Journaling

To me, journaling has always been something of a hobby that I return to again and again. I don't return to it because I love it so much (though I do love it!); I return to it because I have this need in my life to get things down on paper and keep them for all eternity. I think I have a weird complex about this, in a sense.

My issue with journaling has always been that I invariably end up writing about things that piss me off (so, so much!) because I have a lot of anger that I hold on to (without expressing it in my everyday life, of course). When I look back on my journals, I toss a lot of them because all they seem to be is a collection of angry thoughts, written really heavy-handedly by a very angry me. I don't want my memories to all be angry! I want to remember the good AND the bad.

From this article from psychcentral, though, I apparently did know a thing about journaling:

University of Texas at Austin psychologist and researcher James Pennebaker contends that regular journaling strengthens immune cells, called T-lymphocytes. Other research indicates that journaling decreases the symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. Pennebaker believes that writing about stressful events helps you come to terms with them, thus reducing the impact of these stressors on your physical health.

Okay, but writing about just the stressful events can't be good, right?? I don't regret throwing out my old journals because they were just cesspools of negativity! I want to be known as having been happy, not having been sad and depressed.

So my latest love is my Midori Traveler's Notebook (two of them, actually!), which I have wanted for a long, long time but didn't get previously because someone that I really didn't like has one and I didn't want anything in my life to be the same as theirs (see what I mean about the anger??). Since I haven't seen that person in years and I doubt I'll ever see them again, I asked my husband for one for my birthday this year. He bought me my brown one (the bigger one, in the back! I have no use for tiny little notebooks, which is his in the front) and I love it! My birthday is in the beginning of June, so I've had this for a while, but still adore it.

 

I love stickers (can't you tell??), and have been going all kinds of crazy buying stickers for my Midori. Sticker mania!!

 

The husband just laughs at me every time I buy more stickers or (washi) tape or anything, because he knows there's no stopping me! I love embellishments, and I'm not the type of person that can't use them (oh, I use them all the time!).

So recently, we bought two more (!!) Midori Travelers Notebooks, this time both in blue! This is supposedly a limited edition, but it seems to still be widely available online. These came with the little airplane charms you see below (the husband gifted me with the four-leaf clover on my brown one):

And the blue ones are embossed! So cute! (Though I much prefer my all-lowercase embossing to my husband's all-uppercase embossing, haha!) Click on the photo below for a bigger view:

In case you didn't know (who are you, anyway??), I have been Instagramming more frequently than blogging or Facebooking lately. I love Instagram because it's fast, it's easy, and it's just one photo per post with a short (or long) description. And it's always chronological! Facebook annoys me with its order, which seems to be what it thinks I want to see. How does it know?? And when I change it to sort by time, it re-sorts itself in a very short while! Argh...! so Instagram it is!

Out of all my journaling posts, this is the one that has the most likes:

 

I think maybe it's because of the flowers? I have no idea! (The flowers are from the invitation to a co-worker's wedding. I thought including this in my journal was a nice way to commemorate the wedding, even though I don't really like said co-worker all that much!) 

And this is just one more of my journaling posts, of which there are quite a few now:

 

I love writing in my journal, and I don't worry about mistakes. Who cares, right?? And mistakes are where you learn about yourself and how you grow as a person! That's what I'm telling myself, anyway!

And this is my most recent Instagram post about journaling, which is a work-in-progress:

As you can see, journaling seems to have taken over my life! (It hasn't, really, I promise ... I only journal maybe five minutes per day.) But I do think about it a lot more, and think about what I do every day, since I write it all down. It's a good thing, I feel, but journaling (diary-keeping?) has made me think that the days really go by too quickly! Time is so fleeting. Sniffle.

The weather here in Busan has been extremely hot and muggy for the past couple weeks, which is gross and makes me want to die, so I'm happily at the office at the moment, enjoying the (overly) air-conditioned rooms!

That's it for journaling ... for now. We'll see how long I can keep this up! I'm hoping for a really long while, since it's easy and I'm enjoying it.

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Busan Eats!

Busan is sweltering lately. Seriously, so hot and humid that it makes me want to stab someone, preferably myself, so I can get away from the heat and humidity. Gross.

So this past weekend, we went on a little date to watch "암살" ("Assassination"), which is the hot new movie lately (that our company worked on). I honestly think people are just going out to watch movies because it's so freaking hot at home... but whatever. The movie was hard for me to understand- I may speak Korean like a native, but I certainly do not understand old school Korean very well. Or at all, frankly. Hmmph. It was annoying and I nearly fell asleep in the middle of the movie, but at least it was pretty? 

After the movie, we went to have dinner. We had braised chicken, an old favorite of mine when I lived in Ilsan! Aww, I miss Ilsan...

 

The restaurant is called BongChu Chicken (website is shockingly in (bad) English!) (or 봉추찜닭, the website for which is in Korean). What is braised chicken, you ask? It's this!

 

And it is so delicious. Mmmmm~~ Sweet and salty and chicken-y with 당면 (cellophane noodles made out of yams, which I LOVE) and carrots and, oddly, cucumbers. I know people eat cooked cucumbers, but I still think it's weird. They get all soft and mushy and weird. Anyways, YUM! 

Then we went to have coffee at Cafe Aslan, (website in Korean), which is a sort of frou-frou cafe quite close to our place. (We walked all day, because weekends here in Busan are TERRIBLE for traffic! Living in a tourist-y area is not good here in Korea.)

 

Aww, it's the husband, who doesn't know I have a blog~ He'd probably kill me if he knew I had uploaded this photo anywhere online. Good thing I only have about 3 readers! Cafe Aslan is really cute and the atmosphere is great, but it's SO EXPENSIVE. It's ₩6,100 (~$5.50) for an Americano! Which is like ₩5,000 at Starbucks, which is an expensive import here! ... But what can you do. You pay for the atmosphere, I guess??

It was pretty late, so we had green tea lattes, which were horrendously sweet, unsurprisingly. Koreans love sweets! The little cupcakes or muffins were surprisingly good. I don't expect Korean bakery items labeled with "cream cheese" to actually taste like cream cheese, but these did! Yummy. We still have two at home, which I just remembered.

I've been at the office for two days in a row, which is unusual for me, but it's been SO HOT at home that I am taking refuge in the air-conditioning at work!

That's all for now. I have another blog post coming soon about journaling (with pen and paper!) because I've been all about that lately. ^_^

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Typhoon Season ☔️

Typhoon season is upon us, argh! 

The only good news is, it's much cooler and humid, but not as humid, as up north, in Seoul. Whew. I'm actually cold right now! I put on a hoodie and warm socks today, it's that cold. 

I'm not excited about jangma (장마, typhoon season in Korean), but I'm not dreading it the way I used to when I lived in Ilsan or Seoul.

In other news, Korean ice cream bars are amazing! (For the most part, anyway.) It was summery enough last week for me to have had the two above. Yum. I'll miss these when (if??) I leave Korea...

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