Sneaking in a post before the end of the month

And golly gee willikers, what a month it's been. I went on (technically?) my first date ever, met both BoxeR and (more importantly) Firebathero, found new Starcraft friends, had a fun bonding week with my group, picked up laddering, and  generally just continued to enjoy life in the city. I promise I will cover all these things in the post and with that, I shall get started.

Social interactions:
Most of those leads I mentioned in the last post have dried up. The North Koreans are not going to work out, but I had begun to think maybe that wasn't the best idea to begin with. The GSL girl is still around, but I still have no idea if that guy with her is her boyfriend or coworker. Either way, I was too shy to ever ask her out, and anyway, I wound up asking out the girl that was my first choice anyway (well I guess second if you count Sunny >__>). Anyway, the story shall be detailed below.

November 11th is Pepero day in Korea (Pepero is the Korean version of pocky sticks). Since this was 11/11/11, it was called millenium pepero day (despite it happening every century the way they wrote out the date, but whatever), however that is more or less irrelevant to this story. The magic of Pepero day is you can give Pepero to anyone and there doesn't have to be a romantic connotation to it, thought there often is. It's the perfect way to fall flat on your face in rejection, perfect for me and my nervousness! On top of that, I heard that the director for the program (the reason I am too shy to go up and ask the assistant out in person (her name is Boram which I will use from hereon out)) had the day off that day, so I took it as a sign that this was the time. I went out that night and bought her Pepero and the next day, went to deliver it in person. She looked pretty happy and surprised when I gave her the Pepero (no one else did that all day it seems). She then invited me in because she had something to bring up with me because of the volunteering project and the English tutoring I'm doing. That lasted a couple minutes, then it got more casual for a couple more minutes. Since I was concerned about the rejection last time, I tried to casually slip in my desire to move back to Korea to teach English in the future which she seemed surprised by, but it was well received. Right before I had to leave, I then decided to ask her out to dinner. Unfortunately, both our schedules didn't align for a couple weeks, so we decided to just get lunch the following weekend. I left the office quite happy with myself.

A handful of the girls in the group know I like Boram, but none of then knew I asked her out on a date. They just knew I had given her Pepero on Pepero day and all of them seem to think it's super cute. On my way to the date, I passed Katherine (girl that I came over on the same flight as) as she was waiting for the elevator. I had worn pants because I wanted to look nicer than usual for Boram, so I walked quickly so my legs would be hidden around the corner from Katherine, then when she said hi to me, I leaned back so she would just see my upper body and head. But she is too smart for her own good and walked around to where she could see all of me at which point she asked if I was going to the international party that day. I said no because I was going out to Sinchon for lunch (trying not to say I was going out with Boram because I didn't want it to be big news in case I failed). At that point, Katherine looked down and saw I was wearing pants, then looked back up at me with a smug smirk that just said "You're wearing pants, I know exactly where you're going..." With that, she said goodbye and I did too, then I headed out. The actual date went pretty well. I don't know how much she thought it was a date, though the fact that I was wearing pants should have clued her in. After eating, I paid and she only offered once before letting me do it (I take that as a success, if she had repeatedly insisted, that would have been bad). After that, we were going to go back to the subway originally since I had to tutor that afternoon, but she suggested we walk around a bit to find this art flea market nearby. So we walked around there and saw some cool things, then slowly made our way back to the subway. All in all, it was about 1.5-2 hours with her and quite enjoyable. I'm currently trying to find a time when I can go out to dinner with her. Eventually I'll be able to tell her I like her, I just gotta get out on a date with her again.

In other social lifey things, I made some new Starcraft friends. I found out through TeamLiquid that there is a girl that goes to school here that loves BroodWar. She actually recognized me at a GSL event (I have a blog on TeamLiquid with Starcraft related posts and pictures of me), but was too shy to say hi there and wound up PMing me later on. We eventually connected and now we go to games together (along with a couple other cool people from TL that go here too and one guy that's here on vacation). It's nice to have foreigners to hang out with at BW events because otherwise, I would be the only white guy there. She is a rising superstar on the TL forums and has studied BroodWar extensively. She only started getting into it in June, but she now knows a ton. I guess she went back and just researched the hell out of BroodWar history. There are still times when I can give some knowledge to her, but generally, her memory of events is better than mine (and I was watching them unfold live T___T). Anyway, hanging out with them has been entertaining. I'm planning to go to a PC bang with the girl so we can play some BroodWar (she has trouble with it on her computer and hasn't actually played hardly any BW yet).

Group Project Bonding/Classes in General:
My professor that keeps cancelling class surprised everyone one day when he declared that he wasn't feeling well and thus would be ending class early....in the semester. That meant that after last Friday, the class would no longer be meeting for the remainder of the semester. The two remaining presentations would wrap up on that final day, then we would be done except for our papers which we are to submit online. The only problem with this is that my group was the last group and until he told us that (on a Sunday night), we were under the impression that we had twice as much time to complete the project. And we hadn't started. So we instantly figured it was crunch time and proceeded to spend a lot of time together over the course of that week. We did a prezi presentation to stand out and it went really well actually. You get docked points if your presentation is below 18 minutes and you get scolded if it is above 22 minutes. He asked for 20 minute presentations and ours wound up coming the closest at 19:47. The second closest was my friend's group who came in at 19:23. In the end, it didn't look like we scrambled the few days before it was due (though everyone knew we did because we freely admitted it) and we got 40/40s from all groups except one group who is full of bitches and grades everyone's projects really low (they gave us their highest grade all semester, a 39/40). When they said their score, half the class just got this confused look on their face and a couple people just confusedly stared at her. We were damn happy with our prezi and what we had accomplished in such a short time. We even included some trolly things in it, such as a hadoken and some cheesy pictures. Me and the gamer girl snuck those in late at night when we were really bored working on the project. The link is here for you to see. The slides are generally devoid of information because that's what the professor said he wanted from all groups.
http://prezi.com/itnjhtj_xzpa/topic-10-kim-jung-un-and-north-koreas-future/
(does you little good to learn from it without it being narrated, but you can still go in and spot the little hidden gems we put in).

My other classes are going well and are far less interesting than that one.

Laddering:
This one is brief. I have begun laddering more on the NA server. I ended the prevoius season with my MMR really low and because I lost my placement match this season, it put me in Silver. This has incresed my drive to get back to gold and someday higher leagues as well. Confusingly, I am ranked in Silver league on the Korean server as well, so I'm not sure what to make of that since the Korean server is way harder than the North America one. If anything, it might just be proof that I play better against better opponents (and the reason I feel like I played really well (though not nearly well enough) against the pro players I played in the Code A preliminaries.

Meeting BoxeR and FBH:
Two of my favorite players ever, I got to meet them in one month. Meeting BoxeR was already mentioned here, and my meeting FBH can be found in my TeamLiquid blog (it's a bit long) http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=289853

Getting to meet him was extremely awesome and I can't wait to keep supporting ACE at events.

So in conclusion, wish me luck on perhaps getting more dates. Who knows, maybe she likes me too and I will get a girlfriend. That would be quite interesting. Until next time, peace out.