The Last Post

It's so weird how time passes by. Sometimes it seems to be whizzing by so fast, but sometimes it feels so long and tiresome.  Time is so mysterious that we need something in order to keep track of it. A calender, a clock. I never really thought about the concept of time, or my past until this year, as I matured.

My friend's birthdays, choir concerts and the upcoming graduation are things that remind me of how last year was like. How I had spent that last event, and what had happened, it all came back to me. And there was this feeling in the pit of my heart that made me want to laugh,  cry and cherish this loving memory.

Its so weird how memories stay in our heart. Even though the experience may have been a bad one when one went through it, after it passes, it stays as a memory and as a good one too. Because it gives the feeling, i guess, of 'I too, have survived through hardship' and this hardship has probably changed us in many ways to who we are today.

This is my last blog post, and my last year at KIS. Though KIS hasn't always been treats and goods to me, when I think of leaving, there is a pang of strain in my heart, because, whether the experiences may have been painful and tiring, it has created me, and it has created the memories that I will never forget, and will cherish to the last of my life. There will be a time when I visit KIS during the summer breaks and remember my schooldays as a youngster, and then there will be the time I will visit KIS as an adult, where I will be able to gaze at the tall buildings with a smile, and then perhaps, I will visit KIS one day, as an old grandma, and remember, the days that lasted. 

goodbye.

Spirited Away

Before you start, please click on this link and listen to this song as you read it.
Trust me, it will make all the difference......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O84CCjrcmR8&feature=related 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BioNW_DNlg&feature=related

There are some things in life that cannot be understood, Some feelings that cannot be explained, Some beauties that cannot be praised enough and Some memories that cannot be revived. Perhaps that is why life is so mysterious, like an unsolved problem, a puzzle that doesn't have an end. Some things in life are so unbearable that we want to give up, but sometimes life gives us a light so bright, a rope so strong to hold on to, just enough to prevent us from letting go. And with this light we travel a thousand miles, through thorn covered branches, heavy dusted leaves, through the dark tunnels of evil with a candle in hand, a candle given to us. With this candle, we can see through dark ends, protect us from deep desires and save us from dark deeds, and just as the candle seems to be fading, life gives us another one. And with this, we travel another thousand miles.

A few days ago, I watched two of Hayao Miyazaki's most praised pieces Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away. I usually don't like anime movies, I have a sort of prejudice thought "I mean, how much will they be able to express through drawings?" However my deep prejudice shattered for you cannot see these movie without a tissue box at your side. A real quick preview is that, In both films, the characters fall into deep trouble from where it seems there will be no way out. However, with the power of friendship, love and trust, they survive through it and receive long lasting memories of such childhood. If after you watch this movie, you feel a sort of power tugging on your heart, if you feel a pang of tightness around your chest and a small smile forming at the side of your face you know that your spirit is still alive! The desires of your childhood, the memories of your youth, the dreams of the other world still exists in you.

I don't know how to explain this...but you have to watch the movie and feel for yourself. The existence of the outer world, the world beyond the stars! Don't say you don't have time, for you always have time for another Miyazaki Hayao film, Always. Just don't fall in too deep, like me, you won't know how to come back!

 Glad to hear I'm not alone!

What Makes a Good Movie?

There are many Genres to movies. I just listed some genres and some examples for each....

Disaster movies: 2012, War of the Worlds, The day after tomorrow, Independence day, Armageddon
, The Core, Deep Impact, Haeundae (Korean Movie)....etc

Zombie movies: I am Legend, Dawn of the Dead, 28 weeks later, 28 days later, Awaken the Dead, Corpses, Dawn of the living dead, death of the dead....etc

Robot Movies: AI, Irobot, Transformers, Minority Report, Island, Terminator, Eagle Eye, Surrogates....etc

Horror/Thriller movies: Disturbia, Saw, Paranormal Activity, When a Stranger Calls you, Final Destination, The shining, Scream, The Hills have eyes, The Mist, One missed call, The orphan, Hide and Seek, Silent Hill, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, I Know what you did last summer, The ring….etc

Fantasy movies: Harry Potter, Twilight, Narnia, Lord of the rings, The Hunger games, Percy Jackson, pan's labyrinth...etc

- and lots more-

I may be forgetting some important ones but I think I have collected at least some of the Mother of all Movies, like Transformers, Harry Potter, AI, I am legend, War of the worlds, Titanic, The Devil Wears Prada, The nightmare before Christmas, Toy Story....So what makes these movies stand out amongst their fellow movies?

It is perhaps the director itself who is different, for Example, most of these movies are by very famous directors, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen etc. Movies like these are different in a way that there isn't a single flaw, there isn't a part in the movie where you feel that you are watching a movie. A good movie is one in where you sweat your butt off and when it finishes you get depressed because its over and now you have to face your own boring life.

Its the little things that makes a movie different from the way the actors act, from how they react, their every words, it all makes a difference. The director has to be good enough to be able to create a whole new character and that is not as easy as it seems for its like creating a human being. Every characteristic and style, is matched with each body part. The way one talks, they way they act, their little movements, their unconscious and conscious and every little habit is monitored by me, the audience. And if they don't speak the exact right words, or if they act awkwardly, it is so visible to the audience. Because you see, people like me don't just watch the movie, we watch every little spectrum, every corner and picture is eyed carefully and exactly.

Anyways......you don't know how awe I am in after I watch a great movie. I worship the directors who create such a masterpiece. Like recently, I watched The War of the Worlds and I swear I couldn't get up for 10 minutes after the movie. Mind-Blowing, I was paralyzed by the masterpiece, even now I'm barely swallowing my saliva and cold sweat may just be crawling out of my sides. (My mom Tsks her tongue on this and tells me to feel this way after I read 'BOOKS' but really, I swear movies are just as educational as books, I mean, if you watch it like me....I don't miss a single word...)

Its really amazing how the same actor/actress is shaped so differently by each different movie.......I'm just in so much awe I might as just go cry now........

A friend that lasts....

I didn't have any good ideas on what to write my blog post about so I was surfing through my classmates blogs......and I realized that almost every single one of them starts by explaining what they will be writing about before they....write it....so I thought I would do that too.

"I will talk about the various types of friends we are surrounded with. (very formal indeed)"

Okay....So we all have friends (By the way, I believe that every girl's dream is to have a gay best-friend (I confirmed my feelings on this after I read Bridget Jone's Diary and that Tom I fell in love with, bless his soul.) Our friends are divided into columns such as, our elementary school friends, our middle/high school friends and then our college friends.
Looking back at my life, I realize that some of my friends from different columns sort of match up together by having similar characteristics.
Okay....What did I just write...You don't get what I'm saying do you? I'll explain to you in real life situation.

We have the smart, sort of stuck up friend who seems to 'know-it-all'. The friend who claims to know every aspect of every subject and when others claim to prove something wrong, they become very defensive and defend their position. (And when they are proven wrong, they tend to change the topic) There are the advantages and disadvantages of having such a friend. The advantage would be that they are usually the only friends who help you with your homework when you are in desperate need of it. The disadvantage would be that your mother tends to compare you with her therefore making you feel like a useless piece of dog poop. (Somehow, writing it down makes it seem the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.)

Next we have the very dumb friend who contrasts very much with your very smart friend. So this very dumb friend of yours does not keep their mouth shut. In fact, if one was to meet them for the first time, they would almost mistake the dumb friend to be smart in the way how she blabbers so much of what so little she knows. Sometimes you and she are having a chat and its increasingly fun and you’re all laughing about it and then she says something really dumb and then you’re like. “... um.......yah.....lets just not say anything for the next half hour” but what you really say is “Yup! HeHehe...he...e.....?.......”

Next we have the cool friend. You really like that friend because you feel that she is different from the rest. She’s not like the other ‘girls’ who gossip or care about other people’s business so often. She seems very mature and she feels older than you and all but then the problem is that she is kind of dry. This can be good and bad. Good in a way that she tells you the truth and doesn’t bother gossiping about it behind your back but Bad in a way that when you want her to gossip with you she’s just all like “yeah.....so what was our hw again?” not because she doesn’t want to gossip but just because she doesn’t care. She just doesn’t care about others. You sometimes get hurt by remarks that seem to truthful and careless. You feel that she doesn’t care about you so you erase the <3 after her name on your phone address and decides to take a step back but then, after like 2 hours you like her again. It’s complicated, the girl’s mind.
Next you have the friend who is kind of a bad influence to you. The one that teaches you all the bad but fun stuff and spoils you and all. It’s really fun to have her around, she’s funny and fun to be with and sometimes you mistaken her to be your best-friend but friends like these don’t last long. In your deepest despair, they won’t be there because they show up only when it’s play time, when its fun to be with you, not when you are depressed. Use them in a good way, when you need to have a laugh, but don’t expect too much from them, for in the end, you will only get hurt.
Next you have the jealous, always-alert, friend. She’s the type who is obsessed over being more popular than you are. She is the one who counts how many friends she has against your friends and how closer you are to someone than she is. You are not enemies with her and she acts like she likes you too but she seems to be always tense about things. She carries a mask around.
The self-centered friend. Don’t even get me started with her.
The friend who acts like she is GaNgStA~! She is the type who acts like she’s really strong and cool and YOLO and all when she really is fidgety about everything. She curses a lot and walks hipsta and talks hipsta and tries to stand out so much. She kind of relates to the jealous friend.
Then you have the friend that you can never be close to. Somehow there is this deep gap between you both and you don’t know what went wrong there. You can never be close with that girl and it is extremely painful to be left alone together. You have to literally squeeze your brain to find a topic that will last you until some savior shows up and joins that chat. The other fried however, really likes you and thinks of you as a friend, she is inside her own little bubble thinking that you like her too, when actually you don’t. Well...it’s not like you don’t liker her but it’s just like a alligator being friends with a giraffe. I mean....how awkward is THAT!?
(God...there are so many different types of friends...this is never going to end....so i’ll just end with the most important friend)
This is the friend that you never know until you are trapped in your deepest despair. A true friend.....A true friend is not the most fun to be with or the most cool or the most caring either (surprisingly enough) She is also not your best-friend, or in other words, she is not the one who you think, assume is to be closest with you. She is the one who quietly awaits you in the dark, who you do not realize, the one that is always there, for better or for worse, the one who, when all has left you, stays firm and takes your hand. A true friend is someone who visits you every day when you are lying in the hospital near death, bald due to the many surgeries you went  through, weak with the thousand drugs plugged into you. A true friend is like a tree that does not waver or change because you have. A true friend was the friend that visited my grandfather every day in his last days Until the leaves shrived cold and fell to the ground, until they sprought again after a winter’s fright. (what am i writing?) And I dedicate to this friend, all the friends one could ever possibly want. 

Movie my life

    I swear that the day I’m finished with my college apps, i’ll pop open a bag of chips, get a bowl of Häagen-Dazs, sit in front of my television and watch movies until I feel like I’m gonna puke or my eyes start popping out. That’s how much I love watching movies. It’s like one of those small joys in life that make your life so much more livable. I’m one of thos psychotic movie manias whose watched all the movies you watched and all those you didn’t watch. Maybe that’s why my head spins in those weird ways. I think of my life as a movie. In fact, every little thing that happens to me, is a part of a movie scene I’m making.

    These days, I’m crazy about those thriller like action like mystery movies. Like Disturbia or The Stepfather or A Perfect Getaway. Movies that are scary but not just violent with ghosts in them, but movies that have a story and in which you have to use your brain and the story keeps twisting and turning. Anyways, there are times in life when I have these painful crazes that aren’t curable with pills. Like this one time, when I was young, I had the Harry Potter disease, and I know every 14 year old child had that, but mine was pretty bad. In fact, the only thing I thought about was Harry Potter and Hogwarts. My imagination was so convincing that somehow I started to believe that my school was Hogwarts in disguise. I was actually pretty old for that but thinking about that past, I don’t even remember how I got out of that craze. I had a lot of movie crazes actually, there was the Mission Impossible craze where I actually thought I was a secret spy in disguise, and then there was that Princess Diary craze where I believed that I was the hidden princess of Korea and etc.
    The new craze I have is this murder movie thing that’s going in. Recently, I moved to my grandma’s house alone because its closer to my school, but then my grandma’s house is one of the few private homes in this neighborhood and whenever people pass by, they just look at our house. (My grandma didn’t want high fences so we had lower fences, its really easy for strangers to just pop over to our side of the house). And somehow, I started this whole movie in my head about a thriller, murder movie. So this is how it goes....
A young girl 17, moves to her grandma’s house. It’s not in the big cities so its kind of isolated, and people here are all just so mysterious. They really care a lot about other’s people business. One day, this girl goes out to the garden to take pictures of her dog and the house and after she takes a photo next to the tree, she looks at it and realizes that there is somebody looking at her through a window in the picture. She looks up to see the window but theres no one there but the curtains kind of blow as if someone had been there. The weird thing is that, this window is the window to the new apartment across from her grandma’s house, and it has been newly rebuilt so no one should be living there....not yet....
Anyways, it may sound to you like one of those common thriller movies, but when I grow old, I’ll make one of those movies that will make your skin get loose out of your pockets. That’s my dream, to become a movie director. Anyways, I’ll tell you more about my childhood crazes one day. I bet one can make a movie out of my childhood, it was that much interesting, at least in the world of my imagination.

Independent Reading Book: Bridget Jones's Diary

Bridget Jones is just another mid-aged women who's life seems a whole lot more worse than any of us, but it is just that we forget how miserable our lives are as well due to our very busy schedule. She is a single girl on a doomed quest to improve herself in which she resolves to and fails to: visit the gym three times a week not merely just to buy a sandwich, to form a practical relationship with an accountable adult and to learn how to program the VCR. The book is hilarious in a way that it makes one slap the person beside him/her in order to pronounce the fact that they feel "That's Me!". Up until now, Bridget Jones is still talking about her life, boring and miserable and clumped up all together but under the mess, we spot the soft parts of her life and the fun parts that have a potential of becoming something that can develop.
All, I can do now is get a cup of soda, some popcorn and enjoy the rest of Bridget Jones's journey into life while I stay paused in mine.

What Makes My Blog Interesting!

The fact that a teenage girl at age 17 in Korea, is writing a blog post on her own blog that is non related to celebrity stuff makes my blog interesting. Now, be sure to notice the word "Korea". I mean what kid my age has time to write a blog post in Korea anyways? They are all so busy either studying for hagwon tests, going to hagwons, doing hagwon HW, attending hagwon study sessions or simply surfing the internet. But here I am, Angela Kwon not only sitting on a table but actually writing something quite educational. (Or is it..?)
      Away from the point that my blog is written by a teenage Korean girl, hate to break it up to you but there is actually nothing that makes my blog really interesting. I know, I know...I am being too truthful. However! Indeed, if we chose to change the meaning of interesting to "not boring" we can sort this whole problem out.
So, basically, what I'm trying to say is that, my blog will probably be not that interesting enough for someone to actually stop the TV show or comic book they are watching to read my blog posts.(though I'm still hoping that there will be someone brave enough to do that) But at least I have the guts to tell you this. I bet at this very moment, some kids out there from my class are actually writing for this assignment (to write about what makes my blog interesting) stuff like "My blog is interesting because it is trendy, new and interesting because it is so interesting and new" and they'll never know that, that post will be viewed by him/her for the first and last time. They actually might be convinced that their blog is actually interesting! *Yikes (Am I being too cruel. I mean, just because my blog isn't that interesting doesn't mean some others won't be either).
Ok....So with the new definition of interesting to "not boring" my blog is interesting because it contains the life of a teenage girl in Korea, and come on....what could be more interesting than that!