i know it's january but i need some sun stat before i lose my mind.

i am rapidly growing tired of the snow. i hate snow, quite a lot actually. i don't remember being a child who liked snow. i appreciated a snow day when they appeared but those were so infrequent i think i can remember all of them from my whole schooling career, kindergarten to college graduation. it is cold, wet and a general inconvenience and there is certainly no convincing me that there is a good reason for it. and the next person who says "but it's so pretty!" is probably going to get slapped. i probably should live somewhere less tundra-y than michigan but besides this rather annoying part, i do like it here. some day, i will be a snow bird and that will be truly lovely. i'm pretty sure that is one of my biggest motivating factors to go to work daily, the promise of wintering somewhere tropical and enjoying the rest of the year in my beloved mitten. it's nice to dream, right?

my friend maralyn sent me an article the other day written by a chinese mother about her parenting technique. this was published in the wall street journal and is an excerpt from her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." the headline of the story in the wall street journal was "why chinese mothers are superior" so she automatically had my attention, considering i was raised by a japanese mother. i figured it was going to be interesting. i was met promptly by this list that caught my attention and got me to finish the rather lengthy piece.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

now, my mom was quite strict when i was a kid. we had rules for everything and there were certainly times in growing up where i realized that my house was way different than my friends. most of those realizations happened in high school and early college when i realized that the way i processed information or choices and consequences was quite different than my peers. i am grateful now for the strong sense of right and wrong that my mother instilled in me no matter how difficult it has made relating to people sometimes. i know i am a stronger person because of it. what the tiger mother in the article failed to realize, that had me horrified at the end of her essay was that not allowing her children any kind of socializing was going to leave them kind of weird and using this strict "eastern" way of raising her children was going to make it really hard for them to adjust to living in the "western" world. another friend sent me an editorial from cnn that a different asian author wrote, discussing his growing up with "tiger parents" and i found myself agreeing with him easily. that author wrote a memoir titled "I Love Yous are for White People" and in his editorial, he said "I'm sure I appear successful and happy on the surface. I'm a published author, a successful executive, and I have a Ph.D. in psychology. In spite of this, my parents' approach failed. I'm torn to pieces on the inside."

i'm sure that if you gave most kids the chance to tell the stories of their childhood, they will come up with some stories that make you jump back and think "what were your parents doing." i know that the trials and tribulations of my own childhood weren't nearly as dramatic as these two writers. and in the same breath, i find myself relating with the sentence that the second author wrote when in a stand alone sentence he said "it was never enough." that is exactly how i feel with my parents and will forever be a part of who i am. i don't necessarily, hold it against my mom but i know if she didn't see the world as black and white and expect me to exist within it, i'd probably be a little better off. instead, she raised someone who has been fighting becoming that uptight for as long as i can remember.

maralyn and i were discussing this, because she is my only asian friend so truly one of the very few people i know that can relate to this. we discussed the way our parents were strict and what was wrong with the tiger mom's methods. then we traveled into a curious conversation about therapy and the way people cope. i mentioned that i have told every therapist i have ever had that my problem is that i feel like no matter what i do, it's not enough; she mentioned that she just keeps things suppressed where they belong so not to get into the messy business of going through them. my degree is in psychology so there is a little bit of buying into on my end that going through your problems is ultimately going to help you but not to the same degree that i would think most of my white friends seem to believe. i told maralyn that i have been told so many times by various white people that i'll feel better if i talk about it. that seems a curious bit of advice because who really knows how to deal with what you hear from people? are you prepared to hear a story, like the one i read earlier, of the young boy who was forced to eat cow brains in his parents' vain hope that would make him smarter?

all of these articles, i think, do a good job of pointing out how different "eastern" "tiger" cultures are from "western" culture, even when the kids in question are being raised in the west. some part of it is unavoidable. the adults we become are the result of the work our parents put in, for better or for worse. i feel like i'm pretty much as american as they come and i still found myself nodding along to these stories. maybe the point that should be taken away from all this conversation about strict asian parents is that the children of these parents should strive to find some kind of balance between the strict culture of the east and the "i love you" nurturing culture of the west.

from the half tiger girl

until next time...

you have the right not to remain silent.

i have noticed when a year starts and it is particularly rocky, the year tends to be pretty good. the start of 2005 was really rough, health wise mostly but it ended up being one of my best years in school and personally. 2008 started horribly, for my family and for my health (i spent months both unemployed and sick on the couch) but as jeremy pointed out to me this past weekend, that very well might be the year that as most significant thus far in defining my reputation at work. so here i am 19 days in to 2011 and in the first two weeks, i've had my car broken into, had all my writing stolen (as well as my empty glasses case and a half pack of gum) and have come down with what i assume has to be the plague but is apparently just the flu. if the flu means feeling like a zombie for 5 days while still trying to engage in anyway, coughing, fever and aches, i would seriously advise against catching it. i'm assuming i caught it as a result of driving 40 miles without a window in 10 degree weather. on the brightside, i feel like i have been properly hazed by the city of detroit: i've had the police called on me, i've been hit on by more random strangers than i can count and now my car has been broken into. perfect. anyway, i choose to be cautiously optimistic that something will happen this year that will have a profound impact on my life, just because it happens to be the pattern.

i have been thinking quite a bit lately about the state of our country, which i think is hard not to think about after what happened a couple weeks ago in tuscon. it is a truly horrifying thing to have happen and for so many innocent people to lose their lives because of this man who is crazy. the problem i see is that i don't believe that he is an isolated crazy person. for a while, i was thinking that the tea party wasn't the worst thing that could happen because mostly they were a bunch of mostly illiterate, intolerant white people who were just going to hold up ignorant signs declaring their world views while taking votes away from the republican base in the midterm elections and call it a day. i knew we were in for more problems when some of those tea party idiots started getting elected.

i just read today that the governor of alabama said: "Anybody here today who has not accepted jesus christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother." he said this at his inauguration and i am almost literally at a loss for words. i can't understand what staff person read that over and thought "yeah that's a good line, please say that. i'm sure no one will get pissed off" or worse that the staff and governor agreed that this sentiment was acceptable. then there is the governor of ohio that issued a proclamation on monday that ohio would recognize dr. martin luther king jr day on march 17th. oops, probably should have double checked on the month before having that printed out. when i read about that, there was a whole part of the article that discussed how that governor picked an almost entirely white cabinet. fantastic. nothing like watching things go backwards instead of forward. i suppose on the bright side, in michigan we don't have a governor that is trying impose his religion on us or neglect a tremendous civil rights leader. we just have a guy without a clue.

i have had people ask me before when i was going to out grow being a democrat and it seems to be now as clearly as ever that will never be the case. because what america looks like today isn't what america is supposed to be. it is kind of horrifyingly disappointing what we've allowed to happen. anyone else remember that speaker of the house oompa loompa is trying to repeal the health care reform because....does anyone know why? i assume it's because it pisses him off. i heard something about it being a job killer but i'm pretty sure that's just republican talk for "scare the general population into doing what we want because this method worked in 2004 when we got into this...wait, almost took responsibility for something. dodged that bullet." i really wish i could understand this juvenile desire to make policy decisions based on what is inevitably going to piss off the senate and the white house. grow up, please.

my dearest dems, this is our time to get our shit together and come back in 2012. seriously, we have too much to lose if we keep electing idiots who are content on driving america backwards. (jumping off my soap box now)

anyway, it seems to me that america is supposed to have so much promise, so much going for us. can we get back to working on that and stop with the violence, bickering and general sarah palin-ing that's going on? we'd all be in a better place i think.

from the girl who turned "sarah palin" into a verb.

until next time...

day dreaming on a boring winter day

happy 2011. i haven't quite tired of telling people happy new year (yet) as a greeting. there is something pleasant to me about welcoming a new year and it has nothing to do with the possibilities ahead. i'm far too much of a cynic for that. i feel like it's probably just the opposite. while 2010 was, i would say, an all around pretty good year, i'm glad that it is done. i had all i could take of it and we parted in a sensational fashion. so here we are, at the dawn of a new year, i'm struggling to learn the upgrades on my computer at work and thinking, like i do, about something more interesting. i mean, don't get me wrong, pulling lists and entering data is super great and everything, it is far more pleasant to day dream about what i would do if i won the 330 million dollar jackpot in the lottery tonight (quit my job, first thing). don't get me wrong, i do really like my job, it just kind of seems to me that i am not actually the type that was made for the 9-5. when i started, it was like the most glorious idea i had ever heard. regular employment, health insurance, personal days, evenings off...and those things are still really great. however that whole, get to work by 9am thing is really old. and the sometimes trivial things that i get caught up with my boss on. i know better than to complain (too much) online so i'll leave it there.

anyway, i was chatting with some old friends recently about work and what not and it got me thinking. i was talking with my friend jen last week about my job and my performance review that happened before our break and about how i explained my former work in the political world to my current boss. and as i spoke to my boss about that, there was a certain fondness that i can't avoid. there are lots of things that i miss and i usually just chalk that up to me being a hopeless nostalgic fool. i still remember how shitty politics can get, especially campaigns and i'm in no rush to jump onto another campaign. the thing that conversation brought up, and several other conversations in the same time period brought up, is that for me, politics is an undeniable passion. i wish i could just be a consultant and get to do my favorite parts of a campaign and know that i'll still have a job when it's all over. i said to jen that while i like my job and the experience that i am getting, i'm fairly certain i am doing the wrong thing (assuming there is actually a wrong and right thing to do in life.) she said to me "who isn't?" and went on to tell me a story about a grad school friend who is kind of like her eeyore who is apparently notorious for remarking that no one knows if they are doing the right thing. that made me like this person who i've never met. kindred spirit, you know.

i've spent the last couple hours in a text conversation with my friend michael who is telling me about his dreams as they pertain to real estate and something about a yellow brick road and emerald city. he explained how this has been a long time dream of his but a teacher we had in middle school pointed out to him why this was an unrealistic dream. michael and i have been friends since middle school, which also happens to be the first time i had a faculty member (she was my school counselor) shoot down my aspirations of being a writer. this got me to thinking about what the hell was wrong with these adults that they would steer kids away from something they were passionate. i remember very clearly what my counselor said to me; i was too smart to do something as silly as writing novels. i'm pretty sure ray bradbury, jd salinger and oscar wilde (among the other numerous authors i had to read during my education) would probably disagree that writing was something silly that only the unintelligent should do. so here my friend and i are, more than a decade past those dreams, still thinking about them and discussing them as we would like to spin them into reality.

these ideas have a lot more to do with each other than it might appear at the moment. fear not, i'll bring it together. i have all these pipe dreams that float around in my mind, writing, holding (real) elected office (someday...far from now...really far), being a consultant, etc. i've always been a dreamer but have never been good at taking the leap into what i think is the "right" thing for me to do. the hesitation, the fear is ridiculous. i know i can offer advice like "if you don't try, how will you know" and "it's better to try and fail then wonder what if" but i don't tend to follow any of the advice that i give. it's a little bit comforting to know that some of my oldest friends feel the same way but i do think that speaks ill of our educational experience that we all shared (the three of us went k-12 in the same district, 7-12 in the same schools) for not fostering that dreamy quality that kids so easily posses but that's a rant for another time.

so again blogging world, happy new year. i look forward to posting another half dozen times of so in 2011. just kidding, maybe i'll actually post more, who knows.

from the girl who likes to high five strangers and wish them a happy new year...

until next time...