About

This blog is my "side piece" -- a place to put down my thoughts when I'm not taking care of the other parts of my life. Sometimes I'll talk about my favorite products, while other times a social issue will take up space here. This is a living document of opinions, analyses, and recommendations. My hope is that it will be useful in some capacity, whether that's providing some levity or helpful knowledge.

Popular posts from this blog

A mote of dust

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“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan Photo by  Max McKinnon  on  Unsplash
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Soda costs extra, but they'd never know it

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Being a first generation child who then becomes a parent is an interesting experience. It makes you particularly reflective about your own upbringing, mostly because as a child of immigrants, life can be pretty frugal and focused on making sure your life will never be as terrible as your parents’ life in the motherland, and quite frankly, as an “other” in the US. That manifests into the stereotypes we’ve all heard before: A laser focus on getting exceptional grades, guilt, frustration, constant feelings of failure, never wasting money, eating out, and on the rare occasion you do go to a restaurant, never, ever ordering anything but water with your meal. Even on special occasions, you should always know you’re living on razor-thin margins. Now that I have privileged American children who have never known the frugality and emotional distance of immigrant parents, their ignorance over everyday luxuries and whining about perceived injustices are particularly comical and grating.  Frida...
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Productivity hacks for working from home

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  Get out of your pajamas and into an actual outfit, but nothing with a zipper, button or collar. Turn on the TV, sit in front of it with your laptop and all your resources and apps open. Write one sentence per hour. Panic after 4 hours, wondering why you only have a paragraph’s worth of work. Take regular breaks -- a quick walk around the block, work out, throw a load of laundry in while you spiral out of control on Amazon. Lean into the urgency of finding the perfect dish drying rack to replace the current one that’s working perfectly fine. Put your phone on “do not disturb.” Place it right next to your hand. Check it often to make sure you’re not missing any notifications due to the “do not disturb.” Find a good playlist for studying or focused work. Spiral into the sadness and beauty of life as you become overwhelmed by the lyrics and dramatic crescendos of the songs. Get up and stretch, which will inspire you to research free workout apps for the next hour.  Go to t...
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