Sabbath

So today was my second Sabbath of the semester, and I am still doing the very basic- no homework. Next week, I am going to add that it starts Saturday at 7, ends Sunday at 7, and that my room should be clean by the time it starts on Saturday. I am also going to start working on a Sabbath prayer, (something like a kiddush) so I can talk to God about and remind me of all the reasons I celebrate Sabbath in the first place.

Eww

Right now I am at my desk in my room reading my 1800 page nursing text book with only the desk light on because Joanna is trying to pretend thats it isn't 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and is still sleeping. I've decided not to let that bother me. I can do basically anything I want to while she is sleeping, just as long as I do it kind of quietly.

Nursing is an interesting profession but think I am pretty intimidated by the responsibility of it all. I also just realized this morning that I am probably going to be seeing a lot more adult male genitalia before my wedding night, seeing as one of the things coming up in the syllabus is inserting catheters, giving bed baths, and other naked intensive procedures. I'm going to say it here cause I'll get in trouble if I say it in a hospital setting, but eww. Gross, gross, groddy, gross, eww.

I'm glad I got that out of my system.

My week days are a little busy, but Ill try updating on weekends.

Comfort and Chinese

So I am back in the comfort of my home in Troy. And maybe we (my family and I) are too comfortable with each other. I say that because I just got back from the kitchen where one of my brothers was wearing just his tighty whities and a tee-shirt. Maybe its because the only two times I have seen adult male genitalia have been relatively traumatic (once was my brother in a freak pantsing accident, the other was a guy publicly pleasuring himself on the train from Seoul to Anyang) but I would rather my little brothers not be so casual parading their junk around the house.

In my last blog I said I was going to start learning Chinese characters, and right now I probably know a little over 100 (their English meaning, and Korean pronunciation.) Its pretty exhilarating. Sometimes I feel like Lyra reading the Alithiometer in the His Dark Materials series. While some combinations are ingenious; the word "eye under" means now, at present. The character which doubles the character for fire one over the other, "yawm" means flame, bright, brilliant, inflamation, or ...itis. Others however are a little harder to understand, and then I feel like Lyra going through the levels of different meaning in each component of the character to put together a comprehensive meaning. For example, the character for tree combined with the characters for eye and heart is "sang" which means, to think or expect. Combine rain with tree and eye and you get frost (also pronounced sang). I know sometimes characters will have one component to denote pronunciation with another to suggest meaning but neither rain, heart, tree, or eye make are pronounced "sang" which would mean they are all there for meaning, in which case I a little lost. Maybe tree eye makes sang, and I've just forgotten. Any way, I love it. I wonder how hard it would be to learn to speak Chinese if I could already read it? I'm glad my roommate this year is freaking awesome in Chinese (three dialects no less) cause I think I need some help with my calligraphy.

KgtK 13 (the last one): In the gray.

So tonight is my last night in Korea, but I'm going to blog about something I put on a list things to blog about.

So I think I'm not thinking so much in Black and Whites anymore.

Example: My class was together for four hours every day for five weeks and we got to know each other pretty well, and in my case, they saw how hard I studied and how anal I was about attendance and homework. Right before we took exams, our teacher was going over the grading system and the standard is that there are five tests and if you fail one of them you fail all of them. Which sucks for me, because despite my best efforts, I failed both of our practice listening tests. So when I asked our teacher about it, she just looked sorry and said there wasn't anything she could do about it, but my class jumped into action. "Katy, just sit next to me, and I'll make sure you get enough right to pass."

So I immediately said what I always say in situations like these. "Oh, I don't cheat." And its true. But as soon as I said it I felt like a jerk. Were my classmates trying to lie? steal? kill? do anything to harm anyone? No. On the contrary, they saw someone who was working hard but lacked the background in Korean needed to pass an especially challenging listening test, and in a spirit of comradely offered to help me out. Even if I wouldn't cheat, replying with "Oh, I don't cheat." pretentiously taking the moral high ground when all they were trying to do is help is so jerky of me.

I think I have used Christianity as an excuses to say in the Conventional State of Kohlberg's stages of moral development, when really, being in a relationship with Christ, knowing Christ and his teachings, should give me the ability venture into Post Conventional ethics with out going off the handle or using the un-conventionality as an excuse to do things that are wrong.

For example, if I could go back I still wouldn't cheat, but I also would have thanked my classmates for their offer instead of not so subtly judging them for it.

(As an update, I didn't cheat, and I did fail. I actually failed worse on it then on the practices. (36%) On the other hand, I got the second highest score in my class on the writing section. Go figure.)

I think I wrote this tonight cause Flo's comment on my last blog about quite times. To be honest, I probably have had four or five traditional quite times my whole time in Korea. This would usually haunt me. But my spontaneous prayer has been going good, and I've been at such peace with G-d these last couple of weeks (which is a big change from my usually feeling of sourceless (or innumerably sourced) guilt.) So, I don't know what that is about, but I like it. I guess I need to learn to live a little more in the gray.

I go to Costa Rica tomorrow. I'm psyched to see the Bedenkops, but worried about the impending sporean I'm about to start speaking.

Also, heads up to my Chinese friends. I'm about to learn to read Chinese. (I bought a two books on Hanja today.) Not like that will mean much. Just thought you should know.