1st Reading Journal on "The Body"

The Body impressed me even with the first few pages. Since the first novella of the book, The Shawshank Redemption, was a bit of disappointment in some sense, this one impressed me compared to that. I really liked the vivid expression on each of the characters. I could easily imagine what kind of characters they are, with what they like to do and what kind of experiences they have had. Because I only got to read the first 30 pages for now, I really wonder what would happen next in this novella. I am waiting for the time I get to read more so that I can write more reading journals on it. I am very much excited to read now.

Metafiction

I saw him today, we stared at each other, without a word.

“Sylvia? That SILENT girl? I don’t really know her that well, you know”

That's what she said few minutes ago.

Whenever I try to eavesdrop sneakily on a conversation about me, this is what I get to hear all the time. Yes, I am a bit quiet, well actually, a lot. But, I have never thought of it as a disadvantage for me. There is always a bunch of different people everywhere. I am just one of them: the one who talks a little less than others, the one who is more peaceful inside.

Well, anyway, I believe you at least get the skim of what I am like. Oh and whenever I start talking about myself, I can never exclude this one special, heart-beating-fast story of mine!

Though I have almost always been a firm representative of those “introverts”, there was this one time when I was as brave as the “cool girls” in my class. What I meant by the “cool girls”, you know, there is always this certain group of cool, social girls in each school. For my class, I have always had this desire to be like this girl named Jane. She talks a lot; whoever she meets, he or she becomes friends with Jane in a few seconds; whatever she says, it’s just hilarious. Well I am not jealous of those. The only thing that I envy Jane is the fact that she is cool with the boys too. Oh my lord, what am I talking about! Now I am really going to tell you my story.

Okay so there was this time when I became really brave. It was when I was in 10^th grade, yeah it was last year; I am pretty much sure about this. Although I don’t understand myself now, I used to like this one senior. Well, I was so in love with him, shall I say. His name was Woong, the one with two o’s, not the one with a u in the middle. Seriously, he was my dream boy I could have ever imagined in my whole life: extraordinarily enormous eyes, sexy Mohawk hair, voice with phlegm, and most importantly, the razor he sent me, coming out of his huge eyeballs. I was pretty much close friends with him, except that he already had “something” with this girl called Romy in junior. I couldn’t stand that. What was more annoying was that she always laughed at me whenever she saw me; even in the elevator, she pointed me with her finger!!!!

I wasn’t being mean; I just couldn’t live like that anymore. It was more unbearable than the Intolerable Acts of 1774. I had to do something, something to relieve my mind from the stress I get while thinking of her annoying self. And then this one brilliant idea suddenly came to me.

‘I will get him! He’s mine now!’

Since it was the first time for me to ask out someone, well actually the first time even imagining myself asking out a boy, I had to make a plan for more than two days. And I was READY, ready enough to get that Romy out of Woong’s sight.

The day was Thursday, the colored-milk day. And it was good because I could meet Woong and Romy at the same time while getting the milk at night. As expected, Woong and Romy came together with bright smiles on their face, looking at each other. They were about to pass me by. This was the time! I literally flew into Woong and hugged him as hard as I could. Though I didn’t see his face, I could feel his surprise. After making sure that Romy left while crying out like a baby, I ran back fast to my room 603, without even explaining anything to Woong. I believed he could feel everything.

So then what happened? Nothing. Nothing special happened, except that Woong refused to see me for a year, after that incident. But it didn’t hurt, probably because I earned a bigger thing: courage. I showed myself that I could do something that much brave if I really wanted to do so. No you don’t have to feel sorry for me. I am okay, really.

spring, summer, autumn, winter, and spring

In the first place, I still don’t understand why my eyes were filling with tears after watching just a short video clip with not that much of plot in it. I have seen the movie “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring” when I was as young as nine years old or something. All I remember about the experience is that I slept for the whole time. When I got up, my parents were crying so hard and staring at each other with a deep sigh. At that time, of course, that looked so weird. But now, just after seeing less than one fourth of the whole movie, I could at least try to understand why.

I first thought the movie was trying to show how to teach children what is right or wrong when the “master monk” tied the “young monk” to a stone in the same way as the young monk did to fish, a frog, and a snake. However, that wasn’t it. It was not like “oh feel the pain, you need to be treated the same way as you did to understand their pain,” but more like trying to tell the young monk a little bit about human desire, human’s desire to feel Catharsis while others are in pain. It’s not only that “bad” desire, but also human’s ability to sympathize and feel what others feel.

“Untie them. If any of those died, you would have that stone in your mind for your whole life.”

The best scene was where the young boy was crying hard, finding the fish and the snake dead. It is a mystery why it was so sad for me to keep watching it. It was not the pain I got from the death of those animals, but a more fundamental one. I have had a lot of same experiences as the boy did; I used to enjoy stepping on the ants and then putting them in the water to see them dying. I guess the reason I was almost crying was because I had to accept that I also had this bad human desire to do harm on others. One very different thing was that I had no one who could make me feel the sympathy that the boy felt.

I hope to have someone in my life to make me cry, feeling sorry.

Paid Surrogacy

100711 (FRI)

Jeong Min Park

Mom, Don’t Say You Are a Prostitute

Babies till 5 years old remember the times when they were in their mom’s vagina. They remember the feeling, the sound, and even their parents’ voice they have heard inside. But imagine, when they come out it’s not the same parent that the baby is remembering. As he is growing up, he learns it is because his biological parents have used a paid surrogate mother to bear him! Since paid surrogacy harms people in a lot of ways, it should be strongly restricted in all states regardless of any motives.

As pornography and prostitution steadily get more and more popular, female trafficking is being prevalent. In a sense of “buying human body” with money, how is paid surrogacy different from prostitution? No one has right to trade humans. Surrogate moms are basically selling their body for ten months to bear a baby inside. After this harsh process, they are not to ask for any medical aids even if their body has been harmed, because this whole process is illegal in most countries. Paid surrogacy is not just wrong in a sense of purchasing human body, but also wrong regarding all the possible dangers toward surrogate mom’s body.

Baby is an extremely special outcome that should only be resulted from true love between the mother and the father. But nowadays, more and more people have started to wickedly use the paid surrogate system even if they are fertile enough to bear infants. They are just being lazy and trying to use the power of money in order to lessen their basic duty. If this sort of process goes on and on, eventually less than 5% of married female would want to be pregnant themselves and go through the hardships. Other than that, they would use paid surrogate moms to do the job for them. Reproduction is the most basic goal of human being. What paid surrogacy does is only breaking the basic rules of human nature.

Furthermore, it is highly possible to affect the babies who are born with paid surrogacy, of course in a very bad way. As a child, the fact that “your mom you have now is not the one whom you used to be inside, but there is another one” is harsh enough to hurt to deep inside. Considering this, finding out that your surrogate mom was even paid for bearing you would beat you down. I’m not saying this would happen in every single family, but there is a high probability of losing your identity as yourself.

Word in word, paid surrogacy is harmful in uncountable senses, especially when considering the moral aspects of it. Paid surrogacy is now illegal in almost all countries, but there are numerous black markets prevailing. Now it is time to put additional regulations and to reinforce the penalty on people who illegally “trade” human bodies. It is time to face the reality. It is not just others’ business anymore. You could be the next one, who knows.