oofishy

In Korean, there's a funny word for a funny concept that tries to describe that smell of the outside world that you bring in with you in your pockets, your hoodie hood, all your nooks and crannies and porous places.

	비린내

I wonder what the odor image is to someone with no knowledge of this word -- hey, non-Korean speakers, tell me. Does it sound like a romantic notion? Spring flowers? Freshness?

Because, actually, it means fishy. Not quite like this, but rather like this. And the first association is with sea critters and their fishy friends, though there are secondary notions of "raw meat smells" and maybe like, "briny," in a more general sense, too. As if on your little stroll around the neighborhood you were wading your way through vast oceans of flaky fish scales and seaweed bits. They collected in atomic amounts all through the strands of your hair and the fibers of your cardigan and got stuck there; remnants of the sea intertwined with strips of you, inexplicably woven together, loose french braid webs of oceanness and humanness.

And you can't detect it until you've plopped yourself back into the aquarium-bubble of freshwater homeland and have gone about doing your freshwater business for a little bit and then someone smells your hairs and your cardigan fibers and goes

"oof! You smell outside-fishy"

What does your ideal meal look like? -sunshine & sandwiches-

a summer picnic

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs (unpesky ones welcome)

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything, no sweating allowed unless you wanna run around and throw around a frisbee except not frisbees because those always come over and hit me on the head.

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything, and simple, but filling food (maybe sandwiches; homemade multi-grain bread, freshly-sliced deli meats, AWL the cheeses from France, whole-grain mustard = KEY; sweet potato fries, somehow still warm from the fryer; all kinds of FRUIT, gathered from trees/bushes/the earth [somehow now we are in an orchard. or there's an orchard nearby, ~14 minute walk]; some kind of CAKE, no nuts except maybe hazelnuts except okay maybe half and half, for the nut-averse/nut-endangered... etc. but the food is not truly the point)

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything,  and simple, but filling food, on well-worn but clean, bright, perfectly sized picnic blankets that make us all sit kind of close to each other but not too crowdedly (the US is unforeseen, and this is the beauty of it all. a picnic of unexpectedly, unplannedly perfect group of thinkers, talkers, feelers, friends and strangers, coming together for various good and terrible reasons such as 1. car has broken down right next to the picnic, 2. you are looking for a lost pet gerbil in the field, 3. you started the picnic, etc.)

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything,  and simple, but filling food, on well-worn but clean, bright, perfectly sized picnic blankets that make us all sit kind of close to each other but not too crowdedly, in which the WE feelings are high and triumphant but inclusive and loving and YOU can join, too. 

a summer picnic. with sunshine & sandwiches. with you. and the blanket doesn't even have to be plaid.

the unicorn in my IR discussion

There is a unicorn in my International Relations discussion.

PLIR 1010.
Wednesday afternoon, 4 p.m. to 4:50 p.m., SHARP.
In the (fittingly) mystical land of Nau Hall.

Okay okay I'm just kidding; you got me. But in all seriosity, in this weird...mythical-creatures-existing-in-everyday-life kind of way, she is a little bit like a unicorn to me - singular magical horn and all. It all started with an innocent game of ASSASSINS. You know - dorm bonding fun activity at the beginning of the Fall semester, getting us to get to know our buildingmates by formulating complicated plots to kill each other as targets of our assassinary and forming alliances and suffering bitter betrayals and surprise strikes. And stuff. If you signed up, said "yes, I shall participate!", this grand assassin scheme-master would plug you into his very complicated system and email you a target to kill and if you succeeded, you would take on the mission of killing your target's target and on and on until one ultimate assassin reigned over all of our dead bodies (our method of killing was sock-throwing, targeted below the head. Relatively safe). The game also involved silly immunities and stuff. Lots of people changed their facebook identities and it got very complicated and intense - people carrying around dining hall take-out boxes for entire days was not an uncommon occurrence.

So I was assigned this girl. And really, did everything "right" - looked her up on facebook, carried my sock around faithfully, watched all crowds of people carefully, always on the lookout for a redhead female looking a little fearful for flying socks bulleting toward her. Even found out where she lived, cause I'm friends with one of her suitemates (one floor below me, SO CLOSE and so far!). But alas, fate was not on my side - no redhead I encountered was the redhead of my purpose!

...Until one rainy morning, while walking out of Maupin on my way to Symbolic Logic, I spotted them. The red hairs. Peeping out from under a gray hoodie, which was in turn peeping out from under a black umbrella. Albeit hiding and peeping, they were real, and calling to me. So it was only natural that I chased her down and  (because I felt a little bit bad about totally ambushing her when she was so off-guard and tired looking from the morning being so early) after tentatively yelling, "...hey...!", gently tossed my sock at her arm. And this is the embarrassing story that went down after the sock launch:

redheaded mystery girl: *looks confused*
me: wait...are you Clara Barton ? (not her real name)
rmg: um...no.
me: ....I AM SO SORRY I THREW A SOCK AT YOU YOU SEE I'M PLAYING ASSASSINS FOR MY DORM ASSOCIATION AND AND
rmg: ...it's okay...
me: D:
rmg: *walks away*

So the only real encounter I had with this redheaded target of mine was...not even real. Tragic. But then some days and weeks and months passed and I got over it (oh, and I got killed by this trumpet player who refrains from shoes. In the next door suite). I also heard that she talked to someone about me, how "yeah I was supposed to be playing assassins, but no one ever tried to kill me or anything. I didn't even do any of the immunities!" Sigh. If only she knew.

So imagine my surprise when I saw her sitting in my IR discussion! Wearing clothes that I would wear if my mom didn't already object so much to all my "hobo-like clothing," saying intelligent things while blushing just slightly - basically, all the bases for a beautiful friendship. And now that I can't kill her anymore, I see her around everywhere and all the time. And each passing occurrence of a chance encounter with the redheaded mystery girl (the real one, that is. Though I also see the non-real one everywhere, too. Eeep), I want to reveal myself: It was me. I was your assassin! And I really did try my best to find and destroy you - you were just never the right redhead!! Please understand... But for some reason, I never do. Strange, because I talk to random strangers about intimate things all the time. Err...more frequently than the average person, I think.

But anyways, yeah. I've sat next to her at coffee shops and libraries and IR discussions without saying a word. Because there's a sense of magic in keeping (benign) secrets forever. Because she is a unicorn. Because this way, she is forever mysterious, far away, distinctly unreachable. Distinctly...shouldn't be reachable, in a way, because what if I talk to her and she turns out to not appreciate differentness and never emailed people back or something like that? So for me, she shall forever stay a mystery.

& forever a unicorn

Put this way, I suddenly can't wait to go to discussion tomorrow! Yayayayay for sitting several seats away from unicorns and admiring them from a respectful distance and never revealing your assassin status and keeping benign secrets forever. And for finishing blog posts - whew

God's provision for Carrie the Casual Camel

Today I ate a strawberry.
No, I'm just kidding - but that's the sentence I always think of whenever I find myself wanting to start a post with "Today,..." cause I don't want my blog to be about wee little things that happen to me each day that people don't want to read about. I mean personally, I love reading those kinds of posts, too, and there's definitely merit in the realizations that exist in the little "Today I ate a strawberry" moments that may have lead you to think of how many little seeds exist in this tiny body of a fruit and what if all those seeds could've become strawberries but nope cause you ate them all, probably in one chomp oops sorry try again...you know?! And I mean you gotta have these realizations during some "Today," so I guess I'm really making no sense, but that's not what this post is about anyways.

It's just that...
Today,
for some reason (alright, not "some" reason - there's actually a concrete reason, but I just don't wanna tell you), I just felt God's provision for me so much. Keeping with the vague theme, here's the generalized story: I've just been really scared about lots of things lately, and God keeps proving himself faithful. A faithful God. A good God. Today especially. I keep trekking through literal and figurative uncharted lands these days and it's scary and weird because I just never know what to do or expect or think or feel about all this. But today, for some concrete, abstract reason, I just felt that all was right with me. Alllllllll iiiiiiis riiiiiiiight wiiiiiith meeeee hmmmmmm - just reassured in the most mysterious, wonderfully unreassuring way, because it's not that the scary things are gone, I just know that whatever happens with whatever I have or don't have, it's all in God's freakishly awe-inspiring plan. But the thing is, that it's like . . . DUH. Why so silly, Jaehee Madison  Lee? All these things my brain knows, my heart and mind need to be reminded of so often, in the weirdest ways (how demanding).

I mean even camels are provided for in this wonderful design. Did you know they have three eyelids? Apparently "the third lid is extra thin and see-through, so the camel can pull it down in sandstorms" according to a very credible source (MMR, text message 9:24 pm 2/24/11). SWEEET, right? And so amazingly created - so wonderfully provided for. And this isn't even about their humps...wutttt!

Carrie the Casual Camel

So...Today,
I'm just rejoicing in God's provision, and in camels, for their humps and their tri-eyelids, and in blogging about the insanely mundane, and the beauty of the fact that God's love is sometimes simply insanely mundane. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Insane, insane, insane. How can I keep from singing?

Did you know that earbuds are magnetized? If you try to push them together, they will repel each other gently.