OH HAY THUR! 


I'm finished with my hiatus and have changed my blog, you can see it here at OHMUNA.WORDPRESS.COM

See you there. 

I got my eyes done!

No, i didn't get double eyelid surgery... I got my eyes layered!

Since several people have asked me about the LASEK experience I have decided to paint a picture about my personal experience with the procedure itself and the recovery.

In the world of laser eye surgery the two most popular and widely used procedures are LASIK and LASEK. Lasik requires only one to two days of painless recovery time, often times patients are fine right after the procedure or the very next morning. Lasek requires about 7 days of painful recovery. The doctor will diagnose and test the patient's eyes before determining which procedure is best fit.

If I had the choice I would have chosen to have Lasik done but because my corneas were too thin, I was unqualified, thus I was stuck with getting LASEK. Damn. 

There are 6 steps to the Lasek procedure.

Step 1: DENIAL

I had been meaning to get my eyes lasered for years and as a child I looked forward to getting the procedure done. However, ever since I could remember I have always has an irrational fear of sharp objects pointed in my direction. If I have a straw in my beverage pointed in my direction, I’ll turn to straw to point another direction. If there is a sharp object across the room, I won’t dare to look at it straight on. My oldest sister has the same problem but to a heightened sensitivity. This disability alone had caused me to wait until the last minute to do Lasek.

Four days before the procedure I saw my doctor and he tested my eyes and inserted in a few drops of a liquid into my eyeballs which dilated my pupils to a degree that made me loathe light and caused me to be farsighted. My doctor (at Konkuk Univeristy Hospital), told me that if he were to do the procedure on me, I would be required to stay in Korea for at least a month for weekly checkups (other doctors don’t necessarily require this).

A day before the actual procedure I started to feel a heavy sense of denial and convinced myself that contrary to my previous beliefs, I didn't need Lasek. 

More after the jump

The iPhone 4s and Remembering Steve Jobs

Before I begin, I wanted to pay tribute to the genius behind the iPhone and all Apple products. Steve Jobs was and will always be an icon in the Silicon Valley, the tech space, music sphere and smart phone world. He is the man. 

Rather than giving a full review on the iPhone4S I'll give a general overview of the iPhone and a few local tidbits. Enjoy! 

 The first Apple product I ever owned was the first generation iPod. It was really hot and heavy stuff circa 2004 and people would Ooh and aah at the sight of my iPod. Back then iTunes was far to complicated for me to comprehend and the battery life ended up being 10 minutes, but nevertheless it was a cool gadget. The two gadgets have similar crisp features, so even through all of the changes the iPhone stays true to its roots. 

Last night I happened to pass by the Palo Alto Apple store and saw that it was covered in colorful post-it notes filled with thoughtful and funny words from admirers. 

Love for Steve Jobs from around the world. 

Not all of the notes were tasteful. 

People lined up outside of the Palo Alto Apple store. There were about 30 people there at 10 PM.

One of the two local news stations covering the iPhone 4s opening. 

I ordered my iPhone at midnight on October 7th through my carrier, Verizon. Without any problems I was able to complete my order in a matter of minutes. After patiently waiting for a week, my iPhone4s arrived exactly at noon. 

Maybe I'm spoiled because I'm from the bay area and there are plenty of Apple stores around, but I didn't feel like it was necessary to stand in crazy lines in front of the Apple store to pick up a phone. If anything it'd be best to stand in line at your local carrier (AT&T, Verizon or Sprint) and wait there at midnight. 

I pranced into a random Verizon store in Cupertino and got my phone activated in a few minutes. There were more employees in the particular store than customers and the store still had a few iPhones in stock even at 2 pm. I have read about other Apple stores that were bombarded by eager customers, but that wasn't the case for me. (Btw, if you scroll down to pictures of the Palo Alto store, I don't know where all of the post it notes went!! how sad!)

Ahh, finally. 

Suri's response when I asked "Which phone is the best on the market" 

And other suggestions. 

Suri is a very forward-thinking invention. It is only a matter of time before we are all hooked on using voice activated commands. Suri is pretty much as it is advertised on the Apple website, and it's useful when it comes to functional settings like checking the weather, directions, text messaging, email... and so on. 

The crop and edit functions are useful but would have been better if there were more editing functionalities available other than rotate, auto enhance, red eye and crop.

I played around with iCloud for a bit and it makes synching much easier and you can use your phone while syncing!

Overall, there are subtle changes between the iPhone4 and the 4s but I am loving it overall. I'll update more later once I become more acquainted with the 4S.

Mountains

This picture was taken on my last day of work. After all of those days of staring out the window and dreaming of flying away to the mountains in the distance, I am finally free to fly away and it feels so good. 

I climbed one of the mountains and this is the view from the top. I'm staring into the city - at the building where I used to work. 

Liberating. 

Panic Attack with Justin Bieber

There is so much to say but I can’t seem to coherently gather my thoughts together. Over the past few days I started to think about how I would put together my first blog post as an unemployed person on my “Corporate Korea” blog.

Last month during my last business trip to SF I had a panic attack, of all places, on the airplane, in the middle of the flight as others surrounding me were peacefully sleeping. Thankfully my sister was sitting next to me, sleeping like a rock to my avail. I woke her up and vented my feelings. She quickly helped me with some therapy (she’s a counselor in the making) and picked me up and got me laughing within minutes. Crying, laughing, craziness galore. This kind of behavior gives you rainbow colored pubes (so my mother says.)

Overwhelmed with personal/work/future/moving out of the apt and korea/lack of sleep etc, etc, the stress piled on high enough to topple over in several directions. It was time to either sink or swim and I sank. It was rather annoying because it came out of nowhere and at the time I had no idea why I was feeling so crazy. Even watching the Justin Bieber movie was too stressful for me to handle. I didn’t sleep a wink during the flight and rigidly held on to the armrests as my sanity felt like it was swirling out of control.  Fuckign Justin Bieber. I love you.

I’m better now, though I am currently suffering from a very separate life altercation which I will elaborate on later.