Short version: My mid-life crisis.

 Long version: I hit 40 last year and realized two things: I need to get out of Korea (where I’ve been for 13 years now), and I need to change jobs. Like most people who hit the big, scary 4-0, I looked back at my life and wondered about the paths not taken. Don’t get me wrong, I have loved all the travel, experiences and friends I’ve had. I just realized that I never actually used my artistic creativity for any useful, purposeful endeavor, and that I REALLY, REALLY needed to. I’m burned out with teaching and don’t feel like I’m “learning” anything new. I need to be making things. I need to make beautiful things. I can’t spend the next 25 years of my life NOT making things on a daily basis.

 A combination of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, PROJECT RUNWAY and a book I was researching with a 19th-century seamstress heroine made me realize that it was clothing design I really wanted to get back into. If you knew me in high school, you might remember that fashion designer/fashion illustrator was my number one career choice. I didn’t end up pursuing it — partly because girls from mid-Michigan don’t go to New York and become successful and partly because I was the first person in two generations of both sides of the family to get a college degree.

 To make a long story somewhat shorter, I was loaned a sewing machine from a friend, I started haunting Seoul’s fabric market, and I audited a class in pattern-making (in Korean!). I also applied to — and was accepted by — the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles (with a merit scholarship). They have a 15-month program where all my classes will be scheduled for two days a week so I can also work part-time in the industry and come out with an associate’s degree (with professional designation) and combine technical skill, creativity and 16 years of management experience (what else is a teacher but a mananger of 20-year-olds?) into a new career.

So I’m changing countries, cultures and careers all in one fell swoop, beginning July 2008 (school will start in Oct.). So the blog is a chronicle of all of this change. My decision to make such a sudden change has a lot of people saying, “You’re so brave!”

My response is: “Brave. Stupid. It’s a very thin line.”

So follow the blog and see which it turns out to be!