The Universe has Spoken

Dec 5, 2013

Many years ago a fellow minivan-driving-mother-friend of mine sent me a link to this video:

I watched it with detached amusement. It never occurred to me that this video could in any way reflect my reality. The video came to mind again recently when another friend of mine got into my car and erupted into frank and hearty laughter. As she picked through the random assortment of things that had accumulated in my car, she gave a running commentary, punctuated with giggles:

“Oh! Good thing you have this bag of pinecones here. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”

(OK – those cinnamon-scented pine cones were acting as air fresheners, that is, when they still smelled like cinnamon. Whatever.)

“And look at all these batteries in the cup holder! I was going to go the store to buy some, but how convenient! You’ve got a bunch right here.”

“Ha ha ha! And what’s this? Ah, of course! Empty DVD cases in the side pockets!”

Side note: I’d actually cleaned out the car not too long ago. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have, and has been in the recent past!

The tragic fact of my existence is that I’m a lazy slob. Wait, I haven’t gotten to the tragic part yet. Sloth and slovenliness aren’t so terrible in and of themselves. If I could contentedly wallow in filth and disorder, where would be the harm in that? The problem is that I can never truly enjoy my entropic lifestyle, because of the other fundamental aspect of my being – neurosis. I try to laze about on my couch, amidst the piles of books, newspapers, my daughter’s violin case, and toys, but I can never fully relax, because I feel like I should be cleaning up the mess. And yet – alas – I’m too lazy to do so! You see my predicament?

After my friend roundly mocked me for the mess in my car, I went home chastened and determined to turn myself around. I was going to be organized and I was going to get all those million and one tasks that I’d been putting off done, once and for all.

The top priority on my list was to give the dogs their second dose of preventative deworming medicine. I was supposed to administer this three weeks after the first dose and they were now overdue. I was procrastinating, because they had struggled so wildly when I’d given them their first dose that half of the vile smelling medicine ended up on my clothes. This time around, I had the boys hold the dogs while I squirted the syringes into their mouths. It was a piece of cake! I gloated over the ease with which I had executed this distasteful task, and congratulated myself on a job well done.

With this monkey off my back and small victory under my belt, I was emboldened to tackle the kitchen next. I cleared out and organized two whole junk drawers and then rearranged the pantry. I realize this might not sound like a big deal, but it took me all evening. I felt like I had cleaned out the Augean stables.

Basking in the glow of my own virtue, I decided to take a break from my Herculean endeavors. This time when I relaxed on the couch, I felt like I richly deserved to put my feet up. I languidly lounged, contemplating my own moral superiority. And that’s when my dogs started to vomit frothy yellow deworming medicine. Repeatedly. All over the carpet.

The universe had spoken and cosmic order had been restored. Its clarion message to me was this: You, Adrienne, are destined to live in squalor. It is written in the stars. You clean out a couple drawers? I will rain dog puke all over your carpet. Give. It. Up.

And really…who am I to argue with this?

House of Steep

Dec 4, 2013

I got to spend a lovely morning with my friendy Wendy over the Thanksgiving break. We went to a tea house in Arlington. This is not just any old tea house. Your tea comes presented with a minuscule, but delicious cookie and its own timer that helps ensure you get the perfect brew:

But the real twist is that after sipping a cup of Earl Grey, you can soak your feet in it too. (A fresh batch, that is)!

Tucked away toward the back of the tea house and sectioned off by folding screens is a “foot sanctuary” where you can order up footbath treatments in the $20 dollar range. Suffering from an extreme case of foot shame, (I swear it’s a thing), I would never actually indulge in a footbath treatment myself. I had fun reading about them though!

The “Chin Up” is a treatment using the aforementioned bergamot tea and mint. “Serenity” uses calming lavender, chamomile, and oatmeal. The intriguingly named “Love to Ladies” is made up of geranium, ylang ylang, and clary sage. “Sadness” is basil, cornflower, frankincense, citrus.

House of Steep: 3800 Lee Highway, Arlington, Virginia

The Newseum

Dec 3, 2013

Over the Thanksgiving break I got to visit the Newseum for the first time with my kids and my best friend and her family.

When the Newseum first opened in 1997, it was located in my old hometown in Arlington, Virginia. The seven-level, 250,000 square foot museum moved to its present location at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, right next to the Canadian Embassy and overlooking the Capitol and the White House in 2008.

From the Greenspun Terrace you get fabulous, panoramic views of the city…perfect for taking pictures!

Tickets ($21.95 for adults and $12.95 for youth aged 7-18) are good for two days, and you really could spend a whole two days at the museum. I made the mistake of parking in a three hour spot, thinking that would be an ample amount of time. Having only managed to get through half the museum in three hours, I had to leave and re-park the car again.

There’s a great mix of traditional and interactive exhibits. The first exhibit we checked out was the Berlin Wall Gallery. Here you can find the largest piece of the Wall outside of Germany.

The kids were duly impressed to learn that I had my own piece of the Berlin Wall back at our house. I chipped it off shortly after the fall of the wall, when friends and I visited Berlin as college students.

The kids especially loved the HP New Media Gallery on the fourth level:

and the NBC News Interactive Newsroon on the second level, where they could pretend to be journalists and record their own newscasts with the help of prompters:

Signing off for now…

Little brown haired girl

Dec 2, 2013

I have brown hair. This would not be noteworthy, but for the fact that I am Korean and Koreans always have jet black hair. When I was little, my dad would tell me that my hair reminded me of his little sister, who also had brown hair. In those days in Korea, brown hair was so freakish and unnatural as to be considered bad luck. My superstitious grandmother kept shaving her daughter’s head in the hope that the hair would grow back black, but of course it never did. I always felt connected to my dad’s little sister and felt sorry for her, but all I ever knew about her was that she had brown hair like mine and that she died young.

Today as I was sitting with my parents on the last day of our Thanksgiving break, the sun was streaming through the window. My dad stared at my hair lit by the sun and started talking about his little sister again. He told me again about how his mother would shave the little girl’s head. The poor girl hated this, but her mother insisted on doing it over and over again.

“It looked terrible, and she would have to go to school looking like that,” my dad said with pity.

For the first time, I began to ask questions about her.

“What was her name, Dad?”

He hesitated and I held my breath. I was afraid that it had been so long ago that he might have even forgotten her name.

“Her name was Yunja, but the Japanese gave her the name ‘Toshiko.’ My brothers and I thought that was such a fancy sounding name, we decided we would all call her that. She was rather tall for her age and good looking. She would have grown up to be a beautiful woman.”

“How old was she when she died?”

“She was in second grade.”

“How did she die?”

“Sunstroke. During the Japanese invasion, they made us all work outside for hours in the sun. The boys wouldn’t wear shirts and we would get so badly sunburned that all of our skin would bubble and peel off at least twice a year. My little sister was healthy and strong. She should have survived. I don’t know why she didn’t.”

“She died at school?”

“She got sick at school, but they brought her home and she died there. I was already working in the watch factory in Seoul, so I never even got to see her. I just heard about it through a letter.”

There is not a single photograph of the little girl whose name I have only just learned. And though her life was fleeting, she is remembered over seventy years after her death with abiding love.

Im/maturity

Nov 22, 2013

It can be tricky to have children who are at different developmental stages. Our conservative strategy for navigating these treacherous waters is to wade in only as far as would be knee-deep for our youngest child. Recently, for example, the kids watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, even though the boys would much rather have seen Gravity. A couple years ago I caught my daughter, who was then six years old, reading The Hunger Games, which I had gotten for her oldest brother. I snatched it away from her and told her she could read it when she was older.

The other day I asked my thirteen year old son, “When do you think T will be old enough to read The Hunger Games?”

“Well, to be honest, I think she’s old enough now.”

“Really? But she’s only a third grader.”

“Yeah, but to tell you the truth, she’s way more mature than I am now.”

“Seriously? You really think so?”

“Yeah. And when I realized that, it kind of ruined my day a little bit. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I’ve accepted it now.”

This may also explain why I’ve heard the thirteen year old say to his younger brother, “We have to be nice to T now, so she’ll let us play video games in her basement when we’re all adults.”

I’ll be back in a week…Happy weekend and Thanksgiving!

The Inferno

Nov 21, 2013

Life in our household has been full of stress and strife lately. I’ve been having terrifying nightmares, which continue to haunt me in my waking hours. Migraines keep grabbing me in a vise-like headlock. The pain, always concentrated in one throbbing eyeball, makes me clench my teeth as I wait out the four hours until I can pop three more Advil. To tell you the truth, lately there have been moments when I have wallowed in self-pity and dark despair. I’ve asked myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?”

Here’s the thing. I have a beautiful child, who is intelligent, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, generous, and kind. He has always marched to the beat of his own drum, and I admire and respect him for it. To be honest though, I have to admit that I’ve also regularly engaged in epic battles with him because of this. We all have to function and live in a world of rules and deadlines and norms, I reason to myself. And so I try to coax and cram and bash my square peg son into the round hole over and over again. I do this out of love and concern for his future happiness, but all the good intentions in the world can’t transform it into a pleasant experience, or even a reasonable endeavor.

In school, children are assessed in ways that may make sense for most, but not for those who do their homework, and then routinely forget to turn it in or lose it between home and school. They don’t work for kids who can’t remember to bring home their textbook to study for the quiz they have to take the next day. The standard assessments simply can’t capture the abilities and gifts of children, whose minds crackle with intelligence, but shut off when confronted with boring, routine tasks. It can be exhilarating to parent such a child, but truth be told: at times it can also be thoroughly exhausting and demoralizing.

A couple nights ago, my son managed to finish his homework, take his shower, and practice his piano pieces at a godly hour. At the beginning of the school year we had optimistically stated that his bed time would be 9:30. Lately, bed time has been whenever we tell him he simply can’t work any longer on whatever paper, project, problem set, lab, or translation is due the next day, because it’s already 10:30, 11, or past midnight. On that blessed night, all of these tasks were done and there was a still a little time to spare before bedtime. It was a miracle.

My son and I looked at each other awkardly, uncertainly, not quite knowing how to handle this unexpected turn of events. This usually would be about the time when I would trot out a fist shaking “You can do it! Shake it out!” lecture à la Bela Karolyi, or a “Pull it together and FOCUS, kid!” lecture or the: “My head is going to explode if we keep having this same argument” lecture or the “Just crank it out, please, I’m begging you for the love of all things holy: just. crank. it. out” lecture, or the “Think, really think if there’s anything else you’ve forgotten that you need to be working on right now” lecture. You get the picture. That night, there was no need for any of those lectures.

“Well…are you heading to bed then?” I finally asked.

“I think I’ll stay down here and just talk with you a little, if that’s ok with you” he replied as he settled himself on the couch at my side. He hastened to add, “NOT about school or homework or anything like that. Let’s just chat.”

We did just that. When he finally did head to bed, I heard him say as he rounded the corner, “Oh, I forgot something.”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! My heart sank and I tensed up as I waited to hear him tell me what important assignment he had forgotten he had to do. And then he came back into the family room where I was sitting, because what he had forgotten was to give me a goodnight hug.

As I hugged this extraordinary child, I thought to myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?” These moments of grace remind me why I would walk through fire for this boy. We’ll walk through this Inferno together and there will be love and light at the other end. Amen.

Oh, to be more like…the Camellia

Nov 20, 2013

At the moment, the fiery leaves of my Japanese maples are taking center stage in a garden that is otherwise withered and brown.

Beni Kawa

Red Dragon

But there are two other superstars in my autumn garden right now:

Oh, to be more like these Camellias!

unexpected, but always welcome – for most of the year, these are unassuming, well-behaved, handsome shrubs. In late fall, winter and early spring when nothing else is blooming – they suddenly explode with glorious blooms.
intrepid – although the flowers look like they should be grown in a perfectly climate-controlled greenhouse, they’ll bloom under mantles of snow
luminous – the glossy leaves and blooms light up shady spots in the garden

Poems for November and a few more leaf prints

Nov 19, 2013

November Night

by Adelaide Crapsey

Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

Autumn Movement

by Carl Sandburg

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one lasts.

Pine needles

A week ago today…

Nov 18, 2013

on our final day with our friends in Madison, Wisconsin, we took one last round of photos:

Note that I’m wearing a down jacket. Indoors.

I posed for Rosita’s Portrait of a Feminist project:

We picked Noah up from school and headed to the airport:

A couple of Cheeseheads!

My brother Teddy met us for dinner at the airport in Minneapolis, where we we had a longish layover:

Yup. More photos.

Another airport, another “chonom” video:

Nicholas’ photo

Thanks for showing us around your new hometown, friends. Until we meet again! xoxo

You can find my friend Rosita’s blog “on being American, Asian and adopted” here.

Even More Madison…

Nov 15, 2013

On Sunday our friends took us to University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Union. We lured the kids there with the promise of ice cream, but warned them in advance that there would be a photo session!

The boys worked off some excess energy with a little Parkour: