About

• 23.04.2012

My name is Maya.

I come from hardy peasant stock. Half of them were Korean, the other half were whitefolks. I’ve spent most of my life shuttling back and forth across the Pacific, and it’s all very fraught and fascinating, rich with questions of race and identity and language. What I most want you to understand, however, is that I ran with a very tough crowd in kindergarten (see below). The whole situation was super legit, especially my badass multi-color windbreaker.

This is my blog.

I write on this blog largely to keep in touch with a dozen or so far-flung humans that I know and like very much. Really the only thing I don’t like about them is that they tend not to come along every time I arbitrarily switch states, countries, and/or continents. This is fairly rude of them, I know, but I am a very generous person. As is evinced by this blog-solution. I  know that they suffer a constant, aching hunger for passing details about my day-to-day, and so I graciously oblige.

There is, unfortunately, a downside to this cornucopia of personal minutia: if you are not one of these people, there may not be much of interest for you here. You are, of course, more than welcome to stay, regardless. In fact, I just looked at my “webstats” for the first time the other day, and it appears that some of you are doing just that. I am both confused and flattered by your apparent interest. But more confused. Especially by you, third most frequent and long-staying visitor for the last six months. From Sweden. Um.

Who ARE you, Mysterious Maybe-Swede? Someone from my past who has relocated to Scandinavia and finds themselves very, very bored? An actual stranger with excellent health care and exquisite modern furniture? Also very bored? Feel free to make yourself known, either way, but also feel free to maintain your anonymity. It is a pleasing sort of confusion I feel, knowing that you exist.

Anyway. So. More about this blog.

I started this blog back in 2006, when I was a twenty-three year old college dropout inexplicably living in London. It was a strange time, actively so. As it turns out, though, no matter how active the strangeness inside your own head, people around you will still sometimes ask questions. Questions like What Are You Doing With Your Life, or Why Are You Doing That Thing With Your Life. So I started telling these people that I was in a state of limbo. And while the glibness of this reply proved surprisingly effective at forestalling further inquiry, over time it also turned out to be kind of self-fulfilling.

In case you are lucky enough to have avoided experiencing it firsthand: Limbo Sucks. Limbo is not leisure. Limbo is lack. The utter lack of any and all purpose. And whether or not purpose is all it’s cracked up to be, its complete absence will eventually have you chain-smoking in front of your bookcase, transfixed for half the night by the spine of Milan Kundera’s “Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the contents of which you do not even really remember, all while your stomach slowly, wetly inches its way up into your throat.*

Cue: the genesis and christening of escape from limbo.

Six years later, the escape itself is still in progress. I am now a twenty-nine year old college graduate living in Seoul under the merciless thumb of my fascinating-but-difficult mother, ostensibly trying to “write.” My recently obtained degree is a Bachelor of Motherfucking Arts in English. I call it: The Moneymaker. This coming fall, I take the next step in my carefully thought-out quest to amass ever-greater riches and power by enrolling in an MFA Program.

Cha-Ching.

That is all, for now.

Kisses.

-Maya

*You will find no trace of these illustrious blogging origins here. Last June, I deleted all early posts. A fresh start, I told myself, as I clicked each one into oblivion. A purge, of sorts.

Mostly, though, they were just super embarrassing.

This uncharacteristic fit of quasi-discretion in no way guarantees that what I post from here on out will not also be embarrassing. Especially to future-me, another six years on. In fact, I am already slightly embarrassed by things I have put up over the past nine months, and am regularly overcome with the urge to go back and edit/delete the night away. So far I have kept these urges at bay, but I make no promises.