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

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.  Friday is
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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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A grief not of my own

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 A very good friend's father recently passed away. This was the first time any of our inner circle of friends experienced a loss of a parent. We helped in the tangible ways we knew how: Texting/calling for updates, meal trains, gift cards, engaging our network of medical professionals. They were all deeply appreciated. We couldn't treat his illness, but we could solve for the consequential obstacles, hopefully clearing a path for our friend to process and grieve. I gave her a call as the situation unfolded, anxious about not knowing what I would say or what it would accomplish, but feeling compelled to connect. Almost immediately I burst into tears when she picked up the phone. So did she. It was unexpectedly cathartic for both of us to have a good cry together, even if it didn't "accomplish" anything.  What I later learned from a timely Brain Pickings video share on helping grieving friends is that sometimes the solution is just. to. cry. Go into their bubble of
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