Must... Keep... Homepaging... Monday, January 13

With over 8 years of commitment to my homepage, roughly 6,400 postings and a daily readership between 400-500, my homepage gets less comments now than ever as more and more people reading it send me personal emailed messaged instead. 

I always wonder just who reads this homepage and the other day I watched a movie called "Julie & Julia".  It was about a young lady, Julie, who admired this particular cook, Julia Child.  She had sent out to cook something like 500+ some recipes in 365 days and had started a blog to record it.  In writing her blog daily, she earned quite the following and I envied her to a certain extent for the interaction her readers had with her. Of course it was just a movie so my envy was somewhat silly, but it got me thinking.  

Who reads my homepage?

I initially started my homepage because I had come to Korea and my friends and family back in Canada all were overly curious as to what life was like for me over here.  My homepage thus became a kind of open book daily account of my life here in Korea as a means of avoided the repetitive questions that were being sent my way from those back in Canada.  I mean, you can only answer the question "so what's life like in Korea" so many times. Now I can just simply answer "read my homepage".  

Life for me here in Korea was never supposed to last longer than a year so neither was this homepage.  It was just a means of keeping my friends and family in the loop until I did my year and returned.  Well, I never did return and now I don't know if I ever will. 

With Canada's job situation (and weather too I must admit), I'm not particularly interested in returning so I don't think about it.  My biggest concern is that I wouldn't know what I'd do for work, for money. Plus things are so different over here and I have very much Koreanized.  I feel incredibly safe here, I am happy and successful here, and I am at home.  While many foreigners few Korea as a temporary break between finishing school and starting a career, I have made my career here. I started my own boxing club.  And to step away from it to then have to find a job in Canada, I'm nervous that any other job for me would just be a disappointing step down.  Maybe I do have it all here in Korea.

I've got the wicked job I made for myself and that I absolutely love in all it's craziness and uncertainty. I have the knock-out of a husband who is both my best friend and business partner.  My business mentor here has become so much more than just our business financial sponsor; he has become more of a life mentor, a family member.  I have 3 beautiful four-legged friends, two of which work with me and the other one in training to be my running partner.  I have the large apartment that's got so many rooms we don't even use a few of them (12 rooms in total).  I've got three "families" -- my K-Crew, my Hulk family, and my in-laws. And I've got a scooter I don't even have a license to drive but get away with doing so.  Me boxing here has given me such a great sense of identity, not only with KBC but in the community in which I live.  In Korea, I feel like I can do anything and everything I want and in the 9 years I've been here I've definitely done so.  

There are two things missing in my life here in Korea, one of them being my family and friends in Canada and the other being the strong influence of my church.  My K-Crew is awesome and they have shown me friendship like none other but surely nothing or no one can replace the people I have grown up with and  those whom are still close with after all these years. Moreover, being raised by church-going parents, Sunday was always church day for us.  We'd attend the morning service, head out to the Swiss for dinner with either just family or a group of friends and then Sunday afternoon would be spent lounging around the house.  My attempts to find a home church here in Korea have failed miserably and have ranged from attending some that felt like pure meat markers for other foreign Christians to frustrating services at churches that felt so money hungry.  The plan is to attend WOW President's church but I'm hesitant to do so because it has something like a few thousand in attendance.  I miss my old church on Jane Street in Toronto, where I used to walk in and Pastor Grandwell used to shout out to me whenever I showed up late.  "Great to have sister Amy in attendance" he used to say.  It always embarrassed the heck out of me but I loved it because the irony of what he said was in the fact that I was one of few white folk attending his services.  I wasn't a sista but I was a sister... hahaha.

So I was thinking today, who among those in my life reads my homepage?  Both Snickers and my dad don't.  Snickers says there's too much English and he can't read English well so his interest in it is in the minus numbers.  My father says it is too personal. I suppose he thinks it's as he is reading a page in a written diary, something private, but that's exactly why I write this -- to share my life with those I love.  I know my mom used to read my homepage and I found out so after she died.  I was cleaning out her closet when I stumbled across some binders that had pages upon pages of my homepage entries that she had printed out.  Sometimes friends will make reference to something I wrote about.  I've been called by name randomly at grocery stores and whatnot by people who recognize me as being "that Flipside girl".  The occasional time I will get a random comment on my homepage but my commenters are few.  I definitely get more personal emails than comments on my homepage these days.  Many of such emails are from people sharing encouragement and personal stories of how they can relate to a particular situation of mine.  And then there are companies that have taken notice of my homepage and contacted me, like Adidas, Arirang TV, and even the Seoul Prosecutor's Office.  Consequently, various connections and sponsorships have resulted.  Adidas sponsored me for roughly five years, Arirang TV did a few documentaries on me, and the Seoul Prosecutor's Office put me in contact with the Cheonan office who then sponsored me for a few years.  

Just recently, a lady living in Singapore has contacted me, I'll call her Shutterbug-B.  She contacted me today actually and, as it turns out, she has been reading my homepage for many years.  Shutterbug-B had read Snickers' bucketlist for 2014 and had noted that Snickers had wished to get wedding photos done.  Well, Shutterbug-B is a photographer, and quite the talented one too I should note, and she wants to help make Snickers' wish come true via holding a photo shoot in June/July when she comes to Korea.  I was so ecstatic when I read this late night email and so I immediately wrote her back.  Of course this could very well be someone posing as a photographer and pulling my leg, but I've seen her photos.  Plus, having read my homepage and obviously knowing I'm a boxer, she risks being upper cut in the tush if she's lying... hahaha.  

On most days, I feel like I am just throwing words out there into cyper space and that no one is reading this.  This homepage was originally meant for friends and family to read but it has become more of a personal reflection of my days for me to look back on later.  And I do go back and read many of my own entries.  Sometimes I wonder what I was doing on a particular day or what I was up to this time last year, 2 years ago or x number of years ago. The very last line in my first entry, back on Wednesday, July 13, 2005, was "Made this blog to remind myself that life is to be laughed at and not taken so seriously!" and I surely have laughed throughout the years both at life itself and at myself.  I've splattered my daily sarcastic remarks on this homepage for anyone and everyone to read and even if no one reads my homepage from this day forward, that's ok.  The plan was always to continue it until I leave Korea and that's exactly what I'm going to do.  This homepage has lead me to various contacts, both business and personal, and I've met a lot of amazing people as a result.  It's hard to write everyday but at this point I can't stop.