30 Things I have learned in 30 years

Oh, it's true- I'm thirty. Three decades. Older and wiser? Who knows! Here's a random list of things I have learned:

On style:
1. Blow drying my hair in the morning makes my hair look way better.
2. Fashion that did not work for me: baggy clothes, midriff hugging or midriff baring shirts, too much pattern, too trendy, long skirts, open button downs with a shirt underneath.
3. How to apply make-up to my Asian eyes. (At least, I think I can)
4. Burt's Bees chapstick is the best chapstick ever.
5. I love A-line skirts and sheath dresses.
6. You can't go wrong with a pretty string of pearls.

On self:
7. I am a very hands-on person.
8. I must study in silence and in a cubicle so I can't people-watch.
9. I'm an extroverted introvert: I need my alone time.
10. I prefer small groups of people, or being alone in a crowd.
11. I am at my best when I feel I am being useful to someone.
12. I have a need for what I do to be taken seriously.

On relationships:
13. I'd rather invest in a small number of life-long friendships rather than many surface level friends.
14. In love, I need and have found a true partner who respects me and lets me be who I am, and is my best friend.
15. There might be no sweeter feeling than laying in bed laughing about something stupid with my husband.
16. You can't change someone who doesn't want to change.
17. You have to be able to take care of yourself to take care of others. Learn to set boundaries.
18. I like bonding with people by doing activities together. Or eating.

On career:
19. The bar exam is really as miserable as everyone says it is.
20. Going above and beyond what is required in a job will always be appreciated.
21. Too many adult professionals don't actually know how to be adult and professional.
22. I'm a pretty good networker.
23. I love being a lawyer.
24. I have to work for a cause I believe in.

On life:
25. You have to accept and let go of what you cannot control, or you will make yourself crazy.
26. Whatever it is, I can survive it.
27. Being 30 is pretty awesome. I know myself and can love myself better than I ever have before.
28. A nice raincoat is a really great investment.
29. Remembering to stop and be grateful is good for your health.
30. Try to take yourself less seriously.

Readers' Review: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" By Junot Diaz

I had the luck to be driving to a meeting this afternoon and caught a segment of Readers' Review: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" By Junot Diaz on the Diane Rehm show. It makes me miss college English classes where you could sit and discuss a book at great length. This was almost as good!

Good Deed of the Month: Support Second Chances

One of the big influences on my career path is David Singleton, executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center. Read a recent article about their work. OJPC does remarkable work for one of the most marginalized populations in our country- those who have been involved in the criminal justice system. Work like this is so important to stop the cycle of incarceration and create more sustainable rehabilitation and reform in a system that just locks away people who we then pay for with our tax dollars. If you are looking for a great local organization to support or be involved in, here's one to consider.

How We Put Ourselves Back Together

1. Start doing laundry that is starting to overflow from the hamper.
2. Finally put away the clean dishes so you can put all the dirty ones away.
3. Clean up part of the kitchen.
4. Tidy the living room.
5. Pay a bill.
6. Put all the piles of junk mail in recycling.
7. Make a new pile of papers and mail to go through.
8. Finally donate some of the clothes that have been sitting in a trash bag in the closet.
9. Intend to tidy the bedroom and bathroom, but then decide to put it off another week.

NPR Discoveries

When I was a college student I liked to post or journal about fun things I learned on NPR. I don't know why I stopped! My favorite latest discoveries:

1) This interview with the head of the Red Baraat. Get this: bhangra meets New Orleans Brass band! What's not to love!

NPR Interview

2) Freakonmic's episode on weird recycling. I love recycling. Fun fact: the U.S. exports 300,000 metric tons of chicken paws a year, mostly to Asia. Incidentally, chicken paws is one of the few Asian foods I don't care for. Just doesn't seem like there's much there to make eating them worth it.

A Sunnier Day

It's a beautiful, cold day. The sky is clear and blue. I feel a bit more hopeful, if not a little tentative. I think for the most part, I've "let my wallow out", as a good friend put it. There will still be sad moments, but I've visited the doctor and it looks like there's only a faint amount of HCG left, so it seems that last week was the worst of it. I feel pretty lucky. The best news is that their initial suggestion of waiting 3 months was more cautionary to allow for emotional recovery, so we won't have to wait as long as I thought. Don't worry, though, I'm still going to cross off the tiny bucket list, but maybe a little quicker. 

Feeling gratitude for:

• really great friends who know just how to grieve with you
• a husband who is my best friend and such a great partner
• sunshine
• the ability to grieve, feel, and bounce back
• health
• sushi and red wine

A Tiny Bucket List

Do you like my revamped blog? I've decided that I want to commit to writing more, among other things. It didn't feel like the blog had a theme or focus, exactly, in the name, and I wanted to give it more meaning. I was reminded of a conversation I just had with my best friend about how I once thought being 30 would seem old or less exciting, but now it seems just the opposite. 30 is not to be feared! For me and many of the women I know, 30 has meant that I know myself better, am more comfortable with myself, love myself better, and am much more self aware. All in all, this decade seems much better than the last.

So along with my little makeover of this blog, I want to share my tiny bucket list. One of the hardest parts about the loss we've experienced, for me, is how I am still tracking my weeks. I think about how I would be so far along, that I would be seeing the first ultrasound, be starting to show. I still catch myself thinking about how different the next few months will now look. I catch myself thinking that the three months we have to wait to try again seems so long. In an effort to try and move away from this thought process, I've made a list of things I will do for myself in the next three months:

• Go to the gym or an exercise class at least twice a week.
• Journal, write posts, write poetry.
• Consider my own Happiness Project.
• Finally schedule a visit to the acupuncturist to deal with my shoulder pain. 
• Eat lots of sushi and drink red wine. 
• Plan at least one out of town trip.
• Organize at least one closet in the house.

This Made me Smile

I found the blog "Things People Said After My Miscarriage." Particularly loved the post about Facebook.

Television Loves

A little reprieve from moody posts. I suppose having some angst in my life always makes it easier for me to write. Despite my ongoing hatred of Time Warner Cable, the husband and I are hopelessly hooked on cable television. I'm not saying that TV is all that we do- in fact we read a lot of books and do a lot of fun things- but we do enjoy a good show. Here are my recent favorites and some critiques:

• The Walking Dead: If you love zombie movies, you will love this show. If you are like me and hate zombie movies, you will probably still love this show. It is highly entertaining, great acting, and interesting take on post-zombie apocalypse life. Yes, there are gory, creepy zombies, but what really keeps you glued are the interactions between the survivors and the slow unraveling of the humanity and morality that the characters thought they had. The downside is you will need wind-down time before going to bed because your adrenaline will be off the charts.
• Boardwalk Empire: This has been a solidly and beautifully written and directed series based on the gangsters in Atlantic City (and other major cities) during the prohibition era. Steve Buschemi is brilliant, as are many of the support cast and characters. An added plus: awesome costuming and incorporation of real historical characters. Unlike a lot of series, Boardwalk has managed to stay consistently strong through the seasons. 
• Girls: I don't care what critics might say about this show, but I think Lena Dunham is remarkable. As her character proclaims to her parents in the pilot episode, Lena Dunham is "a voice of a generation." Girls is funny, poignant, brave, and smart. The characters are flawed but lovable, and the actors are beautiful, but not in the sense that they are remarkably fit, thin, or have faces built for modeling. 
• Downton Abbey: Who would have thought that a series about British aristocracy in the World War I era could be so captivating? Though there are a few characters and bits of plot that I could do without, this show has a great cast of characters and really is a fascinating portrayal of the decline of class system. I'm enjoying the tongue in cheek British humor quite a lot. 
• The Mindy Project: I love Mindy Kaling. She is a funny woman. In her show, she's a OB/GYN, which her late mother was in real life, who is great at her job but struggling a little with life. If you enjoyed Kelly Kapoor humor in The Office, you'll enjoy this show. I just love seeing an Asian American woman doing comedy! And being the star of a show!

Chinese Cures

Some of my family came to visit today. My mother and aunt came, arms laden with a combination of Chinese comfort foods (steamed buns, ba-wan, tofu and fish) and dishes that are allegedly fertility inducing. Bitter herbed chicken soup, ginseng, sesame chicken soup, eight treasure rice... Asian mothers are funny this way. They will give you plenty of advice about conceiving that borders on superstitious and fret about you being too tired. It might be one of the few times where this doesn't irritate me at all. I don't even bother to try to tell them that most miscarriages occur because it essentially was a faulty batch of ingredients that made the fetus abort itself. I'm finding right now that I am more comfortable with receiving help from those close to me than I usually am. I think it's a healthy thing. Maybe that's the lesson to learn at times like this- just to be able to receive and be taken care of a little. Let that rod of inner strength heal a little after taking a beating so it is ready to move forward again and dare to hope. 

I'm trying not to let the little voice in my head that is calculating the months take over. It likes to obsess about how now a 2013 baby is no longer a possibility, how things simply can't go according to its plans. I'm trying, every day, to be kinder to myself, and remember to be grateful that I have all the support that I need.   

Needing Catharsis

It would be nice if humans could just channel all their grief or anger into one tight, glowing ball and just push it out of their systems. Perhaps some people can do this, and I wish that could. Instead, this event will just slowly leak out of me in fits and coughs. I will entertain myself by helping my best friend decorating a cake and feel next to normal, and then I will check Facebook and see that the cloth diapering class I had been considering signing up for is today. And a crop of my friends' latest baby pictures. Maybe gathering up all the sorrow sitting at the base of my chest would just be too much to expel all at once, but all the same, I wish I could be done with it. I don't pretend that this is the worst thing that has ever happened in my life, or close to the worst thing that I know of happening. I know it will ease in time. With every Eeyore post here I will perhaps feel just a little bit lighter. But I probably should stop checking Facebook for a little while.

Day 3

I don't usually get too personal on this blog, but I feel like I need to write about this, if only because I wish that I had heard more about some other woman's personal experience with this before I went through it myself. Before I tell you more, here are my two requests: 1) unless you are someone I know personally, or if I don't know you and you are going through it and want to reach out, don't send me messages about this post. I don't want advice and I don't want your pity. 2) if you are someone I know, please know that I appreciate your care and concern but I probably don't want to talk to you about this, and if I do, I will bring it up myself.

Today is Day 3 of my miscarriage. It is an early pregnancy miscarriage, which everyone says is quite common. Usually this happens because the fetus is simply not developing correctly and nature is correcting the problem. It was my first pregnancy, and at this point there's no reason that the next attempt won't be more successful. The science of this is somewhat comforting to me. Less comforting is the waiting for the process to complete itself.  The doctor refers to this as the "worst period" of my life. This means cramps, blood, clots, tissue- all the miraculous things that had been forming inside of me, have to come out. This means spending days or weeks wearing super absorbent pads, which always have felt like diapers to me. This means sleeping on a towel just in case and obsessively checking our nice sheets in the morning to make sure I haven't ruined them. I had always envisioned miscarriages as a sudden and brief event, where a woman in a nightgown suddenly doubles over in pain and there's a lot of blood and she goes to the hospital and then it's over. I had no idea that it could take weeks for "it" to "pass." And frankly, it's a gross experience. We referred to the ER room I went to as "the crime scene." Have to find humor where you can!

No matter how much I cling to my logic, and understand that things will be okay, each morning since we discovered we were losing the pregnancy, I have sat in my house and cried. It's hard to express the loss I feel. After all, it was so early, just a tiny clump of cells. I think ugly thoughts about how unfair it seems that sometimes women who don't even want to have children just fly right through and pop out beautiful babies, when others who want children so badly have so much trouble. I wonder whether it could have happened because I was still drinking a cup of coffee a day, or because I didn't eat enough and drink enough water one day, or if I jinxed myself by already starting to put together secret registries. My mother insisted I must have just been tiring myself out too much as if I were some delicate flower. (Ha!)

I'm not going to know why it happened, only that it does happen and it's not unusual. I know it's still early and I will go through my appropriate stages of grief. I also know that right now when people ask me if there's anything to do for me, I don't know what to say. There's just nothing to do about this. I'm a healthy person and while this is not the most physically comfortable experience I'm physically okay. I made a crockpot of Chinese chicken soup. I've done some laundry. I'm doing some work from home. Part of me just wants someone to come in and pick up my life and put it back in order, the way it felt just a week ago, before this happened. When I started bleeding a few days ago, I had this absurd hope that perhaps I was just having my cycle and in fact was not pregnant after all. Or I was just one of those women that would bleed throughout the pregnancy, as unpleasant as that would be. None of it was the case. The disappointment is smothering.

Grief is not a stranger to me. I know this will ebb. I know that there will probably be plenty of exciting and happy things coming up in the future. I know I am usually fairly resilient. There have been (and will be more) moments when I'm sitting in the warm sun at a favorite restaurant and feel peace and beauty. But right now, I just feel how I feel. A little flat and a little cynical. A little angry and resentful- at what or whom, I'm not quite sure. Super grateful for the wonderful support I have in my family, friends, and co-workers. I don't want to see a lot of people because I don't want to feel their sadness for me. It just feels like I would crumble if they treated me differently or too gently. We were given the news my body had already told me twice at the ER. First, a male doctor very clinically and kindly explained what my test results meant. We nodded. Then the female resident explained it again, in a very sympathetic way, but it made me feel so much sadder. I guess that pretty much sums it up.

My favorite bad day song:
 

2012 In Retrospect

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst. Then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life." - American Beauty

I love those final lines in American Beauty- perhaps because I treasure those moments where I feel exactly as Lester Burnham describes. So much gratitude. Not because life is perfect, but because even in the midst of family strife, national tragedy, and international horrors, I am still blessed with wonderful moments and people in my life. Because even in the midst of the ugliness of American politics, I might still manage to hear about a moving story of people helping each other. I think I might be getting better at holding on to the good things and letting go of the bad. 

Blah blah blah.. anyway, a quick list for my 2012 highlights:

• Brought in 2012 on the beautiful beach of Samara, Costa Rica
• Became a first time homeowner
• Saw my friends in Colorado
• Planted my first vegetable garden
• Became an aunt
• Visited Asheville, NC
• Drove from California back to Ohio with my two best friends
• My best friend moved back to Cincinnati!
• Witnessed Cincinnati become even more beautiful and vibrant: Washington Park, Smale Park and the riverfront, OTR's many new restaurants and stores... 

I'm now 30 years old and it's 2013. I can't say I have any earth shattering wisdom, which I'm sure the me a decade ago would have expected, but I do think the past year has taught me to practice gratitude, to provide empathy without being drained or co-dependent, and to accept that each person in my life will make choices for themselves and the best thing I can do is to love but to set boundaries. That seems pretty great, actually.