It is pretty late.

It is pretty late. However, I slept in this morning, and I can sleep in tomorrow, so I am probably okay.

So you may have forgotten (you haven't, because I think I have probably told you a few times by now), but I am in choir. And I am not the hugest fan of it. I mean, I adore singing and getting better at singing, but everything else is not the greatest. But this weekend, my choir had two days of singing at a a conductor's symposium - basically grad conductors and student teaching conductors from all around the Midwest came to conduct our choir, and then receive pointers from other, more experienced conductors. Anyway, basically what this meant is that there wasn't really any actual scrutiny on us for a change, but scrutiny towards the conductor instead. But we still had to sing for two hours straight last night (past my bedtime) and two hours straight this afternoon. It was actually pretty tiring and I think I was dehydrated after today. Also I learned that conducting is basically upper-body dancing - they even use the same lingo (choreography, flow, step, flexibility, etc.).

Anyway what I meant to say with all that was that I made friends with the lady who stands next to me in 2nd sopranos (she sells for Mary Kay and offered me a free facial because my eyes "speak" to her - how could I refuse??), and also I got to talk to the Korean girl in the choir too and she offered me help with Korean if I ever needed it. She also said that she knows a lot of American people who are her friends who are teaching English in Korea, so that made me pretty happy. I already have a few questions lined up to ask her next choir class. The most pressing one is, since age and seniority is so important, how does one find out how old the people they meet are (if it's not clear)? Do you ask right away what year they were born, or do you just speak respectfully until they let you know? That's the most important question to me right now because it's not something I can just google. I can google almost everything but not that. I really feel like it would be rude to refer to someone as agasshi or tangshin or something like that if you've just met them. Is it ever possible to be too formal? I guess you could just use their name with sshi added whenever you're speaking to them instead of any pronouns. But that is bad for me because I'm horrible at remembering people's names, even in English. Maybe this will help me.

I filled out some scholarship applications today. I don't know if I'm an exceptional enough student to get any, but my fingers are crossed. Plus the little cover letter I wrote for each one was pretty good. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's turning a pretty phrase (it's been confirmed that that is, indeed, the only thing I'm good at). As far as writing went, I actually did a lot. On one of my breaks I started working on one of my old stories again. I had to do a lot of research for it, but I finally got up the courage to write about a guy with PTSD... they say "write what you know", but the truth is that I've already done that, and I've run out of things I know, because it turns out I know very little, and even less that's interesting. So we'll see how this goes.

So I'm halfway through the teaching that we're doing in my Literature for Adolescents class. In a way, it's both better and worse than I expected. Turns out I have an exactly spot-on pre-assessment of my own teaching abilities... I gave a 20-minute lecture on Tuesday and it turned out exactly how I predicted: boring, nerve-racking, and I made too many hand gestures. What I do when I'm at a loss for words is I move my hands a lot in a really meaningless way. As I'm doing it, I'm fully aware of it, but there is literally nothing I can do to stop it. In the end, I spent hours and hours preparing for that lecture and it ended up falling a bit flat just how I thought it would. Even though we weren't very rehearsed, all my group fellows did really well because they're all quite charismatic. It was a little disheartening. Jamie says I should go into theater, and I think I'm tempted (right now the determining question is, do I want to be stressed out and hungry, or not stressed out and really hungry?). Anyway, we've done two days of teaching and we have two more, and I'm crossing my fingers. I have a pretty big part to play on Tuesday, and I hope I can be interesting about it. But how do you rehearse interestingness? All I know how to do is rote memorization, and that is boring as a rock (if a rock also gestured lamely). It's not very good for my other classes, either. Even though I got 39/40 on my first History exam, I haven't been able to do all the reading for my other literature classes (Dante's Inferno in three days for one, and Huck Finn in three days for the other) and it makes me feel stupid when I go to class and I don't have anything interesting to contribute to the class discussion. I've done a lot of the reading for next week though, so that will probably be better. Having a weekend where I wasn't home has been good, because home is really bad for my homework getting-done skills.

I don't know if you have watched much Hello Baby lately, but I wanted to tell you about how I watched what's available from the 5th season (it's airing, so there are only 4 episodes). At first I didn't like it because MBLAQ aren't even half as cute as SHINee, plus they have to take care of three kids who are YooGeun's age (about 4). But after watching it for a little longer, it really took a turn for the serious... the group really had no idea to deal with three kids, two of whom had really strong personalities, and almost right away they were kind of forced into making decisions about real, actual discipline and routines and being really mindful of what they said around the kids. I think because the group itself is older (maknae is 19, leader is 25), they were able to make more serious decisions about what to do about kids that were energetic or hurtful or really disrespectful. I actually don't think you would like it at all, because it was filled with really uncomfortable or horrible moments where either the kids or the dads or both would make a bad decision on camera and no one would know what to do. Eventually they went to see a child psychologist and she helped them out a lot and it was really cool to watch them come to these realizations about parenting that had never crossed their minds before, and then earnestly try to do better with the kids. Anyway, in that way it really reminds me of Supernanny, which my roommate watched marathon-style all day today (it's either marathon style or nothing), and which I adore. Supernanny is seriously one of my role models.

Anyway I'm totes going to bed now. I always think I'm going to make these posts brief but it never works. Sorry.
안녕,
Amy