An explanation.

Yeah, so I haven't posted in about a month, which technically means I haven't fulfilled the requirements of my fellowship and will now have to write an end-of-program report.  This doesn't bother me, since helping out future generations of Light Fellows (particularly Korea Fellows), whether by blog or by report, is not a chore or an unwanted responsibility to me.

The reason I haven't been posting is very simple: I didn't feel like it.  I re-read some of my more recent entries, and almost none of them have anything valuable or worthwhile to say about the experience of being a student in South Korea or at Sogang University.  A lot of it is petty whining about my own personal struggles and/or opinions about rather irrelevant aspects of life here.  I partially attribute this to a "generation" gap - as a second-timer here, nothing is really green or new, and so my blog last year was much more useful in terms of gleaning what it might be like to take a summer here as a language student.  This time around, however, Seoul has lost a lot of its sheen, and while I don't like living here any less than I did last summer, I just don't have a great deal to report that's new or informative.  I expect this will change in the fall/winter, which are seasons I have yet to experience in Korea; additionally, I'll be facing a much more challenging Korean course in about 2 weeks time, which I'm sure will provide greater opportunities for societal understanding and linguistic growth.

I guess what this boils down to is that I realized that I felt like I had done my duty well when I blogged last year, but the challenges of my new life here have almost nothing to do with my experience in Korea and will not (at least in my own opinion) contribute to the body of knowledge that Yale has compiled to help students who hope to become Light Fellows.  Because I didn't want to abuse this blog and hurt any readers, I neglected to post at all, feeling that I would do a better job writing an end-of-term program report that forced me to gather my thoughts on what actually matters to this Fellowship regardless of how I feel about other things going on here.

My conclusion is, therefore, that last summer I blogged for the benefit of others.  While that is still a clear goal in my mind (the last thing that I would ever want to do is be responsible for an even greater lack of interest in studying Korean at Yale), I realize now that this time around, for the sake of my sanity and for the sake of honesty, I have to blog for myself.  If that means failing to fulfill a requirement, then so be it; I will continue to post as often as I feel like it, but I also won't force myself to try to present my experience here as particularly packaged so as to maximize appeal.  And that might just mean not posting.

I do regret not blogging about some things in the past month; I had an amazing, amazing, amazing week-long break from Sogang in which I was invited to speak at the 2010 ALEC Leadership Conference sponsored by Jinju Chodae Church (the roof, for the record, did not cave in, but I did get an envelope containing 150+ thank-you letters from students and got to sign about 300 autographs).  Additionally, I am behind on sharing my totally necessary opinions about K-pop today with the masses.  As an added bonus, I also finally started making long-term life plans, and now have a schedule for the next two years that kind of resembles something a responsible person might have come up with.  And I do plan to talk about all of these things in future posts (I mean, I will probably start some posts tonight or something), but I felt it necessary to say all of this first.

To those who have borne with me, thank you.  To those who will continue to do so, thank you even more.