Name
My name written in Korean (the original way) is 정성헌. “Seong-Heon” is my first name and “Jung” is my last name.
Pronunciation
My name is pronounced
- Seong as in sing-sang-(sung)
- Heon as in (hon)ey
- Jung as in (seong) but replace the ‘s’ with a ‘j’
All three sounds in my name actually have the same vowel sound, but my first name uses “eo” to represent this vowel and my last name uses “u”.
This is due to complicated but interesting bureaucratic reasons. The short answer is the romanization guidelines changed between when my grandparents decided to romanize their names and when I romanized my name. So, my last name (which I take from my father & paternal grandfather) follows the old standards and my first name follows the new standard.
Hanja
In hanja, my name is 聖憲. It’s roughly equivalent to wise/holy law. A fortune teller said it was a good name; go figure.
Pets
I have three gastropods: one snail and two slugs. They are named Ibuprofen, NyQuil, and DayQuil. I strongly believe gastropods (i.e. snails and slugs) make for wonderful pets because they are the only pet I have found so far which check all the boxes below.
- Does not smell bad
- Does not get sick easily
- Does not require a lot of space
- Does not incur terror upon some people*
- Moves around
- Can be touched
- Can be left alone for more than 1 week during vacations and such
- Vegan friendly**
- Cheap to maintain
Admittedly there are some close contenders. Honorable mentions go to plants (5), jumping spiders (4), turtles (1), snakes (4, 8), rats/mice (1, 2, 4, 7).
* Some people are mildly disgusted, but I distinguish disgust from terror. ** My snail is not vegan because I use cuttlebone as their calcium supplement, but this can be easily replaced with calcium powder or, in the case of slugs, nothing!
(Dis)ability
I suffer from narcolepsy. I do truly mean it when I write that I suffer from it, but I still try to make the most out of it. For example, I have extensive experience with sleep paralysis and have even managed to run some experiments while paralyzed. I also adjust incredibly fast to jetlag, requiring no more than a couple days to adjust to 12+ hours of time difference.