A little blog.
Observe. The kind and the unkind, the ‘modest peculiarities’. 1 Absorb, and emit back, the kind. Refrain from critique as attack. (Some of it will come out anyway. In any case, it is a waste of breath.) The answer is, no one knows. There are no rules. (omitted) “The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities, and his right to these…
Last week I found out I got second place for the little writing contest I had submitted to a while back. It’s an eerie feeling, getting paid for my writing for the first time. I sent it to my parents. My dad’s only remark was that my use of the term ‘village’ was incorrect, even though my great-grandfather’s patients were indeed peasants. I chuckled, because I mostly blame my mom – whenever she…
Yesterday I had the privilege of being invited to my friend’s husband’s dedicated strawberry research farm lot at Cal Poly to pick strawberries with my kids. It had just rained three days prior; so many of the berries were lightly moist, and ripe. They felt warm and plump in the hand with none of that grocery store rubberiness. A vividly sweet fragrance swirled around us, punctuated by the sharp…
I’ve been working on an email to my dad for his birthday. Turns out I’ve been accidentally rewriting one from years past.
Dear stranger, I am a sucker for salutations. Even when the recipient potentially finds them extremely awkward (as they often do, in today's largely letter-less world).
The other day, my son said to me, "I'm happy 'bout you." "You're happy about me?" I asked. "I'm happy 'bout you playing with me, that's why I love you."
Have I ever told you about my first kiss? I was 8. He was 13. My mom knew his dad from church; his mom was studying for a cosmetician exam. She needed help on the English. My mom volunteered my dad, who brought me to their house on those weekend tutoring sessions and Jonathan, the poor teenager, was instructed to entertain the little kid who tagged along. They lived in a big, sprawling house that…
My writing's been feeling bumpy as of late. Is a blog even the right place for any of this? My thoughts too heavy, morose, mired in memory requiring dense exposition. Feels impossibly difficult to write deeply about real people who aren't just in my past, but in my present. Am constantly worried about lengthiness, and yet it feels wrong to censor myself. These 'posts' feel truncated, so much…
My husband hates my blog. "It's just too... long," he said to me one night. "And it's cringe. It's like the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Like Fast and Furious. It's just not my thing." I hadn't written it for him, but it's hard not to care about this kind of feedback, coming from the person who repeatedly insisted that I just start a damn blog in the first place. I'm not verbose when I talk.…
I just want to begin with, I hate what LLM's are doing to our culture, our society, our children's future education, our economy... I hear about it day and night from my husband, from headlines in my inbox that I occasionally scan, even though I have nothing to do with it. I change diapers. I weather tantrums. I scrub toilets. I go to Costco. I don't need an LLM in my life. I don't need to write…