Omnipotent: [ADJ] Someone or something that is omnipotent has complete power over things or people.
Recollection: [NOUN] If you have a recollection of something, you remember it.
Dayfly: [NOUN] A mayfly is an insect which lives near water and only lives for a very short time as an adult.
If I were given just five seconds to describe myself, I would say, 'I'm omnipotent, a recollection and a dayfly at the same time'. It's not a normal way of introducing oneself but I think these three words summarize myself most perfectly. When I say omnipotent, it doesn't mean that I'm actually omnipotent like a God but I believe in myself that I can do anything if I try hard enough. I'm a recollection of memories because I become very sentimental when I think of the past and especially when I was very young in elementary school. I tend to watch some videos my parents have taken when I was in kindergarden and it makes me feel extremely comfortable. I'm a dayfly because when I make up my mind to do something, it doesn't last longer than a day. Also, my emotions change so easily that one day I'm full of rage and then the next day I become the happiest person in the entire world.
Place: Sangmyung Art Center at Sangmyung University Cast: Students at KMLA Time: 4:00 p.m. Date: Saturday, November 19th, 2011.
At the start of last month, October, I walked into the Minjok Education building for my Samulnori practice, as usual, complaining this would take another self-study period. As everyone in KMLA knows, the self-study period is vital for studying for quizzes or preparing presentations in classes. We MUST use these hours very efficiently, otherwise we have no choice but to take away our sleeping hours. Anyway, when I walked into the room where we always practiced Samulnori, there was a strange guy standing beside our music teacher, acting like a real teacher. Right then our music teacher announced that this strange guy will be guiding us towards the better performance at Minjok Concert for a month temporarily. I didn't like this guy because he didn't look like a person who would be good at Samulnori. However, as soon as he started teaching us Samulnori from the very basic things such as posture, rhythm, and the correct way to treat the instruments, I was already building great deal of trust of him in my mind. He was certainly good and he looked really professional. Besides, I liked his teaching styles with which everybody started to build tensions in their minds and work hard to do a better perforamce.
After that day, Samulnori practice became the joy of my everyday life, and as we were getting better every time, I felt this great pleasure I have never felt in my entire life. As the show day was approaching, I became more and more excited to show this great improvement of ours to the whole audience of teachers, students and others who come to our concert. And finally, it was November 18th, the rehearsal day.
The entire first and second graders arrived at Sangmyung Art Center that looked like an Opera House, and the place was filled with numerous staffs who were about to assist us for a better show. The most impressive people there were the directors. These directors were absolutely amazing. The main director standed in the very middle of the audience seats and checked all the details meticulously throughout the performance. He checked the composition of how performers were arranged on stage, the volumes of different instruments, the colorful and atmospheric lightings and many other details that might alter the performance minutely. When a student band was playing, the director somehow managed to adjust the microphone volume of guitar, syndicate and vocal, and when he finished doing it, I was literally shocked by the extreme changes of the quality of the show. Before the adjustments, I didn't even want to hear a single note in the music but after the director made some adjustments, the song was so harmonious and lovely that I wanted to record it and keep it in my mp3 player.
I spent whole lot of time practicing Samulnori for a month, giving up my studies, and we successfully finished the Samulnori performance, receiving one of the most applause among other performances. I really enjoyed both practicing and going up on a stage. However, what I remember the most about directors moving around the whole stage back and forth so passionately. I was extremely fascinated at what these directors do. So I've searched for some stage management jobs in google and youtube, and I found this video so fascinating!!!!!
One of my weird characteristics is that I hate bouquets, especially the ones made with real flowers. I also hate live octopus or any kind of sashimi. I have this abnormal love towards animals and plants, especially the ones that are not taken good care of. Flower bouquets are the primary reason why so many plants are killed everyday, and innumerable christmas trees that are cut every year is a massacre to me.
Joshua, in this video, talks about similar topic using his interest in crows and others animals that are always around us and perfectly adapted to human environment.
In this 10 minute long video, what he basically talks about is how intelligent the crows are compared to other wild animals. He presents several quite interesting experiments that can prove his theory and also says that the brains of crows are very balanced just like those of chimpanzees'. The high intelligence of crows was well known since humans started researching on wild animals. One of the hilarious examples he gave is about university students catching a few crows on campus and making them irascible by measuring their heights and weights and then releasing them. After repeating the exact same procedure a several times, crows not only became more and more skeptical and developed animosity towards those certain students, but these crows also began to instigate these students constantly, by pecking them and keep on flying around them all the time. Eventually, the crows were infamous among the university students who wanted to research on the crows. Inevitably, the students had to acquiesce to the crows. One pivotal thing to point out, is that, later, even after these students graduated, the crows remembered the students and kept on following the same students. This anecdote, according to Joshua, proves that the crows have enough intelligence to be trained by 'a vending machine for crows'.
Joshua spends quite a long time explaining how the crow vending machine works and how the crows' thoughts change thoughout the process. Basically, the crows can be trained to pick up coins around the vending machine and put them into the machine in exchange of the peanuts. Normally, provincial people would just carefully scrutinize the crows to see if there are any tricks in the machine, get surprised and then just look away since picking up coins is a peripheral thing. After all, what does that matter unless we're the beggars waiting for a few coins to gather? However, here, Joshua suggests that this unprecedented machine of crows can be applied in diverse ways if we use our imagination. For example, the crows can pick up trash after a game at such a voluminous stadium, or maybe search for people in distress exhaustively around the disaster areas. Apart from these, thousands of laudable ideas can be used to utilize the machine effectively. What Joshua was trying to say in this video was not just about crows and their vending machines. He wanted to emphasize how we could enhance the relationship between humans and other animals. As we all know, humans are trying their best to annihilate other species of animals and destroy the Earth as much as possible. We have done such terrible things to our environment for our own goods. Because of this, the media from all over the world are emphasizing the importance of keeping our environment healthy and clean, and now as a solution, we can look for ways to save both humans and the Earth simultaneously. And Joshua Klein just made himself the start point of the project.
But then I was shocked to see this comment on the TED site:
An article in the Year in Ideas issue on Dec. 14, 2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts. The article reported that beginning in June 2008, Klein tested the machine at the Binghamton Zoo, that the crows learned how to use it and that after a month the crows were actually scouring the ground for loose change.
The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.
The reporter never called the zoo in Binghamton to confirm. And while the fact-checker did discuss the details with Klein, he did not call the zoo, as required under The Times’s fact-checking standards. In addition, the article said that Klein was working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine, which does exist. Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended.
These discrepancies were pointed out to The Times by the Binghamton professor several weeks after the article was published; this editors’ note was delayed for additional reporting. These details should have been discovered during the reporting and editing process. Had that happened, the article would not have been published.
Although I'm a little skeptical on the practicality of the vending machine, I'm still quite sure that, if we work hard enough, we will be able to engenderamiable atmosphere between wild animals and us! ;)
Glee is an American musical comedy-drama television series that airs on Fox in the United States, and on GlobalTV in Canada. It focuses on the high school glee club New Directions competing on the show choir competition circuit, while its members deal with relationships, sexuality and social issues. (From Wikipedia)
List of Songs I love!!!
- All by myself
- Billionaire
- I look to you
- Loser like me
- Marry You (singing at a wedding)
- Listen (Dreamgirls)
- Blame it (on the alcohol) > my personal favorite movie clip!!!!!
- Forget You
- Pretending & Light Up the World (low quality picture)
- Jar of Hearts (sung when Rachel is betrayed by Finn)
- As long as you're there (Vocal Adrenaline performing)
These songs I have listed above are my favorite songs that I put in my mp3 player and listened to over a hundred times, I guess. I think these songs are amazing and they can be considered as classics. (My definition of classics: any kind of art, in this case songs that makes us feel better no matter how you feel before that)
I have watched whole 2 seasons of glee over a couple of times. When I watch dramas, it's not that there is a specific characteristic that I like, but I evaluate how I feel after watching it. Glee turned out to be very satisfactory, probably because there were whole bunch of great songs that are sung at right moments of these high school students' lives. Also, although these casts are not actually high school students, just thinking of high school in America just makes me feel excited and connected. Characters in glee go through a lot of difficulties, including girlfriend and boyfriend problems, homosexuality, teachers and students, conflicts between different clubs, family issues. Quinn, one of the characters in glee, made a baby with Puck while she was cheating on her boyfriend Finn Hudson.
It seems like, for most Korean students, that american high school students do not learn a lot or study so much compared to koreans. However, I personally think that what they learn through all these experiences are more valuable and extraordinary than merely sitting in a chair looking through textbooks. Through my indirect experiences in glee, I sometimes found myself in these characters, often in a negative way and found some ways to deal with this. Also, I could experience what will happen in my college life in America beforehand, so that it would be easy to solve these commom issues that will attack me in my near future.
While I was watching glee, I found myself sniffling with tears in my eyes or sometimes laughing with these characters. I tend to be very emotional in any kind of films, even with animation movies. This may look very stupid, but I really enjoyed sharing feelings with the characters when they faced problems that seemed like they could never be solved.
One thing I'm disappointed about glee is that the season 3 glee suddenly became terrible. There are no more wonderful songs and the story is so obvious. Also, the characters used to deal with their problems pretty well, but they started to become erratic students. I really hope the director would just get back to the original story again!
Friends: The Drama I want to write a book on. (Or a research paper like in Mr. Ganse's class...)
Friends is an American sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004. The series revolves around a group of friends in Manhattan. The series was produced by Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television. (From Wikipedia) When I first came to know <Friends>, I was watching it just to spend my remaining time. Then, as soon as I was watching about 3 pieces, I was slowly falling in love with this drama.
This is the blooper for friends season 8 and 9, just for fun introduction!!! ;)
<Friends> was always with me since I was in second grade of middle school. I went through tons of stress coming from my studies, my family and my friendship problems during this period of time because <Friends> was there for me, waiting to be watched(?). ;) To sum up how much I love this drama, there are 10 seasons, with each seasons consisted of about 25 pieces, each 30 to 40 minutes, and I have watched at least three or four times of all these. If it weren't for this drama, I would have just given up everything and deviate from my goal completely.
I was so into <Friends> for several elements and I personally think this is the most perfect drama series that humans ever created. As most people would know, there are 6 main characters, Pheobe Buffay, Chandler Bing, Monica and Ross Geller, Rachel Green and Joey Tribbiani. None of them speaks more or takes more part than others and each of them have their own, very distinct characteristics, which always justifies them for doing weird things. The story itself consists of both big and small experiences these characters go through, including marriage, divorce, workplace experiences or girlfriend boyfriend problems.
What I learned most from this drama is, definitely love. While GLEE taught me how to deal with high school and university problems that are very trivial and a lot of times fake relationships, Friends gave me lessons on serious relationships, such as guys who would marry me, or even more than that. It's true that I observed many couples and watched in a very close distance of my parents, I never looked from their perspectives. However, in Friends, out of six characters here, there are four of them who get married, and I could observe very serious relationship slowly developing, with so much difficulties and conflicts, then finally reaching a point at which they get married. I don't know how the director did this, but he drew highly sophisticated picture of this process, full of pure emotions, eliminating all the fake behaviors most people do today. I really liked how such comical story developed into such an emotional story, resulting in tears in my eyes.
To prove that I'm not the only one who was greatly moved by the drama, let me give you some statistics. It is unprecedented to continue one drama for 10 years, with 10 seasons with the exact same flow of story and exact same characters on it, from 1994 to 2004. Of course, their style of wearing clothes or how they wear make-ups have changed a lot during 10 years, but the storyline hasn't changed in a single way. Also, by the time they were filming season 10, the advertisement fees in between the air of Friends skyrocketed. Friends was broadcasted in America every week, on Thursday 5 o'clock in the evening, and by the time season 10 was being aired, the New York city became so quiet suddenly, as all the people were at home, watching Friends at the same time, as there were no prevalent downloading sites on the Internet at the time. In 2004, the weekly salary each of the cast received was over a billion dollars.
If anyone of you who is reading this haven't watched Friends yet, I strongly suggest you to watch it before you die, unless you'll regret after you die. ^^
Actually I want to give 10 stars out of five, but this is all I can do!
God, only if I could teach these kids and keep them under my nose! It's all I could think about as I was reading this book for about 30 pages. The four main characters, Chris, Teddy, Vern and Gordie all come from the family environment where they are not taken such good care of with tenderness and affection. They are either getting too much attention; beaten to near-death like Teddy, or is completely ignored from their parents like Gordie. The worse part is that they themselves know that others think of them as idiots, as they all come from such a terrible family background. People just make conclusions so fast like that, without trying to understand what they have been through and how they have changed. This was very evident when Chris said,
"And you know what, Gordie? By next June, we'll all be quits." "It's not gonna be like grammar school, that's why. You'll be in the college courses. Me and Teddy and Vern, we'll all be in the shop courses, playing pocket-pool with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses. Vern might even have to go into Remedial. You'll meet a lot of new guys. Smart guys. That's just the way it works, Gordie. That's how they got it set up." Then Gordie said, "Meet a lot of pussies is what you mean." But then Chris gripped his arm and said, "If you don't, then you're an asshole." "What's asshole about wanting to be with your friends?"
I was really moved and surprised at the same time at how matured and grown-up these kids are, at least in the inside of their hearts! They do go smoking and stealing guns and talk about weird stuff that I do not understand why, but they do think about their friends so deeply and care for each other all the time. Then I asked myself, 'With these kind-hearted minds, why are they acting so inappropriately all the time, losing their minds once in a while and doing things they're not supposed to?' The answer just came into my head like a lightening: EDUCATION.
We often say that the best teacher is our parents, and if we take a look at the family situations of each kid we can easily realize what kind of education they received as a child. Teddy must have learned violence and anger from his crazy father and Gordie must have learned to deal with everything on his own. And all four of them, of course, were never treated with tenderness, even at school. I think this environment of the kids have made them so vulnerable and naive. If anyone paid attention to the guys and taught them just a little bit of life lessons or maybe just gave them some interesting and didactic books to read, they would have had much more confidence, wisdom and knowledge.
"Most babies are accidents. Not me. I was engineered. Born to save my sister's life."
This line by Anna, the narrator of this movie, simply summarizes what this movie is all about. Anna is a younger sister of Kate, who was born to cure diseases of Kate by implanting all kinds of her organs to Kate's body whenever needed. Kate innately had terrible health, slowly dying from leukemia. She often choked up with blood, and was often suffering from medication treatments. I was even worried that her blood would soon be depleted as she was excreting too much blood from her body. Due to this, Anna received unwanted surgeries over ten times, by her age of 11.
At this age, she started to acknowledge what was happening to her and finally came to understand that their parents were violating her rights over her body. Not only that but her sister Kate also suddenly said she wants to stop all these. All the surgeries, chemical treatments, hurts and fights going on over her parents because of her.
Therefore, Anna finally chooses to file a law suit against her parents for violating her rights to make decisions over her body. Later in this movie, the doctor feels that it would be better to just give up and make Kate comfortable until she dies. So her father and brother Jessie takes her to the beach, a place where Kate likes the most. However, her mom becomes nuts about this and wants her to get medication and keep on trying until she cures. Nonetheless, the family all just go down to the beach and enjoys the beautiful and pleasant ambience of the beach. When Kate comes back to the hospital where she had been staying almost all of her life, she receives a photobook, filled with photos she and her family took, all of them smiling.
That night, Kate and her mom cried themselves to sleep. And that night, Kate died. Right after the movie ended, what came to mind was, life is so transient. I've been thinking about death a lot recently, and this movie seemed to just put all my scattered thoughts into order. You NEVER know what will happen just one second later, and your life just goes by. I think the reason why human beings are so afriad of death is because they really don't know how they will feel or what will happen after they die. Humans have knowledge boundaries that are so wide and deep that it is impossible to become aware of all of them during lifetime. However, there are also plenty of things we do not know, like death. As everyone has to go through death and nobody knows what will happen, it is quite natural to be afraid of it. But, whatever happens in the future, I think going against nature is always wrong. Anna's birth, at the first place, which was also against the nature, was the start of all the conflicts and fights and pain. Of course, in terms of birth itself, it should be celebrated, but it certainly brought lots of anguish. Moreover, at the end of the movie, the mother keep on tries to continue the chemical medication, which hurts Kate so much, she wants to stop and give up. This, making a frantic last-ditch effort, did not work in the end, and it only brought fights and pain to everyone. Thus, I think we should never go against the nature of what will happen, especially if it is impossible to be controlled with human power.
Omnipotent: [ADJ] Someone or something that is omnipotent has complete power over things or people.
Dayfly: [NOUN] A mayfly is an insect which lives near water and only lives for a very short time as an adult.
