My body? What body?

Today was a down time at home day, no dates. Whew. Except going to the huge huge supermarket w/my aunt - I needed a notebook and she was shopping for tomorrow's big family gathering. Every year on the same day, our family comes together to remember my grandmother, who passed away when I was 13ish. It's a Korean tradition to do this for elders on the date of their death. I've only been to one, for her, years ago in Korea. We did our own tiny one in NY years ago, too, just w/my immediate family b/c we couldn't go to Korea that year. It will be good to be able to participate again and ALSO to see ALL of my family in one place. I can finally unload my gifts!!

[Note image of naked baby on the rice bag. The woman who brought it to us explained why he was there but I didn't catch it.] I spent the rest of the day napping and then doing my Korean homework. What a trial! It's really hard for me. I have all these emotional blocks when doing this kind of stuff and it makes it almost impossible for me to actually absorb anything. Also, I realized that learning vocab is really hard b/c it's just memorizing meanings to character. But what I need is to understand where the meanings and origins come from. But I can't know those things b/c I don't know this language that way, OR Chinese. Man. It's just like how knowing Latin helps learning English. My aunt says I should study Chinese while I'm here, too. Yikes.

This was one of many curious things at the enormous supermarket: the carts all go thru this UV light scanner thing that sterilizes them (the blue frame - and, of course, it's all automated). So that you don't get the last person's germs that were hanging out on the handle. The pic is bad b/c I was zooming from too far (the car) since I wanted to be inconspicuous. I'll save the rest of the pics for later.

I realize I'm doing NOTHING for my body - it's like I forgot that I have to take care of it. So now my back is killing me from dragging textbooks around all day yesterday. My aunt thinks that if I exercised really hard, that I'd stop grinding my teeth, since that comes from stress and exercise releases it. Good theory. Too bad I am not really up for the challenge right now!