Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson is an excellent book for those interested in learning more about the basics of photography… and especially those who have an expensive DSLR camera lying around but can only use it in Auto mode.

I have been trying to learn more about photography, and in that process I picked up Understanding Exposure.

As a beginner, I learned quite a bit.  He explains seemingly everything a beginner could want to know; from aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to lighting, metering techniques, and filters (if you don’t know what any of these are, go buy the book).

But beyond the teaching aspect of the book, I have to give my highest praise for the writing and organization of the book itself.  Bryan Peterson proves to be an excellent writer.  He explains things in easy to understand language that is never condescending or preachy.  Also, as he teaches each section he gives numerous examples from his own portfolio showing how each piece works.

As a newly avowed e-reader junkie, this is one book you should buy in reality.  The pictures are great learning tools and you’ll want to see the details to fully understand what he is talking about.

I highly (highly!) recommend this book.  It is rare that I find anything so compact (174 pages, but mostly photos) yet so useful.

You might think (as I did) that you can get this information for free on blogs or various internet sites… and you can… but you’ll also get about 1,439 headaches along the way from the poor writing, lack of organization, and jargon you won’t understand.

If you want to buy the book… please follow this link… I get a small percentage which helps me pay for hosting this blog.

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If you’ve known me longer than 5 minutes, then you’ve most likely been forced to look at one of my many spreadsheets.  I put everything in spreadsheets: from simple things like bills and weight loss to more complex equations like which city to move to and what camera to buy.

When I read GRETCHEN! Rubin’s The Happiness Project (my review here), one thing I liked about her (there wasn’t much) was that she also liked to make lists and grade herself… so, she took Ben Franklin’s List of Virtues, modified it to her liking and graded herself each week.

After finishing The Happiness Project, I decided to make my own chart to track what makes me happy.  I’ve been doing it for 10 weeks, and while it does seem ludicrous… it’s helped.

MY SYSTEM

Basically, each Monday I give myself 0, 1, or 2 points… 0 points if I do not do it much at all, 1 point if I kind of succeed or do it halfway; and 2 points if I feel like I have fulfilled that part of my life in that week. The process is completely subjective and it forces me to become much more mindful (which is one of the categories) about what I am doing… and since no one else is looking at this list and it doesn’t help me to cook the books.

Here are the categories in which I give myself 0, 1, or 2 points:

• diet — eating healthy and not over-indulging in desserts, alcohol, etc.
• health — going to the gym, walking, smoking
• cleanliness — keeping my apartment clutter-free, doing the dishes immediately, folding laundry immediately, making my bed; etc.
• money — staying on budget
• sleep — sleeping enough; not feeling too tired to do things
• korean — studying at least 4 hours
• blog — writing, researching, studying
• social — being active with other people
• reading — reading
• new things — experiencing new places, foods, cultures, etc.
• being mindful — being aware of emotions, health, and surroundings

One friend recently suggested I add a “love” column, which I think I will.  I initially put in the “social” category because I have a tendency to lock myself in my apartment, but I’m realizing that being “social” is completely different from communing with those I love: family, close friends, etc… which is important to my happiness, and one thing I have let slide recently (sorry Mom).

WHAT I’VE LEARNED

I’ve learned a few things from this little project.  One is that it is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT to do all the things that help make me happy within one week… and I mean doing them to the point where I derive some happiness from them.

The things that take the most time (exercising, blogging, studying Korean, sleeping, reading, and being social) actually do take A LOT of time and I cannot figure out how to incorporate all of them into one week (although I suppose I could start exercising with Korean friends… that sentence was meant to be a joke, but now that I look at it, I’m thinking that maybe it’s a good idea).

IT’S NOT PERFECT

It’s not a perfect system.

For instance, the spreadsheet does not help me when the person I’m dating lies about spending the night with their ex… that fabulous week of rigorous gym visits and new Korean vocabulary words got flushed down the un-happiness toilet.

And it also doesn’t count for the weeks when I’m incredibly happy lying on my bed reading, blogging… and not much else.

Basically, from all of the needlessly complex spreadsheeting (which I will continue to do), the formula for me seems to be

• don’t do anything that creates guilt
• grow mentally in some way
• be good to my body

And as simple as this is, I never really thought about it consciously.

I was a little skeptical of charting my happiness, but it’s been good.  I think about things differently and I am making better decisions because of it.

So again, even though I didn’t particularly like GRETCHEN! (the author of The Happiness Project), I have to thank her profusely for helping me.

Buy The Happiness Project here.

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Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War: A History (July 2010) is worth a read if you’re looking for a quick (288 pages) primer.

The Korean War (1950-1953) is often referred to as the Forgotten War… and for good reason.  There’s not much good to come out of it on the American side (we lost, we helped kill millions of people, we napalmed everyone in sight, etc. etc.), and since they knew that even at the time, reporters were heavily censored while covering it.

The Korean War is one of the deadliest wars in history (ranked 13th here) with estimates of 2.5 million to 3.5 million dead (almost 40,000 American deaths).  And it all happened on a peninsula roughly the size of Utah.

Even more devastating is that this marked the beginning of what we know today as the Military Industrial Complex along with America’s preoccupation with not leaving countries.  This is where Cumings is most successful.

He draws the line that begins with America in Korea and ends with America in Iraq and Afghanistan.  After the end of WWII, the American military took over the South Korean government (USSR took control in the North).  When the military gave governing power back to the Koreans, they made sure that their guy, Syngman Rhee, was President.  Of course, their guy went on to exterminate thousands upon tens of thousands of civilians if there was any inclination that they might be communists.

It was after the Korean War that America’s defense budget ballooned. We decided to maintain an enormous standing army (after all previous wars, the military would shrink to almost less than manageable sizes… including WWII) and military contracts stayed at wartime levels.  This all makes some sense given that this was the true beginning of the Cold War, but it is impossible to read this book and wonder what might have been.

But also, much of Cumings’ writing is weak and he laces many of his well-researched arguments with almost petulant sounding tirades.  At one point he even attacks a random reader from Bethany Beach, Delaware, who made the unfortunate mistake of making a list of his favorite books on the Korean War in Amazon.com’s Listmania! (If one cannot get a point across without referencing Amazon.com’s Listmania! service, then there is something terribly wrong.)

And while I agree with Cumings that North Korea was probably not as evil during the war as the American media would have us believe, Cumings seems to want to absolve North Korea of everything (he doesn’t, but he spends a great deal of energy showing how much nicer the North Koreans were).

Of course, Cumings is trying to make points that have been whitewashed by 60 years of American propaganda.  So, in light of that, a little yelling can be excused.  And there is no excuse for the inhumane treatment of civilians and soldiers by the Republic of Korea and American armies.

Despite being frustrated with Cumings’ writing style, the book is powerful.  This war was dirtier and more awful than anything my generation can imagine, and as Cumings points out, it is probably dirtier and more awful than anything my parent’s generation can imagine (i.e., Vietnam).

You can buy it at Barnes and Noble for $17 (it’s not listed on any of Amazon.com’s Listmania! lists).

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Cousin Emily suggested I read Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project ($15 @ Barnes & Noble).  It is a book about the author’s one year project to make herself happier.

As GRETCHEN! says (she’s so high-strung I can only think of her in ALLCAPS and exclamation points), sometimes we aren’t happy doing the things that will make us happy in the long term.  That’s the way I feel about this book.  I did not enjoy reading it, but I learned some things and am happier in the end.  Seriously.

This is an issue I am slightly obsessed with having been quite unhappy for most of my twenties.  When I came to Korea I eventually came to realize that I was very happy, so I’ve been trying to identify why I am happy now.

Here are some things I learned about my own happiness from the book and from my endless ruminations on the subject:

#1 Clutter — She starts the book by focusing on clearing the clutter in her house.  This is an issue I wholeheartedly agree with.  When I sold everything I owned before moving to Korea, I expected to be sad… but I wasn’t.  And after everything was gone, I felt a sense of liberation I had never felt before.  Now I am ruthless.

#2 You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy – This is the sort of thing I would have scoffed at before.  It’s so new-agey and hokey, but it works.  I don’t think I fully realized it though until moving to Korea.  It took me a long time living here before I realized that I was actually kind of happy.  Then, I started telling people I was happy (something I’ve never done)… then,  I became more happy by just saying I was happy… and an added benefit is that by acting so happy, all the Koreans around became happier too because they were happy that I was happy in their country (which GRETCHEN! discusses in the book too).

#3 Being happy is hard work — I was very unhappy in Connecticut, but I never really worked at being happy, I just expected it to happen.  When I moved to Korea, I was so afraid of being unhappy and depressed that I worked hard to make sure that didn’t happen.  And it worked.  The downside to this is that I’ve become more intolerant of unhappy people because I feel like they are not working hard enough.

#4 Growth — Growth is very important to me, but I’ve never thought about it as a facet to my own happiness.  Seeing this written out was very helpful for me because it allowed me to think on it in different ways.  Now, when I think about doing my Korean homework I realize that it’s not a chore… it’s part of my growth and it will make me happy.  I realize this is a bit of mental gymnastic re-framing of the issue… but it’s also true.  Because of this, I’ve been much more conscious of setting aside time to do these projects.  Now, I enjoy the projects more and I even look forward to them.

#5 Being present for the different stages of events – GRETCHEN! makes a really good point that events (like birthday parties) are actually pretty short in the whole scheme of things and that we should pay more attention to the before/after of the event and recognize the happiness we gain from them.  So, instead of dreading the endless hours involved in her daughter’s cake selection, GRETCHEN! got into it and made a bigger deal of it because she knew her daughter would most likely remember the pre-party cake selection process much more than the actual eating of the cake.  GRETCHEN! also validated my obsession with photo-documenting everything I do by saying that we need to take photos so we can remember these events and draw happiness from them endlessly.

There are many, many more great things, and there are a lot of things I didn’t like about the book…but GRETCHEN! says it’s bad to constantly criticize (which she probably wrote so that people like me would feel guilty about saying negative things).  I will say that the project seemed to work wonders for her because from Chapter 1 to Chapter 12, she became FAR less annoying. FAR LESS.

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I just finished Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.  I bought this precisely because I wanted a non-sensational account of life in North Korea.  I didn’t want to read about nuclear weapons or labor camps.

In many respects, the handful of people Demick interviews do lead normal lives.  They go to jobs they don’t necessarily like; the parents worry about their kids’ educations; and the kids struggle against the pressures of school, hormones, and parental expectations.

However, the differences are much more stark and unforgettable.

Most of the people interviewed ended up in Seoul by a string of chance events.  They all loved North Korea, and had no long-planted seed to defect.  But at the same time, almost all of them learned within minutes of crossing the Tumen River into China how different their lives would be.

When Dr. Kim defected into China, she came upon a bowl of rice sitting on the ground.  She couldn’t believe it because “she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice.”   Then she heard the dog and realized that “dogs in China ate better than doctors in Korea.”

All of those interviewed lived through the famine of the 90′s that likely killed between 1.0 to 3.0 million people.

Everyone in the book dealt with starvation, and those that lived were ridden with guilt over what they had done to survive.  Mi-ran, a schoolteacher, was never able to erase the images of her starving students and the reasons why she didn’t share her food with them.  Mrs. Song, a doting wife & mother, never forgave herself for her son’s death (this on the heels of her husband’s death the previous year and her mother-in-law’s death two years prior).

Mi-ran later discovered that that the two sisters who remained in North Korea were snatched in the middle in the night and taken to labor camps because she had defected.  And several of the mothers were never able to see their children again.

It goes on and on.  And these are the lives of the “ordinary lives” in North Korea.

I highly recommend this book.

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I just spent the entire weekend in Seoul and had a lot of time to read on the bus and waiting for friends.  I’ve been reading the hefty 2666, but decided I didn’t want to lug a 906 page book around Seoul for three days, so I brought my nook (which I love and recommend).

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This summer, a few of the bloggers I follow (namely Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein) joined an online book club to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace… having read a bit of Infinite Jest in the past, I knew I could not stomach it; however, the book club was so popular they have decided to continue it with Dracula.

I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and am a bit excited to finally do so.

When I was a child, I saw the movie Fright Night.  This movie caused nightmares for approximately three years afterward, ensuring that I would run to my parents room at the slightest sound of what I thought was the un-dead.

Actually, I would lay petrified on my top bunk wondering if I had the speed to make it down the steps of the bed and across the entire length of our (long) ranch-style house to my parents room.  Obviously, I was super-fast because I am here to tell the tale… but I must say there were several close calls.

That being said, I am thoroughly enjoying Dracula.   You should join me if you can… it’s only one month, and the book is free online or about $7 at any store.

Here’s the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula… While I do like this movie, it’s also worth it to watch the movie as a case-study in bad casting (i.e., Keanu Reeves).  Most of the other actors do well.  I love Richard Grant in anything, Gary Oldman is more than creepy, and Winona Ryder does fine — although there are scores that could have done it better.  Oh, and just ignore the bad special effects at the beginning…

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