Thoughts of an Aspiring Teenage Writer

Oh my gosh, another one of my fave book series is turning into a movie! I really love it how all the popular book series are being turned into movies…it makes me feel very nostalagic/happy.

Although I read this series, like, four years ago, and a lot of things look pretty childish, I can’t wait until it comes out so I can see it! (or at least see it when the DVD comes out…it all depends on whether or not I’ll have time this month >.>)

My thoughts on the trailer:

1. Hmmm I imaged Mr. Crepsley as being…more handsome. LOL. He’s, like,, my fave character in the series, which is funny because I more or less disliked him in the first book. But I guess he has charisma, and I know that that actor is very good/talented. So we’ll see how he pulls through.

2. I like the actor that plays the best friend of Darren. I know he’s good b/c his performance in “Bridge to Terabithia” was phenomenal. I hope the movies (hopefully there is going to be more than one movie >.>) follow the books so that he will have a bigger part than he does in the first.

3. Gah. Again with the three book in one movie thing. This sort of kind of didn’t work for “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, but I hope it does for Cirque du Freak.  Although the fact that they decided to go with this method sort of annoys me, I understand that  making/having people watch 12 different movies is just plain IMPOSSIBLE.

4. The graphics for the circus scenes sort of bothers me. IDK. Maybe it’s because I see too many movies with good visual effects. Or maybe my imagination’s capacity to visualize things surpasses any computer’s ability to create. But in any case, I’m hoping the v. effects will be better on the actual movie than the trailer.

And yes. I know. I should be doing my homework now. I will. I just took a little detour from printing out the current event and the reading for Humanities.

(A bit of situation irony: We’re learning about the Leviathan. Scott Westerfeld’s newest book is called “The Leviathan”. HAH this made me smile while reading the Hobbes section of yesterday’s reading.)

Wow. Korea was awesome. I did things there that I would most likely never be able to do at home.
I also got to meet family members that I’ve last seen 3 years ago. (and it’s official, I’m the shortest one in the family.
-sigh-) I also ate a lot of korean food, walked around the cities for hours, and basically had a really fan-freakin’-tastic time.

Here are some of the things that I got to do (for the first time) in Korea:

• go to this restaraunt where the first floor is a live fish market and the second story is where you get to eat the fresh sashimi.
• see little crabs get boiled in hot water (I was thinking all philosphically about the futility life all the while)
• go to an outdoors fish market that stretches about a mile long where people are selling alive fish (they kill it when you buy it, of courses)
•  set and feed a fire (yes, an actual fire) over a primitive stove so we could boil a duck (not an alive one, thank God)…I had a little Fia moment when I was feeding the fire with flammable objects like newspapers and scrap paper…newspaper is excellent, by the way. LOL)
• eat a hamburger where the bun is actually made of rice. (pretty good, except, too much mayonnaise…and I had to pick out the pickles, first, as always)
• get stuck in traffic for like 10 or so hours
• sleep, exercise, and basically live in a supermarket (my grandparents own one, and they had a cycling machine in the store. LOL. I was like a cycling guard dog, making sure no one steals anything while also burning a lot of calories. Now THAT’s being productive)
• Watch the korean dramas I like so much on live TV.  (I miss that now…there is, like, nothing to watch on American TV. It’s all either hospital dramas,  FBI-like scenarios, soap operas that are so inappropriate my parents don’t let me watch them),the weather, and sports)
•  See people I actually know (not personally, of course, but that’d be cool) on advertisements and posters (sorry, I don’t memorize the Victoria Secret/Abercrombie models)
• ride the bus in the aisle with lawn chairs b/c the bus was full
• watch my grandpa hunt for little freshwater crabs with chicken scraps
• eat under a bridge (it was so hot that we were just like, “let’s set up the picnic blanket under that bridge.”)…this happened like 3+ times
• sleep in a one-room, studio apartment (in Seoul)…I want one of my own one day
•  eat original Turkish kebobs (done by actual Turkish people living in Seoul)
• get carsick on two consecutive bus rides x.x
• go to this beauty school where people learn how to do nails, style hair, make fashionable clothes,  apply makeup (not ordinary makeup, but like, makeup for actors and other celebrities), and design weird costumes…all in one place (my mom’s friend is,like, the headmistress there.)
• go to the back-alleys of Seoul and do some browsing for illegal, fake purses from Hong Kong that look like the real thing but cost way cheaper (my mom wanted a prada purse, not me). I thought I was going to die back there b/c it was the sort of place where a random thug could walk up to you and shoot you or something.
• eat barbecue duck at 11 o’clock at night (not my idea, but my uncle’s. had indigestion the next morning and had to go to the gym and work out for like 2 hours to get my insides back to normal)
• work out for at least two hours in a gym with a great view of the city and watch some old Jackie Chan movie while on the treadmill.
• steal apples from an orchard that was right next to my aunt’s house in the country. (we only took like, 2, so don’t fret…plus it wasn’t my idea.)
• realize that I have way more family members than I thought…so many great uncles (at least 5?!) and great aunts (3?)…not to mention they’re children…and their grandchildren.
• get more than $300 in less than a month from the above great-uncles, great-aunts, grandparents, uncles/aunts, random cousins once removed (which I now know means ‘the cousin of your parent’), my mom’s friends, etc.
• drink green tea on the summit of a mountain. (we used a cable car, of course…but there was still like a 200 m climb up and down)
• go to a sauna after visiting the said mountain.
• go to a bathroom stall out in the country where there was nothing but a big hole. D: 

There are many other things that I did in Korea, but I can’t think of any more right now. I’ll add more later if I think of any.

Starting July 19th, I will be in Korea for about a month. (I’ll, like, come back a day or two or three before school starts @.@)
I might still update my blog and check my emails, but I don’t know for sure. It all depends on whether I can access the computer or not.
I’ve currently been working on my novels at 2-3 AM every morning. And I’m strangely not tired/can still wake up at 7ish every morning…I surprise myself sometimes.

If I get a chance to post another entry or edit this one, I shall put up a list of the books I’ve read so far in my summer vacation. If not, well, I’ll just do it after I come back.

This is going to be a rather depressing entry, but I hope you will still read this in respect for Claire Yu, the little girl who left this world last Wednesday (June 24, 2009).

She was five years old, and lived here in Plano. She went to our church, and the first and only time I met her was approximately last year, when I babysat for her parents. She drowned in a community pool (I don’t know where) by falling in the water (she apparently couldn’t swim) while her dad was busy watching her older brother’s swimming lesson. He looked away for just a few minutes or so, and they found her corpse floating in the water near the shady area of the pool. I know. It sounds like something that you would see in a horror movie of some sort. But it really happened.

I went to her funeral this morning…and it was a rather new experience for me, since this was the first funeral I’d ever gone to (if you don’t count the funeral of my grandmother when I was two, which you probably shouldn’t because I don’t remember anything about her or her funeral). As I sat there, attending the funerary mass (I’m Catholic), several thoughts flashed around my mind:

1. Life is full of surprises. Who knew that that little girl would drown in a pool on that particular Wednesday? I’m sure she herself and all the people around her hadn’t even given a single thought about death and several times more about her going to first grade after summer. I doubt it that on the last day of school, she walked out of her elementary school wondering if this was going to be the last time she would ever see the building. This led me to think about my own last day of school, and sort of feeling a dull apprehension about how unpredictable life is. Her funeral made me realize that NOTHING is predictable. I or you or your neighbor can randomly die sometime today, this week, this month, this year. Depressing, but true.

2. As I sat there, I couldn’t help but think how stupid worrying about things like SAT, high school, GPA, cliques, college, boyfriends/girlfriends (etc) really are. As the priest bluntly pointed out, the only thing that is for certain in a human’s life is death. Why waste time worrying about things that might not even happen? Of course, by saying all of this, by no means am I saying that we should all just spend all day in bed until we rot or something, but this experience has allowed me to realize that every single moment in life is precious (cliche, I know, but so true) and worrying about the future seems like such a waste of time.

3. What really happens after death? Although I am a Catholic, I’m not really what you’d call devout. I do have doubts now and then about the afterlife, and this was one of the moments where, even as my mouth was praising the lamb of God and the heavenly pastures, my mind was racing around in a futile attempt of correctly guessing what happens after death.

4. The Goths and all those emos in the world have no right to wear black all the time. Black, I think, should be limited and only be worn in funerals. Her funeral has made me realize this because the little, cramped hall was just too…depressing with everyone in black. I doubt many people in this world will still want to wear black ‘just because it “matches the color of my soul” or “looks cool” ‘ know what an awful, scary atmosphere a room full of black creates.

5. Speaking of colors, I also saw that pink is not always a happy, happy color. The girl’s coffin was a light pink. It was, second to black, the most depressing color I’d ever seen in my life. I don’t know if it was because the little pink box was surrounded by a room of black or what. But I will probably never look at it the same way again.

6. I saw. Her. Corpse. … It was my first time seeing a dead body, and strangely enough, it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Which led me to think back to the priest’s sermon about how death is really a very long sleep in which we await until we get to meet with God. She really looked as if she were sleeping. Sure, there were some gray areas around her face and her facial expression did look uncannily like the one on “Daisy”, the little piglet I unfortunately had to dissect. But I could really understand why how in some books, they describe the dead person as looking as if they could just be asleep. She just looked so peaceful, and there was even a trace of a smile (enigmatic like the Mona Lisa’s) on her lips.((Which baffled me because I would think that one would not be smiling right before you asphyxiate.))

7. And of course, because I am human and maybe a little more self-centered than norm, I couldn’t help but think of my own funeral and wonder who would come to it. Would my family in Korea fly to the United States? Probably not, they can’t afford it and don’t have the papers. Would friends from other states (California and Florida) come? Probably not. Some of those people I haven’t seen in more than five years. Would I have a Korean service like the little girl had or an American one? I personally would prefer that my parents chose to do an “international” one, so no one would be confused. What songs would they sing at my funeral? Probably Catholic church music. But would they sing the Gothic/ones in a minor key that I love so much? Probably not, considering the fact that the ones in her funeral were the ‘too-optimistic’ ones that I don’t like. Would my mom look as fragile as Claire’s mom looked in front of the coffin? Would my dad be like Claire’s dad and try to dab away the tears forming in the corner of his eyes? Probably.

8. Her funeral also served as a sort of wake-up call for me. Other than little idle thoughts here and there, I’d never thought of the possibility that I or any one else could die so early. Sure, my grandmother died when she was fifty or so and my uncle died when he was forty…but I guess it’s true what they say about teenagers. A large part of me largely assumed that young people in this time and society were virtually ’safe’ from death until middle-age. But looking at the fragile, doll-like girl in the coffin sort of brought me back to reality. It made me realize how limited my time on Earth is and that I should not waste so many days of my life when I could be doing something more…productive. (Yes, this means I’m going to start writing/working on my novels more.) As my favorite song from Muse wisely reminds, “Our time is running out.”

Because of this experience and newly-gained realizations, I am eternally grateful to Claire and wish her luck in the afterlife.

In pace requiescat. Claire Yu (2004-2009)