HeeJin Lee

저는 반대 이슈가 있었지만 (100년 전 지어진 집으로 이사하는데 21세기 가구가 잘 안 들어오더라고요 😅😭) 저 또한 문 떼고 짐 들였어요. 미국에서는 비교적 흔한 일이라고 하더라고요! 원하시는 데로 가구배치가 잘 되셨길요.

TFW you find a place that sells Uzbek kimchi in town!

Signs of aging for this year:

*Began using MS Word zoomed in at 120 percent, always
*Did not enjoy daylight savings ending for the first time, ever
*Realized that I need to plan for 2026 goals now, breaking up leisurely starting the new year with LNY as deadline

😫😭

축하드립니다 선생님! 이사도 수월하게 잘 하시길요!

Belatedly grading student responses to Han Kang’s HUMAN ACTS today, one year after martial law was declared in South Korea. I’m all the more grateful to read the incredibly thoughtful submissions, dealing with memory, trauma, and history in truly moving ways.

Brought to you by being inundated with marketing emails in the last few days in the US!

Potential hot take: In the vein of words being important, I hate the terms “pleather” or “vegan leather.” It’s all plastic, it gets sticky, it flakes off, it’s not a more ethical/sustainable choice, whether for clothes, shoes, or bags. I’d rather secondhand or repurposed actual leather!

How is it that there are so many jokes about bad winter drivers in PA/Pittsburgh—I thought that was a southern thing?!

ACLA seminar accepted! See you in Montréal!

Biggest case of the Monday blues + feeling out of routine after taking the whole week off last week. This crazy “teach for one more week after Thanksgiving before winter break” needs to end!

Also, amazed that there is still an airport cafe where I can get a solid coffee, water, and bfast croissant for under 15 dollars (with kind staff, to boot) AND they have nice seats where I can hopefully squeeze in 20 mins or so of work before boarding.

Shoutout to the kind employee who explained to me, step by step, how to get there—not sure I would have made it without him!

Wouldn’t say PIT is “new”—gates and the bulk of the airport remain the same—but rather, renovated. Parking is nice and walk into the airport building proper is new and nice, but ngl not a fan of having to drive around 20+ mins to find the area where I reserved parking.

Excited to read this, especially since it reminds me so much of the Zoom reading group I had with fellow grad students in our department at the height of the pandemic!

Love the fact that I now work in the same town as a friend from grad school and so I could support him at his conference session yesterday (also in town) and that we got to catch up over a proper lunch. And we could even walk home afterwards, through our respective campuses!

Indeed, bsky for me is the proverbial workplace water cooler 😅 I do like instagram which is where I tend to connect with friends, most of whom are not academics. But agreed, lessening social media use overall is great for quality of life! Though I miss hearing from you. Hope all is well!

Woke up in the middle of the night to learn that there’s a temporary water outage in my neighborhood, in 2025 🫠

Proud to have made granola at home, for the first time, after a long day on campus! It’s probably routine and super easy for most, but it feels like a real win to make something at home, as part of recalibrating the work-life balance in my life.

TFW you learn that a dept colleague, not in your field, did extra research on the work of fiction you’re set to present for your colloquium talk next week so that he could find a photo of the cover art to make a poster for the event 🥹 feeling so incredibly lucky to be around caring colleagues!

though many here have told me it doesn’t snow “too much” in the winter 😅

I got my dose of “warm” winters in LA during grad school (it does get cold in the winter, especially since older homes there tend not to have central heating) but I missed the cold and snow, so glad to be back in these climes! Waiting to see just how much I have to shovel before getting too excited,

I love the cold! Though trying to recalibrate my senses after being in the South for the past two years 😁

Winter already in the second week of November!

As I have been saying for some time now, there are no emergencies in Korean literature!

Learning just how difficult it is to recover from working at breakneck speed to center self-care and health first—to be sure, the same amount of work exists as before but your body and your doc tell you in no uncertain terms that this is just not feasible any longer 😭

TFW your departmental colleagues organize an informal social hour to get to know you and other new faculty members who joined this fall 🥹

Dedication to self-care is scheduling PT sessions at the gym on a weeknight at the end of working hours when you depend on limited street parking. Lucky to have found a spot when I returned home from the gym today!

On top of the fact that I ran into a senior colleague from a different department on the elevator this AM—someone completely new to me—who greeted me and wished me a good day. Little gestures like this definitely make me feel more at home here, even in the midst of my very first semester!

Graded the best set of take-home midterm essays I’ve ever read since I began teaching in my grad student TA days. I don’t know how lucky I got with this bunch, but it IS possible to get students to care and write—and the majority of them wrote about premodern works we read!

This reminds me of the total breakdown of my telecomm provider in Korea a few years back, they got hacked bc their password was 1234 😂😭💀