One afternoon during my freshman year of high school, I decided I would start biting my nails and see where it took me.

It was an adventure, if you will. I was a girl at a private school in Seoul, clad in navy blue and beige uniforms, a pair of dress shoes, pantyhose, who had little to worry about but my future. I didn't even have to think twice about what to wear to school each day. Each day was regimented. With classes beginning and ending at the precise times they had been slotted to begin and end on; carpools lined up for when we all got out of school at 10P.M. and needed to be taken to SAT prep somewhere in Gangnam afterward; school cliques formed not only based on common interests, but also academic and extracurricular performance. Goals and achievements formed my life. What's more, I was reminded more than once each day of how important poise was to society's receptiveness of that person. Composure. I don't know if it was the immense pressure we all were suffering under at Daewon or the Korean culture as a whole, but if you completely lost your shit at school, peers and faculty were less likely to try and understand. Instead, they were quick to spread rumours, criticize, hurt, shame, burn, ostracize. That person is fucked up, but not me, and not my friends. Just that person is fucked.

All that aside, during this time I began, innocently enough, to bite my nails. I didn't think much of it. I was a bright, chatty girl, just as filled with ideals and fantasies as your area grocer's daughter. I sat in class as I began what was to be a 7-year-long procedure. There was sunlight pouring into the classroom. First came the pointing finger. I discovered it to be an art form. Getting the angles right was going to take practice. Then it was the middle. Then the ring finger. Then the pinky, but the pinky was sensitive, so I skipped it sometimes. The thumb came last because it felt right that way. Maybe this would later develop into a habit, perhaps shape me into a more interesting mold? As if I wasn't interesting, just yet. Sure enough, soon I had no more nails to chew on. I had eaten them all. I began to weigh my options. Feet were out of the question. Friends' fingers would be overstepping many boundaries. I wished they would grow back quicker. I discovered many of my teeth weren't sharp enough to gnaw. I moved onto my cuticles. Hey, this isn't so bad. I liked the way the bits of skin felt, wedged between my teeth. I could easily stop this if I wanted. Why, you ask? I could easily retort back, why shouldn't I? It has nothing to do with you. Reality is, I cannot begin to explain why I do this. Sometimes, I'm at it for hours at a time, at work, on a train, before sleep. Bags of unused nail polish sit in my vanity cabinet. I pretend not to notice.

On February 10th, 2014, after seven years of nibbling, I sat, now an intern at a satire publication, at my office desk in downtown Chicago. Ten minutes before a meeting. Or was it 30 minutes after a meeting? I remember Google.com staring back. It was compulsive. I decided to ask some questions. My raw fingers typed in, "biting skin around nails." They wondered if anything out there would commiserate. My mind flashed back to the times I'd been given strange looks at airports, especially at Immigration. Or at the DMV, when I needed to renew my identification. I noticed spots of dried blood stuck to the keyboard.

I soon learned I had something called Neurotic Excoriation, also known as Compulsive Skin Picking. That's funny, I thought. Looking this up had also been compulsive. It was proven to be a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Other people had it. Many people had it. I looked at photographs of hands that at one point looked exactly like mine. Blotchy, varying shades of red colored the tips of their digits.

I think the whole thing bewildered me a lot more than it should have because I spent my entire life thinking I must be unrelatable.


Guichanaso.

I understand aspiration. I think I understand it on a visceral level. Those who acknowledge their inadequacies and aspire, from the get-go, to be someone or something else. Who's to say that's not "part of who they are?" After all, who you aren't yet is just as big a part of you as who you have been.

Guichanaso.

Whenever I am crushed by work (and shame about my exorbitant procrastination and severe lack of discipline), I used to hope that I could freeze time just for the rest of the world, and not for me, so I could get my work done during the frozen time. Going back in time just entails too much other possibilities, like, would I be retaining the knowledge I have in the present? With the time-freeze power, I'll just have to be discreet and not let anyone know how I did all the work in a second. But then I would always think about this: do I die earlier then because I would've lived up a portion of my life during that frozen time? I went through this thought multiple times, probably every time I was crushed with work, like I am now. Wonder what this line of reasoning reveals about me. Or at least it's just something about me.

Mothagesso.

'Cacoethes scribendi'

That was the name of my first blog. I think it was a Tumblr thing. Like I did to my notebooks and binders back then, I tried to impose on it a structure, a structured system, a perfect organization and a clear theme or something. It was like the beginning of a semester in school, you know. New notebooks, new pencils and utensils, labeled and color-coded. I couldn't even keep the format of the dates consistent from day to day. I lost most of my pencils within a week, and there's no exaggeration in that.

I looked it up again, and it means, the incurable desire (itch) for writing.

That blog was a little different from those hopeful first pages, those failed experiments, those evidences of my obsessive-compulsive desires without any sort of substance to match it. It was the blog I made when I was, for the first time, giving up the idea of a perfect organization. I didn't make sections and tags and pages and tabs to categorize my posts. I was starting to write about whatever I felt like, really. Having no aim or purpose got me going on it for longer, back then. A definite goal of any sort was something that I couldn't live up to, something that didn't get me to follow suit and continue. It was also around then that I started to make the first entry of my diary sort of half-assed. No pretty first entry; that guarantees a downhill slope of my entries, if not no future entries at all. But I must confess, I read through a Wikipedia article titled, "Latin phrases" to find a cool latin phrase to use as the title of my blog. Vanity was still there.

Hum a strange, unmelodic sound. And then hum that on repeat. No matter how absurd, if you repeat it, it sounds a little musical. More or less melodic.

I couldn't brace myself for something clean and complete and concise and coherent. ADHD of thoughts. Lethargy and escapism. The best I could do is love the randomness. My favorite jokes, the humor I practiced, was based on 'random' remarks that barely had a rational connection- an expression of something distantly and spontaneously connected. Strenuous pattern was my humor and writing of choice. The joy was in connecting them. It suited who I was or what I was ready to be. Irresponsibility was the name of my game. Duty and structure I didn't have enough to live up to. I wanted to say and write things, but I didn't want to- or more like, I wasn't capable of creating anything cool. 

모람모람 (Morumorum, or moram-moram): 이따금씩 한번에 몰아서 (adv. Every once in a while, all at once)

Now I hope to revert that. I don't think I have any more substance, in truth. I don't have any more substantial knowledge or thought, taste or passion, still. But I just want to revert it and write and think and act and speak differently. With more discipline, intent, honesty, and more of those fake words that sound heavy. I know the only way out is just to get going. Planning a system, let alone talking about it, never worked; I just have to go build one.

But I still enjoy this free space without form. Unlike some of my expressive and artistic friends that I have, I have a perpetual fear of a blank sheet of paper. A lingering, ever-present sense of responsibility to create something rational. I ran from that fear as I did from people, in search of irresponsibility and irrationality, of comfort, of sorts.

As I do with the mason-jar-full of sake g&t garnished with rosemary and cucumber, I find refuge and exile here, some sort of home and some sort of-

Mothagesso.