I'm not sleeping much. I lay awake at night, wondering how I'm going to make a dent in my eternally long to-do list, how to keep the many people in my life from getting too upset with me, how to keep perspective. I drift off to sleep around 3 or 4am, none the wiser. For two years since I've started this blog, it's probably been obvious I've been on a kind of quest. A seeking of a better self? A digging and clawing from the depths of an unhealthy lifestyle to one that resembles normalcy? …
writing
22 Months and 3 Weeks
I purchased this tank top from H & M the second week of July in 2012. I remember this because I was frantically scouring the mall for clothes to take with me to a family vacation. That's what I always did for vacations; a profoundly unhealthy habit of accruing a whole new wardrobe just for a short trip. Cheap clothes that fell apart in minutes. I haven't bought a single ready-to-wear clothing item since. Almost two years for both me and K! Okay, I've gotten some socks and underwear for K, …
Type A Summer Vacay or How I’m Not Effortless
There are thirteen more days of school left for K, and the ginormous maw of summer has been inching toward me, begging me to feed it with worthy activities. I started a little late on the summer camp sign-up process this year, and here in Seattle, it's like a competitive sport to get access to the various "enrichment" programs. Most of the popular ones are filled by early April, and you have to be aggressively Type A to have your ducks in a row so that you're not stuck with the most expensive …
Instagram + Green-Eyed Monster
Instagram! Are you in on the action? I just started (@sanaeishida) but I don't know what I'm doing at all. I couldn't load it on my iphone for some reason, so it's on my ipad, which makes picture-taking a rather awkward ordeal. I took a profile pix of myself when I was trying to do something else, and "liked" one of my own photos by mistake. And what's a private user? I'm basically a mess. I tentatively selected a few folks to follow and then had to stop and ask myself why I wanted to plunge …
Giving Back
My first job out of graduate school landed me in jail. The brisk and humiliating body search. The clang of the barred door. "What have I done?" I thought, numb and disoriented. I'd committed no crime, at least none that I knew of, and certainly none that would put me in the slammer. Somehow, though, at age 27, face covered with adult-onset acne, I stood toe-to-toe with glaring, orange-clad inmates. What I had done was find employment with an arts non-profit in the Bay Area. I'd been …