First Winter Ordeals in Korea: In Which Steph Gets Mysteriously Misdiagnosed With Bird Flu and Receives Her First IV Drip

I had been warned by numerous parties in the months leading up to this: my first winter in Korea would be particularly vicious upon my immune system. I was told stories of perfectly healthy twenty-somethings who, within a month of arriving in Korea, came down with the most serious illnesses of their lives. We're talking hospitalization, everything. Good thing health care in Korea is so affordable!

The weekend before Christmas, I came down with spectacular symptoms. Sore throat, throbbing sinuses, inner ear pain, headaches, full body aches... you name it, I most likely had it. Stupidly I struggled through the weekend, pretending that it was just a temporary dip in my health. But Monday dawned, and it had been over 24 hours since I had slept well and eaten more than a few spoonfuls of stuff, and I decided, fine, I'd go to a local health clinic, get some antibiotics, and beat this illness to the ground.

A dear but unfortunate friend of mine accompanied me to the clinic. It's a good thing she agreed to come with me, too, because in addition to the language barrier, I was totally not myself. Lights looked weird and buildings were kind of wavering in my vision. I decided to conserve my energy and focus on my hot, uneven breaths making their way in, out past my ravaged throat.

The doctor at the clinic announced that I had a high fever, so he couldn't give me any antibiotics until I had first brought the fever down, which would take a day or two. (In retrospect: HAH!) I zombied over to an examination room, where a nurse told me that I'd get a shot that would help decrease my body temperature... a shot in my butt. Yes, I live in a culture where butt shots are commonly prescribed. Something about the shots being more effective sooner.

This is where things go a bit fuzzy.

The nurse told me I'd be getting a butt shot, and the next thing I knew, my world had shrunk to the wall I was clinging to as a wave of dizziness crashed over me and flung me around. I couldn't draw enough breath into my lungs. I didn't know which way was up and which was down. I'm not sure how long I lasted that way, seconds, minutes, hours, but when I finally came back to my head I was lying on the examination table and the shot had been administered. I dimly had felt two people heaving me onto the table, felt someone unbutton my jeans for me. (Afterwards, my friend joked, "I feel bad that I kind of took advantage of you. I feel like I should've wine-and-dined you first.") But the resounding thought that was in my head--indeed, the thought that would haunt my mind for the next few days--was that I just wanted to be left alone so I could cry angry tears over how I hate not being able to control my body, to will away any ill health.

Anyway, stuff continued to happen. My friend informed me that, after hearing that I had been to Taiwan the previous weekend to visit relatives, the doctor said that I might have avian bird flu, and so I should go to the hospital across the river. (In retrospect: WHAT IN THE H---.) In the hospital: hours of bureaucracy and procedures to follow. Leaning against walls or lying down whenever I could. Meanwhile, stumbling wherever my friend led me and thinking, melodramatically, "Is this death? I think death might be preferable to this."

Anyway, I can't even make the hospital procedure part sound interesting for this blog post. To make a too-long story short, eventually I was able to see a doctor, who made a funny face at being told that the first doctor thought I had bird flu (at which point the first doctor was promptly nicknamed The Quack Doctor. I mean, bird flu, really? Did he think that Taiwan is all farmland and I was playing with my family's chickens on my ancestral farm?), made an even funnier sound upon looking at my throat (hah hah), and then finally, finally prescribed me an IV. Oh, the relief. Not that I crave IV drips like people often do in China, who, when they feel even the slightest bit under the weather, rush off to the hospital and get hooked up. It's just that at that point I was feeling seriously dehydrated and weak from not eating. I was drinking fluids aplenty, but the moment any swallow passed, with difficulty, past my throat, my tongue shriveled up into a desert again and I was fairly panting with thirst. That, plus the no-appetite thing, actually made me appreciative of Asia's penchant for prescribing IV drips to ill patients.

Here is a random picture of it snowing in Seoul, because. Um, 'tis the season?

I thought it'd be too Generation Me-Me-Me of me to take a selfie while hooked up to the IV, so unfortunately I have no pictures of the now-memorable incident. But there I was, a contraption taped to my arm (I have a thing with needles and fainting so I didn't look too closely), trying to distract myself from the fact that, right before me, some unnatural fluid the yellow of semi-unhealthy piss was flowing into me. Around me were the rattling coughs of octogenarians, the nasally voices of the same octogenarians yapping to the nurses, the darkly funny trill of someone's "Dancing Queen" ringtone going off beyond the plastic curtains around my bed.

Before, I had this conception that an IV drip was a miracle medicine, a legal sort of steroid that would have me bouncing out of the hospital bed, ripping out the needles, and skipping towards the door. Yeah, no. Sure, it brought me from 10% (on blackout's door) to around 30% (limbs have stopped shaking, though still weak), which was good, and got me home, and made ever optimistic me think that I was on the track to recovery... and then the next day I was promptly back on the hospital bed, with IV Drip #2 in my arm.

I'm still on the road to recovery, I think, but at this point I'm closer to the end than the beginning. I never received an official diagnosis (language barriers, y'all), but I'm pretty sure I had a nasty combination of the flu plus a throat infection. Hmm. Sounds about right. My sense of taste still feels a bit off, but I believe I am consuming an acceptable amount of food now.

But enough is enough. The point really isn't anything deep like how punishing Korean winters can be, or how accessible Korean health care is. It's just that I had a story about my life in Seoul that I wanted to share. And that may bode well for the future of my blogging.

Thanksgiving 2013 Update

I told myself I'd give myself until Thanksgiving to write this post. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Not only does it bring about the promise of good food and (sometimes, if I can swing it) family, but the anticipation of Thanksgiving helps me keep in mind the humbling thought of gratitude for the blessings I have in my life.

Boy, are there a lot of blessings. Some of you remember the post I wrote over the summer in which I talked about realizing that I had had depression for the majority of my life, culminating in the mental and almost physical paralysis it cast over me this summer.

I'm still not sure how I managed to climb out of that seemingly bottomless hole, and I still don't like thinking back to those months and analyzing how un-human I felt. But I'm happy to say that, for me, medication helped tremendously. For the first time since I could remember, my brain stopped using most of its power to churn out insipid anxieties and started redirecting all that energy to activities that actually meant something to me. I was in shock the first day I completed all the items on my to-do list with energy and time to spare. I couldn't remember the last time I had been able to do that.

Even better things happened. In what was probably the best professional decision I made in my post-graduate life to date, I accept a job offer as Head Media Librarian at an academy in Seoul, South Korea. Even if you knew nothing about what I do for my job, doesn't my job title just sound like a delicious concoction of all the literacy- and education-related issues I have ever felt passionate about? And indeed it is. I'm helping to develop and run an experimental literacy program that's somewhere between a typical reading&writing classroom and a library. So basically my job entails reading children's/YA books and talking about them with kids in order to advance their creativity and critical thinking skills. Oh, and also I get to do projects that end up looking like this:

Oh yes, I consider myself very lucky for having an intellectually stimulating job where every day is a different challenge and a reward. And also that I get to read YA books and get paid for it... hah!

The upheavals in my life this year made me realize most sincerely the importance of having supportive loved ones in my life, and thus this year has also been for me a year of learning about how to make strong, lasting connections with people I care about. This isn't going to be an overnight fix because me and people is like "uh," but I truly have been trying my best to encourage valuable friendships both old and new. A side effect of taking antidepressants is that I have become much more extraverted: there are actually many times when I--gasp!--would rather hang out with people than be by myself! The shocker!

No, but in all seriousness, the changes I have gone through this year have made me fully aware of how blessed I am to have the loved ones I already have in my life, and my luck at finding so many new friends with whom I have so much in common, with whom I can find so much joy and inspiration.

That said, I'm not sure where this leaves me in terms of my blogging. I'd like to start again, writing about things I've noticed about teaching children's lit to young EFL kids, but it certainly won't be in the same capacity as it had been before. Instead of making any promises, then, I'll just leave you with this update on my life. Boy does it feel good to be able to write about happiness!

The (Un)State of My Mind

This is probably not what you come to a book blog to read about, but.

So you may remember how, just a few weeks ago, I was shuffling between multiple countries and planning for a great backpacking expedition. You may remember coming across a post introducing my new travel blog, and basically just a whole bunch of references about exciting plans I had to spend several months to a year traveling and living out of my backpack.

As of last week, I am back at my parents' house in New Jersey.

What happened?

-

There is no easy way for me to write this.

One day earlier this month, I woke up in a hostel in Beijing and knew that I was sad, that I had been sad for a while. There had been days of gray skies and rain, and days of Beijing traffic and crowds, of sticky sweat that left flakes of darkness on my skin when I scratched at it. Traveling no longer felt shiny and exciting, but rather like something that I had go through the motions of doing.

My sadness isn't something that comes and goes. It has always hovered, unblinking and unfazed, in the dark section of the entranceway to my mind. It's a sadmonsterdog that doesn't need any particular kind of nourishment and follows me around wherever I go. When the sun is shining brightly enough and casts that corner into enough shadow, I can pretend that my sadness isn't there, that the light and life are enough to make me a normal, un-sad person. But if the sun is not out in full force, then I have to look into the void of this sad-thing that threatens to crush me with its need whenever it gets the chance.

-

Here's what traveling is like when you're sad:

You wake up. You have three things on your itinerary for the day, but with the sky the silver of empty colors and the sun nowhere in sight, you know you don't have the energy and pare it down to two. You go to your first destination. The crowds are thick and loud. It's hot. Umbrellas threaten to snag in your hair and rip the strands out. It's hot. You're thirsty and there are always people in your photos and the color quality in them sucks anyway because everything's so gray and you just give up on seeing the site as well as the rest of your itinerary and go back to your hostel and curl up in bed with your computer, hating yourself.

-

Here's what blogging is like when you're sad:

You have IDEAS and WORDS running together in your head, and a blank screen and a blinking cursor before you. But between your head and the screen is a chorus of faceless voices, crying mocking questions that pierce your well-worn armor.

"Do you think that anything you write now is going to compare to what you wrote back when people actually read your blog, y'know, back when you actually posted things?"

"You are four months behind on reciprocating comments. Way to go with following blogging etiquette. Why can't you do anything right?"

"Wow, your reviews suck now. Just...don't. Stop trying. Stop trying to pretend you're good at it."

As more voices join in, the distance between you and your goal seems to stretch on and on and on, like a demented piece of Laffy Taffy. So instead, you close the lid of your laptop and put your head down on it and try to stop thinking anymore.

-

Here's what writing is like when you're sad:

You don't.

-

I don't need an official, clinical diagnosis to know what's wrong with me. I don't even want to write the word, I have such mixed feelings over it. The word, to me, has been perverted into a playground insult hurled by ignorant children or, worse, idiotic adults. When others casually use the word to describe how they feel when they don't get their first-choice iPhone color or their local bar doesn't have their favorite imported beer in stock, why would I want to use it to try and describe the blankness that causes me to spend hours at a time lying on the floor of my room, the black mirror that reflects back to me something so dark and twisted and vivid that I'm not sure if I'm looking at a reflection or if I am the substanceless reflection?

What good does it do for me to be all, "Yup, that's what I have, that's what I am" when it doesn't change the way I've felt since I was a freshman in high school? When it won't make a difference, because you've used the word before, and even after talking to People and the threat of medications, you're still afraid that your sadness is an inherent character defect, a birthmark that just won't go away because, well, it's not meant to?

-

I had limped through two Chinese cities and half a dozen hostels over the course of two weeks with the same kind of listlessness dragging down my awareness before I realized that to continue traveling when I felt this way was a complete and utter waste of everything. So I looked up plane tickets.

And now I'm here.

I've been trying to get back to what counts for me as normalcy. The process involves lying on my bed, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. It involves motivating myself to force down unappetizing sustenance at set intervals throughout the day. Avoiding writing, responsibility, and writing-related responsibility, because the words that come out don't sound like me, and little sucks more than to not be able to express myself the way I want to. Playing the piano for hours, when I need more things that don't use words. Walking. Reading old journals and cry-laughing over how silly some parts sound, and how some things have not changed at all.

There are okay days, and then there are days where it's really not.

-

I just thought you should know.

-

I don't really know how to end this post.

Recommencement

Boy, has it been awhile! This may have been the longest hiatus I ever took from blogging, on account of my hectic peak end-of-year work season and, afterwards, over a month's worth of unforgettable vacations, the pictures and stories from which I can't wait to share with you.

I hope that you'll also bear with me as I transition back into blogging. It's not going to be the same as before--I'm not the same person I was before--and, inevitably, our interests change as we grow. I'll still blog about books, but there might be less frequent posts, fewer book reviews, and more posts about global/social issues that get me thinking. My travels in early 2013 have also awakened the travel bug in me, so with any luck, you'll get a fair number of posts about my travels, if I can make everything come together. I hope you'll still be interested enough to follow me on the next chapter of my life. I can't wait!

A sneak peak at travel-related posts that are coming up...

First I went here:

And then I went here:

I realize that the second picture is hard to puzzle out the geographical location of, so here's another clue:

Can I hear a "TELL ME MORE"?!?!

An Explanation For My Absence

You may have noted my absence from the blogosphere these past two months, and I'm afraid that I might have to continue to be absent for at least one more. My work involves US college applications, and since the Big Deadline is in early January, I'm now basically on the computer doing work 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Needless to say, at the end of the day, the last thing my eyes really want is more time spent looking at a screen. I hope to be back into the swing of blogging again in Spring 2013. Happy reading, everyone!

Confessions of China Living

I wish someone had told me, before I moved to Shanghai last year, to be careful to not let China make me a meaner person. I had thought that I had adjusted well. I had learned the width of the narrowest opening between two people that I could weave through on a crowded city street. I learned to accept the smaller dimensions of personal space here, but not give it up for the obnoxious, privileged young Shanghainese women who will cut you in line. I learned not to cross at crosswalks and how to judge the likelihood of a car hitting me by its distance from and the speed at which it is going. I accepted the fact that horns were going to blare at 3am, and have even begun to be able to sleep without earplugs.

I learned to survive, but I mistook my accumulated survival skills as signs of my emerging cosmopolitanism. This is what it is to be an urbanite! I thought. I am tough-skinned, competent, and worldly!

But in actuality, I was slammed by the thrice-as-forceful wave of post-graduate life, city life, and Chinese life all at once. I can't separate the three, can't ever figure out whether my feelings and frustrations are the natural reactions of a newly minted independent adult, those of a space-and-quiet-loving girl whose prior contact with cities up till now had been day trips into New York and Philly, or the result of coming to a Chinese city.

I no longer want to deny it, no longer want to cover it up with euphemisms. China is impatient and judgmental and unforgiving, and in my struggle to survive here, I've absorbed a lot of that into myself.

It's easy to internalize a lot of frustration in China. That's what happens to a society led by a government that doesn't allow freedom of speech. It only takes one bus ride in Shanghai to get a pretty thorough gist of what makes me angry here. As the bus pulls to the curb, middle-aged men and single-minded young mothers push shuffling old women out of the way to be the first onto the bus. The bus drivers slams the doors shut as soon as you step on board, barely avoiding catching the back of your shirt in its wheezy path. Slouching young men with artfully arranged bangs sit in the courtesy seats and bury their heads in their iPhones or iPads, determinedly ignoring the thin-wristed, white-haired little old ladies who cling to the side of their seats and struggle to stand upright as the bus driver lurches in and out of traffic with his hand permanently pressed against the horn. The man desperately missing his sixteenth cigarette of the day on his short bus journey groans and shudders and jerks his head and hacks up a thick gob of spit into the single, tiny, overflowing trash can. Oh, traffic lights? A mere suggestion. The thing that counts down the seconds until your light turns green? Obviously an indication that traffic is supposed to go when there are still 4 seconds left of the red light to go. If you get to your stop and the bus is crowded, which is often, it becomes a game of push and shove, see how many people you can bang with your overstuffed purse on your way to reach the door. The concept of letting people off the public transport vehicle before new passengers board? A mere concept, rarely put into practice.

A trip on Shanghai's public transportation illustrates the selfishness and inconsideration of a nation that adopted capitalism while still held in the thrall of communism. Knowing this, everything in China becomes suspect. The smiling, well-made-up waitress who serves you at dinner may be secretly resenting your white-collar job and accompanying salary. You buy a cheap watery beer for 40RMB at a pub that tries to evoke European legacies and feel guilty that your one beer could feed for one whole day one of the many beggars, often deformed or missing limbs from factory accidents, who sit in the streets. You become suspicious of every price given to you at the local market, wondering if the seller isn't trying to gyp you out of a few more yuan despite his already reasonably low price. Silence does not indicate contentment, but rather decades of pent-up frustration at inequality and corruption.

No community is perfect, but I never thought that I'd lose so many of the things I used to like about myself--listening skills, objectivity, concentrated kindness--so quickly, in this environment. It took almost a year's worth of unhappiness and regretful meanness on my part for me to realize that I don't like much of who I've become. So, starting now, I will strive to be more aware of when I'm being mean, and to resist the easy temptation of sliding into meanness. I will also write more about China, my travels, and my thoughts here. I haven't written as much about my life abroad as I had expected to mostly because I'm really unhappy with many things about it. But if writing about it will be my catharsis, then I'm going to. I'm going to put the truth out there, because I'm still an American citizen, I'm still a reluctant leader of humanity, and the truth cannot be denied.

I Finally Watched The Hunger Games

I have finally joined the post-March 23rd space-time continuum as regards books and movies. In laymen's terms, I FINALLY WATCHED THE HUNGER GAMES MOVIE.

*dances*

The story behind my five-weeks-delayed inaugural viewing of The Hunger Games is, in short, simply that China, which last November had agreed to let The Hunger Games play in Chinese cinemas as one of only 20 films allowed into China this year, rescinded their offer, or something like that, so that it's no longer being released in China. The government probably realized the series' plot revolves around the people rising up to topple an overly controlling government. Heh, heh. (Ugh.)

Anyway, this weekend I was on a business trip to Shenzhen, which is literally one metro ride away from Hong Kong. I thought, with all the free time I have on this trip, why not go into Hong Kong for an afternoon and an evening, and take advantage of the fact that Hong Kong is, in many ways, a scion of Western culture on the Asian continent.

The view from Avenue of Stars (venere.com)

The movie was fantastic! I admit to trepidation at the movie adaptation of the next big YA series after Twilight, considering, well, how melodramatic and insipid those films were. The Jennifer Lawrence was the perfect Katniss, and such a talented actress. She captured the complexities of Katniss' character excellently, so that even someone who hadn't read the books (the person I saw the movie with) could get a glimpse into what she was thinking throughout the story. I also think that the people in charge of the movie's sound editing should get an Oscar nomination, it just complemented the story so well. I was less impressed by Gale and Peeta, but whatever. The Hunger Games was always and forever Katniss' story.

So, who wants to talk about the movie with me now?

It's hard for me to pick a favorite part of the movie, but this was definitely one of the most powerful scenes. (panempropaganda.com)

Some Wanderlove of My Own

I didn't realize how difficult it would be to get back into daily routine--which includes blogging--after almost a month of traveling and vacation! Sorry I've been so absent lately. On the other hand, I've had some brilliant experiences and discovered new places that I love and would like to revisit in the future.

At the end of February I went on a company retreat to Malaysia. We stayed mostly in Kuala Lumpur, which was a lovely city, not just because of the weather, which was consistently sunny and warm (a far cry from cold Shanghai), but because the people were friendly and the food was delicious.

The weather was like this:

--and I visited a Kinokuniya Bookstore, which is basically book heaven for book lovers, because it's huge and has pretty much any book you can think of on its shelves somewhere. AND because it fully integrated YA literature into literature at large, and there were lots of placards around the store recommending YA lit as "your next great read."

RESPECK!

The Petronas Towers were so, so, breathtakingly beautiful:

They reminded of plants, taking root on our earth and unfurling towards the impeccable sky. I didn't get to see much of Malaysia as I was only there for a few days, but I will definitely return.

A few days after Malaysia, I left for vacation to Taiwan. My family is from Taiwan, but this was the first time I had a sizable say in where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do. Being there simply reinforced to me the fact that Taiwan is an incredible, lush, friendly, wonderful place that I could seriously consider calling home.

My favorite place on the trip was probably the Pingxi district, a short train ride outside Taipei, which is like a slice of the 1800s in the middle of the 21st century.

In the town of Shifen, the train track slips in between old houses, and during the times when the train is not passing by, people will stand on the tracks to release "sky-lanterns" that they can buy and paint their wishes on.

These are scenes that seem to come right out of stories and dreams.

Incredible, isn't it?

There's more, so much more:

Storm clouds moving in to the city of Hualien.

Riding bikes along abandoned railroad tracks in the East Rift Valley past rice paddies.

Attending the weekly Saturday night local music performance in Dulan.

Looking off from the paragliding launch site on the high terrace overlooking the pastoral town of Luye.

And, as always, braving the crowds at night markets to enjoy the ubiquitous good Taiwanese street food.

It was a wonderful trip and it was really hard to return back to "normal" life. Needless to say, I will be going back to Taiwan as soon as I can. This tiny island is truly incredible in what it has to offer in terms of scenery, culture, food, and people. I'll stop short of being a salesperson for Taiwan vacations but seriously, you should try to go if you have the chance!

These two places in the past month have really awakened the wanderlust in me. Hopefully I'll get to explore more places in the future while I'm still hanging around Asia. South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia, I'm looking at you!

Malaysia Bound!

I will be here for the week:

allbestwallpapers.com

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! My company will be there for our annual retreat. Am I excited? You bet. I have a handful of posts scheduled for the week. Otherwise, see you in 6 days!

"Keeping Life Simple"

Last month, I went home for a brief vacation. I caught up with old friends, ran errands, refilled prescriptions, visited the dentist--and, as always when I am able to come home, I sorted through my books and got rid of a bunch.

I go through my belongings and purge on a fairly regular basis. At least once a year, I take out all the clothes I own and fill several department store bags' worth of clothes to give away. When I was still in school, I used to go through all my previous class notes annually, throwing away a little more each year until, now, all of my schoolwork from middle school fits comfortably in a 2-inch binder.

I may have once briefly considered keeping all books that passed through my hands ever: ARCs of books for which I own a finished copy, books that were pleasant enough during reading for me to want to hang on to them a little longer, and so on. But ever since I discovered the used bookstores near my house, started blogging, and ballooned my TBR pile from the single digits to the triple digits, I have been getting rid of as many books as I seem to acquire during my time away.

When I was home, I sorted through all the books that had arrived for me in the 8 months I had been gone, and the result looked like this:

It's impressive, but not that intimidating. Because most of that pile didn't stay in my house: I donated and swapped a lot of them away. Such is me.

Anyway, I was walking downstairs with armfuls of packages that I was going to take to the post office, when my mom passed me and stared at my cargo.

"You have soooo many books," my mom said. "I always see you carrying books around." It's true. I'm in a state of perpetual book-sorting. There may be a lot of stuff in my room, but I'm always moving stuff out of my room, out of the house. No one in my immediate family sort their belongings on as regular a basis as I do.

"Don't worry. These are going to the post office," I said in my usual half-bemused, half-defensive way. For, no matter how thoroughly I've admitted to myself that I am a complete and utter bookworm, seeing the astonishment--and, sometimes, judgment--in others' eyes still makes me raise my armor.

"Oh, great!" my mom replied. "You're keeping your life simple. That's really good."

It's sort of funny, her using that phrase--"keeping your life simple"--to describe what I do. It's not the way I would describe myself. But, the more I think about it, the more I can see that being me, of a sorts. At least materialistically. I think it's because I usually have so much going on in my head that, out of conservation of mental energy, I need to keep my physical and informational surroundings as organized and manageable as possible.

Over the course of this past week, whenever I found myself at the computer, wondering what I should do, I have been going through my Google Reader and cleaning out my feed subscriptions. I cleaned out over two-thirds worth of feed material. Over half of the blogs I had been subscribed had not been updated in over a year. That's ridiculous! I can't believe I left them in my Reader for so long. I cleaned out feeds that I generally skip over on the now-rare times I look through my Reader. I want a Reader where I'll read every post that comes up, you know? Quality. Information. Entertainment. Inspiration. All not tied down by half-mumbled promises of checking out each other's blogs we made in rushed moments at packed book events. I find temporary moments of tranquility when I get rid of clutter in my life. I rarely miss the things when they're gone.

How do you organize the "information" in your life?

Privacy and Blogging

Around the Jing'an Temple on a winter's night.

In the last few weeks I have been reading a lot of non-book blogs. You might say that they'd be classified under "sex and relationships" and "culture/race." (If you're interested in checking out the blogs I have been poring through, they are here, here, and here.) Many of these blogs have several years' worth of backlog posts for me to blissfully spend hours reading through. I seem to enjoy reading blogs like I read books: one complete story at a time, not really getting into the ones that are serial or ongoing. It's interesting that this behavior of mine applies to TV shows as well. The only TV show I keep up with religiously is Castle; the rest, I tend to buy in box sets and watch over a series of weeks.

Reading these non-book blogs has made me think about what I want out of this blog. For the majority of its first three years (yes, my blog is three years old now. Kind of astonishing to think about, really), Steph Su Reads has been inarguably a book blog. I post book reviews, book-related news pieces, my reflections on book-related topics. It's been an incredible experience, but since graduating college and moving to Shanghai, I can't help but sometimes feel as if I want to do more with my blogging. If I grew tenfold as a person from entering college, I am growing even further in post-grad life. There are things I see, things I think about, things that I have changed that my fingertips sometimes tingle to write about.

And yet, at the same time that I feel like I have more to say, I have withdrawn from blogging. In the past few months, I have posted reviews and Cover Lust posts. Not much more. I used to feel the fire of wanting to write about hot topics in the book world burning through me. Not so much now. While I want to expand my writing here on my blog, part of me is also fiercely afraid of doing so.

I have always drawn a very thick and uncrossable line between my private, "real world" life and my online blogging presence. I don't do vlogs. I rarely post pictures of myself. I find it hard to take my online friendships with other book lovers into the rest of my life. I've cut back on the number of author and blogger friend requests I accept on my personal Facebook account. (No offense meant to you if I don't accept your friend request! You're better off finding me here on Facebook.) Whenever someone in my "real world" life mentions that they have read my blog, I sputter out a nervous laugh and blush fiercely.

The blogs I have been reading lately plunge deep into their writers' lives and discuss all of their joys and worries, good and bad points. I like reading them because it feels like I'm reading a first-person novel. Part of me wants to have that sort of candidness and authenticity in talking about myself and my insecurities, but the only outlet through which I have been perfectly honest is in my dozens of handwritten journals, and those will be private until the day I die. I admire the honesty and authenticity of today's memoirs and blogs (well, so much as any form of written and edited communication can be considered honest and authentic, but that's a discussion I'll save for my Victorian Literature & Culture seminar classmates), but I struggle in revealing that much of myself for others to read about and judge.

The great part about the blogging and memoir culture is that readers find community and connection through personal accounts. Part of me longs to join that community, but a stronger part of me sadly withdraws even more.

I think that as book bloggers, most of us already keep a large part of our lives off our blogs. Oftentimes there feels like an invisible circle of acceptable topics that we book bloggers can blog about, and if we blog outside of those topics, we lose followers. (I admit, I have been guilty of unfollowing people on account of how they became non-book bloggers. It's funny, because now I am thinking about scaling back on the number of book blogs I follow, so that I can expand my blog-reading repertoire without being overwhelmed.) So I'm curious: How much do you, as a book blogger, feel like you must only post about book-related topics? What outlets do you have for when you want to write about non-book topics? How do you think you'd gauge your level of interest for any non-bookish posts I may write in the future? How do you maintain the balance between your online persona and your real-life person?


Happy Valentine's Day. :)

Steph Su Returns

Well, the title of this blog post might be a bit misleading. I'm still in China. I've been on the Internet, didn't impose an Internet ban on myself or anything. But it's true that I haven't really been active on book-related stuff in the past month or maybe even two. Yes, work took over nearly all of my waking hours (seriously, I was in the office 12 hours a day during the last two weeks before the Regular Decision college application deadline. I will now severely criticize any and all authors who get any part of the process wrong, or "tweaks" deadlines and notification dates to suit their plot, as I have said many years ago), but it wasn't just that.

Quite frankly, I had a crisis of faith.

It's probably still ongoing. I still catch glimpses of nasty blogger-reader-author-publisher shenanigans on Goodreads, Twitter, on blogs, Facebook... everywhere I turn, something was happening that caused me to lose a little more hope in humanity. That, on top of my "real life" of living in Shanghai, China, set me spiraling into God-knows-what direction. I'm not a city person, and China is currently in a state of trying to figure out its place in the world and in contemporary history, and that apparently involves some moral crises. I seriously contemplated getting rid of a lot of things that I was scared was weighing me down: the social "face" I was trying to keep up on Facebook, Twitter, this blog, even Goodreads. I've barely even answered emails for the past several months. (Sorry about that, everyone who's tried to contact me.)

The trouble is that social media has become such a fixed part of our lives today that it's really hard to remove yourself entirely. So, no, I won't quit the Internet entirely (although that's not completely out of the question at some temporary point in the future), but I've been rethinking my boundaries, what I'm willing and not willing to put out on the Internet, what I'd rather keep to myself. I'm trying to remove as much negativity from my life as possible, and most of the negativity, I've learned, comes from me worrying too much about what others think of me. (Yes, I'm a college graduate and I still feel that way. This is why YA and I will never fully break up.)

This affects--or will affect--my blogging because I am going to take a step back from the networking/negotiations part of it and just do my own thing for a while. I need to get back into the feel of blogging, and I don't want it to become yet again something that stresses me out because of this obligation to this author or that obligation to that publisher. So I'm going to take it slowly. I'll blog when I want, what I want, and I'll stop when I want to also. I'll be online when I want, and I'll not be online when I don't want to. This sort of stuff seems really stupidly basic, but I feel like I've gotten frazzled to the point where I need to lay out these very basic rules for myself in a concrete manner. I'm not looking for acclaim or recognition or notoriety right now, because I'm not in the state of mind where I can take those sorts of expectations, whether external or internal.

So... a tentative wave of hello to you. :)

I'm featured in a Shelf Awareness ad!

So this morning I arbitrarily decided to open up the day's Shelf Awareness email--something that I admittedly don't do as often as I should, since I often let the SA emails pile up until the weekend. And the first thing I saw was my name:

I thought I was seeing things, so I did like a quadruple take. But no, that's my name--really, my full name--right up on the top of the July 18 issue of Shelf Awareness. Simon & Schuster decided to use a quote from my review to promote Tabitha Suzuma's Forbidden (which, incidentally, really is an astounding book, and you can read my full review here). Talk about being floored at the honor. Wow!

I was floating in a cloud all day.

Goodbye!

I'm off to Shanghai in the morning, so expect a decrease in posts and online presence until I get settled in. I'll try to keep you all up to date with book, Shanghai, and job news as much as I can. Bye for now!

Big News

So my thesis is finished and turned in. (I will try to write about it more in a different post.)

My written exams are completed, with just some less stressful oral exams to take at the end of this week.

I am set to graduate college on Sunday, May 29, in less than two weeks. (And I will definitely be dedicating a post to my school in the near future.)

In short, I am on the brink of being a college graduate and entering the real world. And it really will be a huge transition, because Swarthmore is nothing like the real world. It's its little bubble of intellectualism, tolerance, liberalism, and idealistic determination. There will be no place like it elsewhere, but here's to hoping that wherever I go, with whomever I meet, I will try to find a little bit of Swat with them.

We all know that today is tough times for finding jobs, and so I've been lucky enough to be set on that front. Starting in July, I will be in Shanghai, China, working as an Educational Consultant at the company Taurus Education. We help top Chinese high school students research, apply to, and adjust to American universities, helping bridge the gap between Eastern and Western education.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you know me halfway well, you will know that this is quite possibly the perfect job for me. It's a combination of education, literacy, teaching, college counseling, and marketing. I have long been interested in working in college admissions, because--let's face it--that transitional period of people's lives is hard. I always wondered if it would be possible to help students go through that process... and now there is this wonderful opportunity for me to do so.

tripadvisor.com

Of course, graduating college and moving to a totally different country are huge changes, not the least of which is that it will affect my blogging. It will make blogging more difficult, because not only is it probably harder to acquire new YA releases in Shanghai, Blogger is also technically blocked by China's policy of Internet censorship. (Apparently this is easy to overcome with a simple and affordable VPN, so I wasn't too worried. I was so relieved when I found that out!)

So, by necessity, the nature of my blog will have to change. I will still try to keep up as best as I can with the latest in YA. I will do my best to acclimate myself to reading eBooks, since it will be MUCH more difficult for me to receive physical ARCs abroad. (Unless you are, like, really, really nice and are willing to pay the shipping? *hopeful look*) My reviews will probably feature older books in my collection--basically whatever I can get my hands on in Shanghai. Against my public journaling nature, I will try to write periodic updates on life in Shanghai--to tempt you into coming to visit, of course. :)

Therefore, for the month of June I will scramble to read as many books as I can before I leave. I need to give away an extraordinary amount of books, so look out for many giveaways and/or sales in the future. Review copies that I am not able to get to will find a happy home with another blogger, I promise. All of this is made more challenging by the fact that I also want to try to spend time with friends, and I am quite suddenly addicted to the TV show Castle and seem to be blasting through the DVD sets quite rapidly, which, naturally, takes time away from my reading.

But all will be well! I am truly excited at this next chapter in my life; if I weren't I wouldn't go to Shanghai. Things will change, but I feel certain that this change will not be for the worse. I want to thank you all for being so supportive of me and my blog, for being the crazy and lovable and wonderful YA readers that you all are. I hope you will continue to stick around my blog as I figure out what new and exciting direction it--and I--will take.

Love always,

Steph

In Which I Guest Post About YA and Feminism

In light of my end-of-college workload, I haven't been able to write discussion posts lately, which is a shame, because I keep on finding things I want to write about, but then not having time to write about them. And then I end up having nightmares about someone else beating me to writing about something (this is true! It happened last night! I woke up in a sweat!).

...In the meantime, however, you should check out the guest post I wrote titled "What YA Taught Me About Feminism and Femininity" on Kody Keplinger's blog. It should be intriguing and hopefully gets you talking.

In My Mailbox (53)

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme inspired by Alea and hosted by Kristi. Check out Kristi's post to see what others got in terms of books this week!

...But before I get to the books, let me just quickly tell you about how my training trip went!

10 days of waking up at 5:30am, swimming for a total of 4 hours per day, plus dryland before our afternoon practices. It wasn't as bad as I had feared, and I'm in pretty good shape now. On one of our afternoons off we went to the tiny island of Culebra, off Puerto Rico proper, and went to one of the most incredible beaches I've ever seen in my life. It looked like this:

And the beach at the hotel/residential community we stayed in wasn't so bad either:

Of course there were the usual stresses and amusements of living with 47-ish other people for 10 days, 24 hours a day, and how tough it was to swim 4 hours a day on a lack of sleep and overworked muscles and joints, but I love my teammates, so that made it bearable.

Here I am with the rest of the senior girls on the team:

I love us.

Now, onto the books! I haven't done an IMM in more than a month. This explains the epic explosion of books in this post. Nothing, however, explains how lucky I feel to be able to review some of these incredible books.

For review:
A Time of Miracles by Anne-Laure Bondoux
The Inheritance Almanac by Michael Macauley
Memento Nora by Angie Smibert
The Beginner's Guide to Living by Lia Hills
Choker by Elizabeth Woods
Darkness Becomes Her by Kelly Keaton
Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O'Roark Dowell
Loser/Queen by Jodi Lynn Anderson
The Girl Who Was On Fire by Various Authors
Rosebush by Michele Jaffe
Where She Went by Gayle Forman
The Demon Trapper's Daughter by Jana Oliver
Teenie by Christopher Grant
The Princess of Las Pulgas by C. Lee McKenzie
Wishful Thinking by Alexandra Bullen
Trackers, Book 2: Santorian by Patrick Carman
Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan
Clarity by Kim Harrington
Num8ers, Book 2: The Chaos by Rachel Ward
Pod by Stephen Wallenfels
Chasing AllieCat by Rebecca Fjelland Davis
Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Book 2: Rage by Jackie Morse Kessler
The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor
The Running Dream by Wendelin van Draanen
Enclave by Ann Aguirre
Timeless by Alexandra Monir
Daughter of Xanadu by Dori Jones Yang
Real Live Boyfriends by E. Lockhart
Badd by Tim Tharp
Tutored by Allison Whittenberg
Other Words for Love by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal
All Just Glass by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Warped by Maurissa Guibord

From Around the World Tours:
The Iron Witch by Karen Mahoney
Trickster's Girl by Hilari Bell

Won:
The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

Gifted:
Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick

Bought:
Feed by Mira Grant
Heist Society by Ally Carter
The Wizard Heir by Cinda Williams Chima
The Dragon Heir by Cinda Williams Chima

Swapped:
Paranormalcy by Kiersten White
Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord by Sarah Maclean
Lead Me On by Victoria Dahl
Must Love Hellhounds by Charlaine Harris, Nalini Singh, Ilona Andrews, and Meljean Brook
Geist: A Book of the Order by Philippa Ballantine
The Reawakened by Jeri Smith-Ready
The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook
The Clockwork Three by Matthew Kirby
The Fall by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
The 10p.m. Question by Kate De Goldi

Gone Swimming!

Yep, it's that time of the year again, for me and 50-ish other swimmers to head off to the warm, warm lands of Puerto Rico to swim for 4 hours a day, for 10 days straight. It's nice having sunshine and beach weather in the middle of January, but I don't think I will miss the whole waking-up-at-5am, muscle-soreness-upon-muscle-soreness part of training trip!

As always, training trip is the time when I essentially "disconnect" from the world and just enjoy reading and writing when I am not either eating, sleeping, or swimming. I'm taking 6 books with me for the trip:

Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey
Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Demon King by Cinda Williams Chima
Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Such delicious variety! Guardian of the Dead and Rot & Ruin are Cybils reading (I am a Round 2 judge for the YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre!), and the rest have been in my TBR pile for far too long. Needless to say, I am very happy and think I will have a great reading time over training trip!

And don't worry: I have such a huge backlist of reviews to post that it will feel like I'm not even gone. Have a great 10 days, everyone, and see you when I get back on the 14th!

What is love, anyway?

I'll be 22 in the spring. Don't worry, this is NOT a post about me complaining about my relationship status. Related thoughts, though, just can't help occurring when you're a twenty-something-year-old female with female friends. Topics like marriage (ahhhhhhhhhh) just seem to inevitably crop up. The scary thing is, some of my friends want to get married around 25. Allowing a year for the engagement, that gives us less than three years to meet someone, get to know them, realize you want to spend forever with them, AND convince them/find out that they feel the same way about you.

I get tired just thinking about it.

The truth is, I have so little experience in the romance department that I have no freaking clue what I'm doing or what to do. This past week I've made some pretty big self-discoveries regarding what kind of guys I fall for, what I'm looking for relationship-wise, the difference between a casual crush of mine and a serious one, and so on. But I still feel like I'm, I dunno, Lewis & Clark or someone like them, plunging down an utterly unknown river, swollen with spring runoff, with only a flimsy low-grade plastic paddle in my hand to fend off alligators and loose logs.

Usually when I need help I often look towards books first, but lately that's just been frustrating, because books always seem to, well, romanticize romance. Somehow, some way, things work out, usually with this big, swoony scene at the end where the guy confesses his love to the girl or the girl admits to the guy that he was right about her, and they kiss and everyone's happy, the end. And how about all those books that have enviously smooth "getting to know you" romantic progressions, eh? The first encounter goes well, the love interest continues to approach the MC, there is no doubt in either of their minds that they like each other. When in real life (or my life, at least) it usually goes: initial encounter goes well, subsequent encounters are much more ambiguous (does he/she like me as just a friend, or as more than one? or do I not even cross his/her mind at all?), until eventually you are suffocated by a plague of uncertainty and confusion.

Where is the doubt in YA romances? Where is the ambiguity of interactions? Why is there a sad lack of examples that could give me any sort of insight into the way "real" romances progress, at least in my opinion?

I know, I know, I know that in telling a story--whether it be entirely fictional or your own real-life tale--one tends to emphasize the good points and deemphasize the bad. And as a reader we are also relatively passive observers with the benefit of an outsider's perspective to the very things that so confuse us when we're actually participating in them. You know how in movies there might be this big misunderstanding scene where neither character says what they truly mean to one another, only they don't know that, so they both think that what the other is saying is how they're really feeling, and then they turn away and the camera shows them making a miserable face at how much it just killed them to lie to the other person like that? Yeah. We're the audience, so we get the benefit of this camera view and get to see the true feelings that the other character doesn't see.

I want to be that "me" audience member for my own life. Maybe then I'd be able to figure some things out.

Or maybe I simply watch too many of those kinds of movies.

I used to be more worried that I'd end up alone. Now, I'm not so worried about that, but I do wonder often what it is I should look for in whoever I end up with. How will I know when I have found the right one? If the one that I can see myself with forever has some serious flaws that usually break relationships, how much should I excuse them for those? I hope I don't settle for anyone less than the one who is right for me--note that I say "right for me" and not "perfect"--but I worry that I may not recognize him when I find him.

It's also becoming clearer and clearer to me that I don't want to waste time with relationships that I don't think have a chance of lasting. It may sound harsh, or too cynical, but I believe that I can tell pretty early on in my acquaintance with someone whether or not I feel like a hypothetical relationship between the two of us has a possibility of lasting. That's one of the big things I realized last week: that I may be attracted to a number of people, but that doesn't mean I necessarily want to date them. I'd rather be contentedly single than be in a casual relationship for the sake of, I dunno, having something to do on the weekends or whatnot. I'm not actively looking for The One, nor am I unhappy that I'm not with him yet. I approach things very pragmatically, but believe deep down that eventually, sooner or later, but most likely later, and maybe even a lot later, I will find him. I've watched too many Disney movies and read too many romances to not believe in the idea that maybe, just maybe, I will find someone who likes all of me, who can challenge me intellectually, and who can inspire me to try to make each day the best I've ever lived.

It seems that so many authors and bloggers I know are either happily married or otherwise in wonderful relationships that seemed to have had fairy-tale beginnings, or courtships, or whatever. Can I ask you if that was really how it went, though? Did you have moments of doubt and uncertainty as to whether or not your partner was the right person for you? How did you know that he/she was The One? Who initiated the relationship? Did your own love story unfold like a standard YA romance, or did it have its tough moments, stuff that never gets told in the stories? Are the romances you write into your stories reflective of your real-life experiences, or are they more wish fulfillment? Where, I guess, does the inspiration for those fictional romances come from?

I wanted to save these questions for closer to Valentine's Day, maybe even make a feature out of it (who knows? I could still do it?) but they have been weighing me down for quite some time now so I thought I'd just put it out here.

Peace, love, and happiness, as always.

"Some of What We Know About Happiness"

I attended a wonderful lecture yesterday by one of my school's most well-known professors, the psychologist Dr. Barry Schwartz. His most famous concept is the theory of the "paradox of choice," which basically says that having more choices may not necessarily be the best thing for your mental state, which I'm sure I've mentioned once or twice in blog posts here.

Anyway, this week is Gratitude Week at my school, so Barry Schwartz gave a lecture called "Some of What We Know About Happiness." Sounds like something you'd want to know about, right? I thought it was wonderful, and so I'm sharing with you my notes on the lecture--with my thoughts in parentheses and direct quotes in, well, quotes--so that maybe you can take something away from it as well!

"Some of What We Know About Happiness" by Dr. Barry Schwartz

www.personaldevelopment-courses.com

1. How is happiness measured?

• Ask people!
• Around the world, people are most happy about family, but not on a daily basis; rather, they like the abstract idea of family (This made me laugh, but it is SO TRUE)
• People are least happy about commuting: "So if you had to choose between a mansion an hour away from work, or a hovel right at your work's doorstep... you should choose the hovel."
• People are bad at predicting what makes them happy, thus they make bad choices. They also seem to be impervious to instruction, so they continue making bad choices.
• On a larger scale, can you measure something like gross national happiness, sort of like gross national product? "Well, if governments had to choose between measuring something really important in vague, imperfect terms, and precisely measuring something not so important, they will always choose to thoroughly and precisely measure the unimportant thing." (Again, LOL)

2. What makes people happy?

• Money. Come on, let's be honest. But there is a "threshold of subsistence" beyond which more money does not make a difference on one's happiness. Rich countries are happier than poor countries, and rich people within each country are happier than poor people, but increasing the wealth of a rich country doesn't make the people happier.
• Meaningful, engaging, intelligent, controllable work that contributes to the improvement of others' lives
• Close relationships
• Marriage, not just cohabitation: "Marriage does make people happier. It makes people much happier for a few years, and then it only makes people slightly happier." (LOL)
• Security: physical, emotional, financial
• Democracy
• However, inequality seems to matter surprisingly little
• Having norms of ethical conduct
• If an experience has a good high point (climax) and a good end, people will generally be inclined to think well of it and do it again.

3. What is happiness good for?

• It feels good, of course!
• Health: happy people live longer - "So it's better to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day than be happy than to not smoke and be unhappy."
• Work productivity: happiness broadens cognitive outlook, increases creativity
• The myth of the suffering artist is FALSE: "The French are not that happy. Their happiness is kind of the equivalent of everyone in that country having gone through a divorce. We don't know yet why this is the case. Maybe they really buy into the whole 'suffering artist' myth. Like, if we Americans believe in it, the French believe in it 5 times as much."
• Improves social relations: people would rather be friends with happy people

4. How can you be happier?

• Change your genes--"And by that I don't mean jeans" *points at his pants*--there have been studies that suggest that happiness may be hereditary
• Pay more attention to what's good in experience and less on what's bad
• Gratitude is a habit that should be developed
• Focus on the little things, make it a daily routine to write down things you are grateful for, and eventually this will become habitual
• Writing (not talking or thinking) narratives about bad/tragic experiences decreases its impact on your psyche; write in a way that helps you try to comprehend the experience
• Lower your expectations: learn to be satisfied with less than perfection

"So if you lower your expectations, write about your bad experiences, and make it a habit to be grateful, you'll live forever." The end!

(Most of the direct quotes were said facetiously, of course.)