There are a lot of different reasons for wanting to have a boyfriend besides wanting to marry one. There are the dates of course. Exciting places are so much more exciting when shared with an enthusiastic male person. You can go ice skating, watching movies, fishing, dinner and it all is more new and interesting when seen through their eyes.

However, you have to pick the right one, otherwise there will be more than one young man trying to enjoy you in your flashy new dress.



...on the one end,



...on the other, and then, if you're lucky...

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"You didn't have therapy dogs?" I asked exasperatedly. This kept on happening. I always knew that my school was a little different from everyone else's, but in Korea, it just seemed like everything I said, even to Americans, was strange and unusual.

For instance, while many people might have had friend going to piano or guitar lessons; something as common as Jewish lessons from where I was from, is relatively unheard of elsewhere.

Apparently, other schools did not have advanced placement programs, a good ESL program, therapy dogs, drug dogs, (but of course parental permission slips for dissections), and pretty much every club that is national.

Other schools were not held up during choir while students argued with the teacher for a half an hour about why they should not have to sing classic christian hymns. At other schools, people were not given 'tolerance' lectures before anyone with a headscarf joined their class. At other schools, it is supposed to be MORE normal to actually be Christian than gay.

At other schools, you are not expect to know that it is: drug awareness week, holocaust awareness week, suicide awareness week, black history month (February) or women's history month (March).

In other schools, people are not finding the cure for cancer, AIDS and other illnesses. People are not programming their own games onto their calculators. People are not programming viruses and spreading them to the entire school. People are not taking college level art courses. People do not have their own studios. People do not have enough money to go to all the national music conferences. People are actually allowed to sing in the top choirs, even if they do not have perfect pitch. Apparently, in other schools, a 3.5 is actually a reasonably good score. 5.0s are impossible.

Despite the fact that I had so little control over it, this experience colors most of how I think about and understand the world. What about you? What makes your reality unusual?

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I want to go home
but where is it?
Is home my four walls
Is home my floors
Is home my windows and my doors
Is home a scent that blows through the house
That lingers in your fingers and won't come out

Is home the steps
Is home the porch
Is home the hearth, worn and scorched
Is home the warmth that breeds in your heart
And tells you when you've been ripped apart?

Is home the rooms
Is home the halls
Or is home where I hear another foot fall
Is it where that baby first crawled
And I bawled over a lost and forgotten home?

Is home a family safe and warm
Going back to be born
Feeling loved, not torn
My home, my home, my home.

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Living in Korea, I have had a lot of time to think about this, but it was only today, when I heard about that new book by the Chinese woman, that I decided I might as well put my thoughts down and see what they look like.



In Korea, there are all kinds of mothers, but they do have one thing in common: they want their children to excel. Some mothers are better at it than others. Some of them give their children nervous ticks, some of them yell at their child's teachers and hope they will do it for them, some parents end up with really smart inquisitive children, but the standard is there.

This is what I have determined after watching all of these parents. It's not how hard or how little you ride a kid, it's about the standard you set and how well you teach them to reach those standards.

There is no question that negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement and punishment, used alone or in combination, teach people lessons. So, that fact that a lot of ways of rearing a child are effective should not be alarming to us. Nor should it be alarming that if you spend many hours on a limited number of tasks you will excel at those limited number of tasks. This is where we run into trouble: what limited number of tasks are you going to chose?

While I appreciate math, I think science is pretty cool, and the violin seems like it could be kind of fun if you learned how to play it, but those aren't the top list items for:

What I would like to teach my children

1.) Love and compassion for their fellow men. I imagine that when I grow up, I am going to have a pretty small house, but one thing I will not compromise on is having a good guest room with its own laundry facilities and bathroom. I also want to have it filled with some kind of guest as much as possible. It just seems right to build my house around the thing that is most important to me: being welcoming.

2.) Knowing how to be happy wherever you are. If you love people, you will always have the opportunity to be happy. If you learn to block out all those things that don't really matter, then nothing can stop you.

3.) Commitment. Probably one of the hardest one of my list so far is commitment. Mostly because I feel, being so unsure as to what I want for myself, I haven't made any long term commitments in a long time. But I know I can teach them to show up when they say they will and that trait alone will take you a long way.

4.) Work Ethic. If you don't try your best, then it isn't worth doing. I think this is one of those lessons you have to relearn your whole life: what is my best? After that, it is just a matter of applying it to whatever you do.

5.) Honesty. Mean what you say and say what you mean. Honesty has always been so important to me and I think that this quality is most responsible for who I am and how people view me. After all, how can people ever trust you, if they don't know when you're telling the truth?

I could at more, but at the risk of being verbose (too late), I won't. These five things (love being the greatest of all) those are the things that I would have them skip sleepovers for. Those are the things that I would have them work through dinner for. Why? Because they actually matter.

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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So, I was reading this really bad article about the shootings in Arizona. You know the kind: "We totally saw this coming because this guy was a nut job," except that the only things they have to support these claims are that "he was a little weird sometimes"?

I think people write these articles because they want to make themselves feel better. They want to think "Oh, that could never be me, because I'm not crazy," not realizing that all of them are a little crazy. Is there an answer for why every hobby conspiracy theorist or backyard political activist is not hunting down congressmen? Well, no, of course not. I personally like to chalk it up to society telling us what it expects and, while it isn't foolproof, those expectations help the majority of us dismiss weird thoughts and weird thoughts and understand on some level that they will never be acted upon.

Even still, it did make me reconsider my stance on guns. It goes like this. It is very silly for someone to buy something that they have no intention of using. For instance, I think most of us would regret buying a banana holder, especially if we do not even eat bananas. If I bought a gun, I would expect to use it to defend myself. Right now, do I have anything to defend myself against? Not really, at least not one that I am anticipating. However, if I did have a gun and if it were 'me or the other guy', would I shoot the other guy? Even though I love being alive and I love everything that life gives me, I would have to say, I hope I wouldn't shoot him. If it were him or me, I wouldn't want to be the one living with the guilt of having killed another human being, no matter how insignificant that life might seem.

So, while I am not exactly for taking away other people's guns, I think I have decided, once and for all, that I will never own one.

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