Highlights of my Day... Wednesday, October 22

1. My nursing students, God bless their beautiful souls for trying so hard with their English midterm!!! I arrived at the medical building today and all around me I was surrounded by nursing students prepping each other for their speaking exam. They cluttered in the halls, sat in the stair wells, and quizzed each other in the bathroom… I felt so proud.

2. Nervous students always hit a weak spot with me. They remind me of how I was as a student, back in the day. I was quite competitive, to say the least, and so I love seeing students all worked up for my exams and quizzes. While some students expressed their stress by biting their nails, others paced back and forth in the halls, fiddled with their pens, read and re-read their exam conversation, and whatnot. I know they’re stressed but I take that as a very, very positive sign. After all, if they didn’t care about my exam they wouldn’t be so stressed. Sometimes stress IS good.

3. I have to laugh at myself for assigning a partner exam when I think back of having to do partner assignments in school. I use to curse the teacher under my breath every time they announced another partner assignment. I was always stuck with the slacker partner cause, for the most part, my peers knew of my good grades. I learned the hard way to stop boasting about my good grades when I was assigned a partner project in grade 10 enriched French class.

4. School was always serious stuff for me and I remember I got down right down and nasty in OAC (grade 13) accounting class. I sat beside a guy I knew from the church youth group, a real wangtta back in the day, and so our teacher made us work together for our year end final project. We had decided to focus on my dad’s company but soon enough, like always, I got stuck doing all the work. Three weeks into the project however, my partner decided to quit school… and take the project with him. Great, just what I needed. He was just one credit short of graduating and so I had no idea why he decided to quit but at last I was free to do things my own way, minus the original draft. A couple of weeks before the project was due though, this same very student, my former partner, decided to return to school cause of a deal he had made with the teacher, the deal being that this project would earn him his high school diploma.

5. I refused to let him take credit for the project I did. I made a big stink about it and he never got to graduate that year. Call me evil, I don’t care. You get what you earn and besides the big fat goose egg he definitely earned, a well-deserved kick to the head should have also been given to him for leaving me high and dry.

6. In between bopping around my house in the morning belting out some tunes and then coming home from work, my computer decided it didn’t want to work anymore. I guess my singing got to it and so for some reason, I blame it on my bad singing, my computer has no sound!!!

7. … and… oh the horror… my lengthy lists of songs and play lists went away too!!!

8. I tell ya, sometimes I really envy my parents for being born in the generation that wasn’t so dependent on technology, when typerwriters were the in thing and phones were simply meant for phoning friends. Nowdays, technology is running the show… and spoiling it too. Whether it’s computers crashing, cell phones being linked to impatience and flat out bad manners, digital door locks that decide to die and leave you locked out, digital cameras that easily get misplaced because of their small size, iPods that lead to partial deafness, or digital wash machines that automatically locked when started, forcing you to wait out and watch your wallet in the spin cycle, technology was meant to save us time but it’s doing the opposite, plus more.

9. And so, tonight I was stuck to listening to my own thoughts and Mi Nam’s chewing. I would have put on the radio, but, the radio link is on my computer and I already established that the sound isn’t working…. so… ya. Not fun.

10. With Christmas about two months away, it was nice to get my business cards at work today so that I can hand them out and help direct the presents my way… hehehe, just joking… or am I?! Often on my homepage I get random people asking me what I need and offering to send me particular things and so I thought that I’d make a simple Christmas Western-stuff wish list and post it, along with my school address to see if anyone out there in this massive world would be so sweet to send me something. Two years ago my ex threw out my Christmas tree that my mom had sent me and so Christmas hasn’t been the same. It hasn’t been the same since I left Canada that is and the longer I stay here, the more I am forgotten at Christmas. Not to give you a big long woo-is-me sad story but it’s true… I’m sure MANY foreigners can relate with this. No more presents wait for me on Christmas morning. I get my annual gift from my parents and a small something from whatever guy I happen to be dating at the time. Christmas isn’t really big to Koreans but I’m not Korean… it’s big to me. So I’m curious, will any stranger brighten my Christmas with an unexpected Christmas gift. Big or small, I don’t care. At this point, a post-it note with a misspelled Merry Christmas would be a bonus, and how sad is that?!

My Christmas Western-stuff Wish List:
A rope tug toy (relax… it’s for Mi Nam)
Oatmeal
Lady Speed
Stick deodorant
Crest
toothpaste
Lucky Charms cereal
straws
whole wheat tortilla shells
Trident gum
Nature Valley granola bars
Oxygen Fitness magazines
a flexible metal finger brace
Red Rose tea
Vicks cough
syrup
Nitequil

My office address:
Professor Amy-Michelle
Dankook University
Humanities Building, room 111-1
San 29, Anseo-Dong,
Cheonan, Chungchungnam-Do, South Korea
330 714

QUESTION OF THE DAY...
What do you want for Christmas?

QUOTE OF THE DAY...
The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.
-- Burton Hillis