While volunteering for the Mountains 2 Beach Marathon, and seeing runner after runner desperately reach for water, I wondered this very question—“why do we run?”
Why do we do the very thing that is considered punishment for many athletes for our own pleasure?
Why, despite the blisters and the stitches and the aches, do we start that Strava run?
Why do we get on that starting line, knowing that in a few minutes, you’ll be wishing you didn’t?
To be honest, I wish I had an answer.
In more ways than one, running humbles you. It humbles you when you realize that all the pain is caused by simply putting one foot in front of the other.
But I guess that’s what I like about running—the simplicity.
Out there, it’s just you and your running shoes. Sure, you could invest in the newest Nike ZoomX VaporFly and the Mojave Run Plus Sports Headphones, but by no means do you have to to start running. Anybody can run(mostly).
Sometimes though, I do regret getting myself into this. Like during this run, for example.
Recently, I revisited my quarantine-era playlist, and let me tell you, it was LIFE CHANGING.
It’s crazy how music can bring back such vivid memories and feeling from a certain part of your life.
Lets go over a few songs:
Song #1: Hot Rod – Dayglow
This was THE song for me during quarantine. I would get on my bike, play this song, and ride around town, with the sun beams burning the back of my neck. During quarantine, it was really, me, my bike, and this song against the world.
Song #2: Green Light – Lorde
Now, I’m not going to go over the masterpiece that this album is, because I could write a whole other blog about that. Specifically though, I would listen to this song on long car rides, or when I was stuck at home, laying in my bed, staring at the ceiling.
Song #3: Ain’t It Fun – Paramore
Quarantine wasn’t very fun. But this song made it a little bit better. The intro itself brings me back to the era of dalgona coffees, and the “Say So.”
Song #4: Corduroy Dreams – Rex Orange County
Now, every Rex Orange County song was a quarantine song, but I think I listened to this song the most. I remember listening to this song while walking home from “work,” whered I helped my parents out with the restaurant.
My name is Karin H. Hahn. The H stands for Hasegawa. Except I don’t like Hasegawa. I just like H and that’s all.
If that line doesn’t sound somewhat familiar, well for one, I’m heavily disappointed, but two, it’s from one of my FAVORITE series, Junie B. Jones.
This line, which opened every single book in the series, will forever be ingrained in my head, for multiple reasons.
One, I’ve read and reread this series numerous times between the first grade and probably the fourth grade, admiring the spunky girl who talked to her stuffed animals and gave herself haircuts with craft scissors.
Second, as a kid, I resonated heavily with Junie B’’s resentment for her middle name.
Growing up, I wanted a middle name like Rose, or Mary, or another one of those basic white-girl middle names that every other girl in my class had.
Over time though, I’ve grown to like my middle name.
I like the meaning of it—”long valley river.”
I like how it connects me to my heritage, to my mom’s side of the family in Japan.
I like the way Karin Hasegawa-Hahn flows.
I just have to get used to people mispronouncing it.
I’m betting that it’s going to be mispronounced at graduation.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.”
This quote, from Sylvia Plath’s novel, Bell Jar, is, my per-say, “Roman Empire.”
Especially as a senior in high school, there’s so much weight on you to figure out what you want to be.
And it becomes so easy to categorize and label yourself, like “I’m a STEM person,” or “I want to be an engineer.”
But truth be told, I have no idea what I want to be. Or actually, I have too many ideas on what I want to be, and I have no idea how to choose. For example,
I want to be a film score composer, where I can make music that makes people feel the thrill of a car chase through a dystopian wasteland, and the enigma of navigating a mind-bending world of dreams within dreams.
I want to be a teacher, and share the excitement that I get from successfully integrating a function.
I want to be an astronaut, and journey into the hauntingly beautiful bounds of space.
I want to be a surgeon, and work with the intricacies and the ins and outs of the human body.
I want to be an architect, and shape the skyline with my designs and structures.
I want to be a nature documentarian, where I can harness my inner David Attenborough through immersive storytelling and beautiful panoramic shots.
I want to be…
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
I’ve always considered myself to be fairly good at math.
So when I’d drive by this certain furniture on the side of the highway that said “7 days until closing”, and a week later, it’d say “6 days until closing,” I knew something was up.
This furniture store—which I’d always pass by on me and my mom’s weekly Costco runs—was lying straight to the face of its customers, and no one was saying anything.
This made me mad.
I didn’t take ten years of Kumon to be tricked by a marketing gimmick by some dreary furniture store. I knew that a week later, the sign would still say the same, the furniture store would still be open, even though six days had obviously passed.
Though this enlightened me to the lies that surround us in everyday life, my mom told me that if you paid attention, these lies were everywhere.
So, it’s this furniture store’s fault that I have trust issues. It’s this furniture store’s fault that I’m a skeptic.
Now, I don’t mean that in a “pick-me” way, but I truly feel so much of the emotions around me, to a point where it controls my life. Or at least it used to be that way.
Bubblegum, Rainbow Sherbet, Rocky Road. These are pretty common favorites when it comes to ice cream flavors, especially when you’re a kid. When I was a kid though, and my mom allowed me to get ice cream(which was a once in a blue-moon type of occurrence), I would always end up getting the most obscure flavors like toasted coconut or black sesame, which was far too refined for my palate.
I opted for these flavors, not because I wanted to “try something new,” or anything like that, but because I felt bad. I felt bad for the pints of ice cream that always got looked over. I felt bad for the ice cream flavors that remain untouched. I opted for such unique flavors because I pitied these ice cream flavors that just wanted to be loved and enjoyed like the damn Bubblegums, Rainbow Sherbets, and Rocky Roads. To me, these flavors were the popular trifecta, or the “mean girls,” per say, and the ones I always picked out were the underdogs wanting to be chosen. And I guess I related to that as a kid.
Now that I look at it, I can’t help but laugh about how I used to empathize with ice cream flavors. ICE CREAM FLAVORS!? I probably ended up wasting a lot of money anyways, because I’d leave the pint of black sesame ice cream untouched after the first couple of bites.
It wasn’t just ice cream though. I empathize with the book that was never checked out, or an elderly person eating at a cafe by themselves, as if they were my own feelings.
To whoever’s reading this, I would like to reassure you that I do not think like this anymore. Though I do feel like I sometimes carry the weight of everyone’s emotions when it’s not even necessary, I’ve learnt to not let it control my life. It’s funny, because now, people view me as “nonchalant,” and even “cold,” when I was everything but that as a kid.
I now get Mint Chip Ice cream every time, without paying a second thought on the neglected Kraft Mac and Cheese Ice Cream flavor that sits untouched.
When faced with this dreaded icebreaker on the first day of a summer program or school orientation, I would always respond with the same answer: How to Train Your Dragon.
The thing is, I could not tell you what this movie is about or why I like it. All I remember is that it was about a boy named Burp? or something and it was about… training dragons. I first watched it on the plane ride to Japan a few years ago, and when I finished the movie, I remember feeling like I could just jump out of the plane, hop on a dragon, and go conquer the world.
In fact, you could ask me about any movie I’ve ever seen, and my mind would probably draw blank. It’s terrible. I sit in a movie theater for two and a half hours and walk out, forgetting the main character’s name. It’s especially frustrating when people ask me questions like “If it’s your favorite movie, who’s your favorite character?” or “Which movie in the series is your favorite?” I would just stand there, trying to come up with an answer, while a smug smile would appear on the other person’s face, as if they were thinking, “what a fake fan.”
For example, I’ve watched and rewatched the Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Maze Runner Series an EMBARRASSING number of times, but it would still take me a minute to give a plot summary. My inability to remember a movie’s plot and/or characters have always frustrated me, but I now feel like I partly understand why my memory is horrendous when it comes to movies.
I think it’s because with every movie I watch, I don’t just sit there, passively observing the lives of the main character, but I become a part of the movie. I get so hyper-invested in the lives of the characters, to a point that I forget to eat my popcorn, or I start speaking like the character after watching the movie(this was especially bad after watching Harry Potter).
Like how humans often forget their happiest memories or most traumatic memories, I too, forget when I navigated a mind-bending world of dreams within dreams in Inception, or when I sprinted with my life on the line through a dystopian wasteland in Maze Runner.
It’s through movies that I’ve lived a million lives; I’ve lived as a mobster, a romantic, a talking race car, a beautiful, swampy, green ogre. It’s through movies that I’ve seen the world, from the bleak streets of Gotham City, to the scenic backdrop of Mamma Mia!, Skopelos, Greece.
In fact, I’ll sacrifice a top-notch memory if it means that I can watch the same movie hundreds of times, and relive it without ever getting bored.
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