself reading one of the absolute best books I've ever read...and then one of the absolute worst.

So to start with, here's the book that's changed my life.

Uprooted, by Naomi Novik

I Feel Like I Fumbled a Prenatal Roll for Confidence

It's been a long time, yeah?

The past year and a half (yeesh) has been this weird, motivating-one-week and demoralizing-the-next week time of my life. I've been trying to get back into just about everything in my life, and yet this one part has been eluding me. I want to try and make a post a week for now, I think, though I feel like I've made that promise to myself ad nauseum for half a year.

Things I am:

• still in Korea
• still writing

Watch This Space

I swear I'll be back soon...incoming shop talk, NaNo talk, and a post fifteen years in the making...

I'm Bad at Titles for Important Posts.

I haven't really had the heart to post. I wasn't really sure how to pick everything back up after my last post, you know? "Hey guys, my dog died" felt kind of lame and a strange explanation for my absence. I accidentally stumbled across that silly Rainbow Bridge poem on Saturday and found myself bawling for a half hour while trying to put makeup on, that was an adventure in and of itself.

But I promise you, I am happy.

I guess in several regards, my life is wonderful. I have a stable job, cheap rent, a short commute. I live on my own working one job when most of my friends from home are working three or four to live in a city and have the kind of life I'm having. (I actually uttered "I can't handle partying this weekend" a few hours ago). I'm sharing this whole experience with amazing people and an even more amazing significant other.

When I travel, the world looks like this and I still put my book down in my lap to stare out the window like an idiot because even though I've passed by the same mountains and farmlands and rice paddies and sky a hundred times before it still wows me, it still makes me want to pick up a notebook and write something, anything, because that's what people like us do when we see nice things, I think.

I have been uncertain the past couple weeks, and the uncertainty led to silence, because I didn't want to admit that I felt like I had nowhere to go in my life. When you have a thousand different paths you want to take, you really have none. My contract here is for a year, and it is up in November. I wanted to go to grad school, I wanted to live some type of Bohemian cafe life. I wanted to see the world, I wanted to go to brunch in New Paltz. I want to be home for Christmas, I want to stand on the edge of the dateline for New Years. I wanted to work in editing, I wanted to work in publishing, I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to be eighteen again and redoing everything that went wrong because to be this uncertain has to mean I made a mistake, somewhere. I wonder what it was.

 I don't know if I'm making the right decision, and maybe I'm not really making a decision at all. Maybe what I'm doing is the complete opposite of making a decision and it's really just procrastinating the inevitable. Or maybe I'm learning that not everything has to be settled at once. Maybe one day I'll shake the feeling that I have to have an itinerary for every night out, every vacation, every year of my life.

Yesterday I re-signed my contract.

See you guys in 2015.