This family of four’s downsize from a 4/3 to a 2/1 is visually stunning. I definitely don’t have an eye for creating this kind of living space splendor but I’m taking notes!
K Wright on the idea of job security. No matter how good I am at my job, and I’m pretty dang good, I don’t take my job for granted, ever. Something can always happen. It doesn’t mean I should be hypervigilant like I was for years, but I most definitely don’t assume that my job will always be there.
3 Women on Caring for Disabled Siblings. This was akin to the situation we ran into when Mom’s health precipitously declined: She was cognitively not very functional, she didn’t have control over key functions of her body, and I was running ragged working to keep a roof over her head and desperately trying to figure out how we would function long term. This was before I married PiC, I delayed marriage for years because I was trying to get her in a stable situation before I moved out, but that was a losing proposition.
Do you have the same money anxieties that Tonya and I share?
I’d like to think a bear really did help this child.
I knew Ashley Ford’s name first on Twitter as @ismashfizzle because she does good work for the world there but here’s another facet to love: her interview with Michelle Yeoh.
“America First” – not my America. This piece was hugely resonant for me as a child of immigrants, knowing how much the generation of parent-immigrants gave up in order to give us a better life. I still feel that sense of gratitude even if my own remaining parent has turned out to be a terrible person. It’s weird but I do.
Golden Globes
I don’t watch awards shows but I will watch Sandra Oh in pretty much anything. And Samberg is hilarious. This monologue made me laugh out loud. And they cut to her mom.
Katelyn Ohashi, I Was Broken – her recent performance was breathtakingly extraordinary but it was made more so by the joy she has now. This video of her finding her joy again, whew: “There was a time where I was on top of the world, an Olympic hopeful. I was unbeatable. Until I wasn’t.“
Not Mine to Mold: My children, nondisabled and disabled, are not mine to mold. I wouldn’t subject my bookish nondisabled son to unwanted daily sports training; nor should I force Edmund to stop repeatedly tapping his head for comfort. Accepting Edmund, and supporting him to be himself, means I stop acting so much like a coach, and more like his mom.
I strongly feel this about JB. I am responsible for molding zir into a compassionate and caring human, but not to make zir any kind of duplicate of me.
Everyone in the department knew that this doctor discriminated against women, are afraid to speak publicly for fear of retaliation, and yet they can’t find evidence supporting it. Hm.
This was a lovely description of empathy around the holidays with a child. I keep trying this with JB but ze just gets worked up and angry instead as I describe zir feelings.
I wouldn’t believe him either. Unification Plan From China Finds Few Takers in Taiwan: On the one hand, Mr. Xi threatened military force if Taiwanese leaders grasped for independence. On the other hand, Mr. Xi said that if Taiwan were to agree to unification, its rights would be ensured by the “one country, two https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/asia/xhina-xi-jinping-taiwan.htmsystems” framework that Beijing used in Hong Kong after it returned from British colonial control in 1997.
…
But neither the threat nor the promised reward seemed likely to sharply weaken Taiwanese opposition to China’s demands, said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at the Hong Kong Baptist University who studies relations between China and Taiwan.
I’m A Man And It Took Me Years To Recognize I Had Been Sexually Assaulted: In our ongoing and expanding dialogue on the nature of sexual assault, I only hope that we continue to encourage men to feel safe in recognizing their experiences with it. Vulnerability isn’t weakness and victimhood need not be a badge of shame
An interview with Richard Grant, on his abusive alcoholic father. I find this view a bit hard to reconcile: Of course, like he always was, he either had blacked out or had no memory of what he’d done the night before, and would sign a check and push it across the breakfast table and be full of remorse and beg for forgiveness and all of that.
I absolutely loved and adored him, because he was a very, very funny, sharp-witted man and very provocative in his conversations. He was very well-read and all of those things. So reconciling that with this person that he turned into — I think that it’s a measure of how much a child loves a parent. That even though [I had] suffered those things, I always very, very clearly understood that who he became when he was drunk was not who he was. To me, that was the monster, and it wasn’t my father who I loved.
This brought tears to my eyes: In “The Barefoot Woman,” Mukasonga’s latest book, translated from the French into English by Jordan Stump, she attempts to fulfill her daughterly duty: “Mama, I wasn’t there to cover your body, and all I have left is words — words in a language you didn’t understand — to do as you asked. And I’m all alone with my feeble words, and on the pages of my notebook, over and over, my sentences weave a shroud for your missing body.”
From earlier this year, Kristi Yamaguchi, Unlaced: On the eve of the National Championships, Nicole Chung and champion skater Kristi Yamaguchi discuss life after the Olympics, what it means to be ‘the first,’ and the state of figure skating in 2018.
I’d never heard of Direct Air before this article, and I’m glad I hadn’t! What terrible people.
My empathies to Joe’s family as they are dealing with a rough situation with his mom’s dementia. Brings back some bad memories for me since it happened when we were much more precarious financially and didn’t have the resources to get her a better caretaker than us. I am glad that Joe is in a much better position than we were in.
RB40 asked: “Do you feel guilty for not giving your family the best when you can?”
(He’s talking about material things.) Nope, because I do give them the best I can. It’s just that to me, the best doesn’t mean the most expensive or what other people think is the best. The best is the thing that serves the purpose well without generating unnecessary waste. What do you think?
Related to that, Matt talks about how to be happy and you might notice that buying it isn’t a good long term plan for that sort of thing. There is a threshold where money makes a real difference, but after all our needs and most of our reasonable wants are covered, I want myself and my family to embrace gratitude and contentment, and not have to keep chasing the next high.
Why do you tell your story? Good question! It used to be because I didn’t have enough people to discuss money with but that’s less true these days.
What a litter!
The most popular videos of 2018: Golden retriever mother takes tiger, lion and hyena cubs as her own pic.twitter.com/VhnZtYPNHn
