Today I didn't go to school until 1pm because I truely need to finish my essays for college admissions. If you knew me last year, especially if you are Mr. Fogarty or Mrs. Moran, my english teachers, you know that I am a terrible procrastinator at writng essays, but once I actually do it they don't turn out that bad. Anyway, today I was browsing the Macalaster website to find specific aspects about the school that I can use to demonstrate why I would be a good student for them. Their attitude is directed toward promoting multicultural and international perspectives. This is also my goal, the only problem is that I have to figure out how to write about that with out being clique or dreamy. The approach I am thinking about taking is writing about Texas-multiculturalism, Nebraska-student teacher ratio, Minnesota-leadership, and Seoul-international perspective. If you didn't know, in Texas I lived in Arlington, a suburb with a very diverse community. Nebraska was a school named Rokeby consisting of 35 kids and about 5 teachers. Minnesota I just like to talk and lead class discussions or activities. And Seoul is definetly international, but something else really interesting is that it is about 99% homogeneous. The problem is trying to fit all four of these things plus the reasons why I am writing about them into a 500 word essay. It's hurting my brain trying to get rid of the unneeded material. I haven't even been able to write a complete first draft.

Well, today when I did go to school there was a chior contest where each class in grades 1 and 2 (10 and 11) performed a song. I didn't participate , but my class did the sister act version of "I will follow him" another did "Happy day" and many of them were christmas medlies in korean. Some I didn't recognize. My class didn't get first prize I don't think, but we had a pizza party anyway. In some ways I felt really left out, because today even more so than usual people were afraid to talk to me. Maybe because I was so preoccupied by college.

After school I sat in a coffee shop for an hour working on my essays then went to meet my Rotary counselor. We have both been very busy, so I haven't really seen him much in Korea. Today we went out for Chinese food with his son who is a junior at a boarding school in Rhode Island, but home for Winter Vacation. The night was really nice. Chinese food and then more coffee and some really good chocolat chocolat cake. I felt bad, because they wanted me to speak Korean and then they would reply in English, but lately my head is so swarmed with English words that are trying to form themselves into my essay that I could barely think of a Korean sentence. That's what I will be practicing over break.

On the way home I met two people whom I haven't seen since September, Caleb and Heather from my church. I was walking in the subway and someone grabbed the my backpack. I was really confused, but there was Caleb. It was God sent, and only two days before Christmas. Heather and I exchanged numbers and they invited me to Christmas brunch at their house around noon on Sunday.

When I got home, my house was filled with about nine elementary school kids. They were all very shy of me because they were afraid to speak English. But then I took out my double deck of cards and taught them how to play go fish and everything turned out really well. It was Christmas because we were playing cards. Somehow many of my christmas traditions are showing up in untraditional ways even though I didn't plan it.

More after Christmas. The caffine in my system just told me this would be a good time to write.