WE FINISHED BOYS OVER FLOWERS!

Self-proclaimed Jihoo fangirl Grace had this to say: "It had a sucky ending. It was too complete, too happy. I don't know if there's such a thing...it was just too perfect, you know?....Woah, I think my bald spot's getting bigger."

The Beginning of the End

Jo got back last Tuesday. He has some nifty new glasses; I'll post pictures ASAP. Then yesterday Stuart and I had a class together. Oh boy.

Today I noticed Grace's schedule hanging outside her door, and it brought a tear to my eye (and a twitch to my photo-taking finger):

Here is also a picture of the snow that fell this past Monday night.


I gotta get a better cameraphone. Anyway, in other news, we still haven't finished Ghot Boda Namja! It's getting serious. We have five episodes to go, and I'm just dying to find out which androgynous makeup-wearing rich boy Jan Di will marry!!!

Christmas gift from Gu Jun-Pyo

Light Side, Dark Side

Well, it's just the four of us again, and in the twenty-four hours since I drove T.A. to the train station, we have experienced some of our most camaraderly highs and and our schmuckiest lows.

Let me paint a picture.

Yesterday evening the four of us were in the living room. Stuart was cooking dinner (stuffed mushrooms, pasta, and carmelized pears for dessert), Grace was at the kitchen table working on a paper, I was on Paolo (our couch) reading Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, and Jo was in the corner leafing through the Lord of the Rings: a Bestiary that I had compulsively bought that weekend. After a delicious dinner we watched 꽃보다男子 (Boys Over Flowers) and then went to bed. It was adorable.

This afternoon, however, found Jo drinking Coors Lite and composing songs on the guitar about how much he wanted to skip class and keep drinking Coors Lite and composing songs on the guitar. I was on Paolo again, this time watching Star Trek: Next Generation on the left side of my computer screen and playing Minesweeper on the right. After Grace dragged Jo out of the house two minutes before their class started, S arrived, eating Tasty Tuesday empanadas and complaining about how he's lost a reading that I photocopied him and that he had two weeks to read and now, two hours before the class, hadn't touched.

And now, as I sit in class this afternoon, writing this blog post, all I have to say is--that's all I have to say about that.

Infectious Hiccoughs

TA37 has emerged unscathed once again from the second major weather disaster to hit the Northeast this semester. We were snowed in for the campus Halloween party, which wasn't so bad (though it means I'll have to actually eat those radishes I bought for my Luna Lovegood costume). Instead, we had a toasty warm dinner of 김치찌개 (kimchi soup) while Grace battled her way through the storm to return to us from her long sojourn in the city. Chocolate chip cookies, hard cider, and Boys Over Flowers rounded off a great night! I put a pinch of cinnamon in the cookies--they were fabulous. Cinnamon makes everything better.

Speaking of BOF, lately there's been this great romantic tension between 'good girl' Ga Eul and 'playboy' Yi Jung. In the last episode, Ga Eul finally worked up the courage to "confess" her feelings for Yi Jung and ask him out on a real date (not a pretend date to make your friend and your friend's ex-girlfriend upset so they'd work together to spy on you and hopefully rekindle their romance but for the interruption of your friend's domineering mother--but I digress). Anyway, this was Yi Jung's response to Ga Eul:

I have three rules when it comes to women. One, I don't mess with good girls. Two, I don't mess with stupid girls. And three, I don't mess with girls who are friends of my friends. And you, Ga Eul, fulfill all three categories.

Man, who writes this stuff?? At least we only have 5 episodes left.

Today we made spaghetti spaghetti squash! Here's the recipe:

1. cut a spaghetti squash (yes, it's a thing) in half lengthwise, put it on a greased baking pan, and bake it for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees, or until it's soft and baked-looking.
2. While that's going, sautee some garlic and onions in olive oil. Make sure the onions are well-cooked so He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named doesn't put a curse on you or anything.
3. Make Grace boil some spaghetti.
4. Once the spaghetti squash is roasted, scoop out the insides (which look like spaghetti) and add them to the pan. Toss with salt, pepper, and fresh parsley.
   
5. Pour the pan's contents into a serving bowl and mix in Parmesan cheese. Serve the meal with that spaghetti Grace made and some more Parmesan cheese to taste.
6. Bonus Step: heat up some Ragu Alfredo sauce for the certain someone who rejects spaghetti squash outright on the basis of its perceived visual similarity to sauerkraut.
   

We had a lot of guests from around campus this weekend, which was great, but we're closing the doors now and going into decontamination lockdown, because it appears that an extremely infectious case of hiccoughs is running rampant throughout our TA. I was the first to fall--not even drinking water upside down, holding my breath, or looking at Jo's face could make them go away. Now Grace, too, has fallen. The other two are surely not long for involuntary diaphragm spasms.

ADDENDUM: I just want to note that certain parties have chastised me for my relatively high consumption rate of milk and soymilk. Therefore, I am now on milk half-rations. It's been a struggle. Thank goodness the cashiers at the Retreat and the Kiosk let you add milk to your tea and coffee for free...

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

 It's the first weekend after classes have started, and Grace is home visiting family.  So, in her absence, we haven't been watching Boys Over Flowers. At all! Isn't that crazy!?!  So in the absence of Korean soap operas to occupy my time, I thought I'd post a little plot summary, on the off chance that any of you aren't familiar with Korean drama.


Khot Poda Namja (Boys Over Flowers) is about a bunch of teenagers who go to a fancy prep high school for the ultra-rich.  The main characters are JanDi, your average girl, who got into the school on a scholarship, and JunPyo, a super-rich son of the richest family in Korea, who actually owns the school and is something of a bully.  They fight a lot, which obviously means it's true love.

Then we've got GaEul, JanDi's best friend, who seems to have a thing for JunPyo's charming rich-boy friend YiJung, a.k.a. Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 

The other two main characters are JiHoo, who only wears white and who has also got this off-again and on-again romance with JanDi, and WuBin, a.k.a. Ringo.  I wonder how their subplots are going to finish?

From left to right: WuBin, YiJung, JunPyo, JanDi, and JiHoo.

Well, Grace gets back tomorrow, so hopefully some of our burning questions will be answered! Now, I should probably get back to my homework, so I'll be able to watch Boys Over Flowers without guilt! ...Well, almost without guilt...

A Post in the Meantime

TA37 had our first party last night!  In honor of Christie and Sarah's birthdays, we had cookie pie that I baked (which turned out hard and crunchy, though our dear friends were too nice to criticize it) and lots of soymilk and Bailey's Irish Cream in our shot-goblets. It was marvelous. Michelle said that this was the first party she had ever been to that served milk. I am very proud of holding this honor.

Pictures of the party are coming later. Now I'm writing to record some snippets of conversation that have occurred today between myself, Jo and Grace (Stuart's at work all day).

When Grace and I left for class at 10:15 this morning, we left Jo a few chores to do: dishes, garbage, setting up the kimchi fridge...nothing too much!

“Wait,” he called pitifully as we walked out. “When are you coming back?”

“We’ll be back for lunch,” I said. “Want to make us something?”

“Yeah,” said Grace, “Make me a sandwich, honey.”

And she closed the door on Jo’s womp-womp face.

When Grace got back at noon, she greeted Jo in the kitchen with a "What's up, honey bun?"
"Who're you talking to?" said Jo indignantly.
"Yo' mama," Grace replied.

Now, Grace and I are in our respective rooms, and Jo is reading in the living room. Grace was singing the theme song from Khot Poda Namja (Boys Over Flowers). You can here it hear:

"Stop!" Jo cried; "You're torturing me, reminding me that we haven't watched Khot Boda Namja in over twenty-four hours!"
But Grace didn't stop singing.
"You know, Grace," called Jo, "I'm getting the feeling that you enjoy torturing me."
"You're very perceptive, Jo!" Grace called back.

I'VE GOT IT CORNERED!!!!

Never fear, fair friends--TA37 has survived Hurricane Irene!  We've also survived Korean dramas. I'm still not sure which is worse.

We went for a walk this afternoon after the storm abated, and encountered all sorts of wildlife!  First, a baby snapping turtle:

He was so cute. And look, he almost blended in perfectly with the asphalt! Fearing indiscriminate tire wheels, we moved the turtle (whom Stuart inexplicably christened 'Chugims') to the lake.

 Walking around the lake, we found a pubescent frog. We knew it was a teenager because it still had a tail, and because you could just feel the waves of angst rolling off its oily green-and-brown skin.

"This hurricane is nothing compared to the tempest in my amphibian soul..."
Later, we went to a TA pizza party that was thrown because of the hurricane. On the way, we ran into a womp-womp, which Jo managed to corner against the TAs:

 "I've got it cornered!!!" he howled.


But Jo didn't have the heart to truly harm the womp-womp. As he explained to us later, the cornered womp-womp just looked at him with this expression:

It was awesome seeing old friends at the TA pizza party! Now we're all back at good old 37, with a few visitors and friends, and it seems we're having a Netflix party for the rest of the evening.  Ain't no party like a TA-Pizza-Hurricane-Irene-Netflix party!

-Jill

Let there be light!

Whew. It's been a busy few days. Yesterday, Stuart, Grace and I went to Target to buy house things. Jo was off tabling for the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, and he still doesn't have a house key to the TA, so we tried to find him, but we gave up after a few halfhearted attempts, figuring he'd find a way to amuse himself until we got back.

Target was an adventure. Stuart was in a mood.  We were all in 'moods,' actually. You'd have thought we'd all overdosed on Super B-Complex Vitamins, if you know what I mean.

For when a regular B-complex doesn't suffice.

When we got back that evening, we found Jo and began setting up the new lights we had bought for the rather dark TA living room. Jo, however, took umbrage at our presumption in not consulting with him before making our purchase.   Insisting that he was perfectly fine with dark rooms and that $7-lamps from Target were an unnecessary extravagance, he thereby initiated what may be considered our first financial domestic tiff. We managed to put aside our disagreements, however, for the sake of moving the couches, Scott and Paolo, into the house.  Getting Paolo up the TA stairs was quite an ordeal! But now our living room looks lovely, with two couches, two lamps, and a TV with the Wii all hooked up.

Last night we celebrated our new living room by watching the second episode of Boys Before Flowers!  Jo and Stuart love it. Grace and I hate it. At least it's an opportunity to learn a bit of Korean. And discuss cute boys :)

My favorite is Joseph Gordon-Levitt:

Well, I think he's got a different name, but he looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, doesn't he?

Jo and Stuart like Ginger (that's her real name) although they assure us that prettier girls are coming later in he show.

And there's a character named Ji-Hoo, but we think he looks and acts like Tian An:

And finally, there's another boy who seems to say nothing besides "Yo yo yo!" in a Korean accent.  He's clearly the Ringo of the series:

Well, anyway, this morning was the Bagel Brunch with the Freshmen, and now we've just had fried rice for lunch courtesy of Michelle, who got it from the International Students' picnic the other day.  I think tonight the four of us will have dinner all together for the first time!