Memories

I met a friend for a playdate and to catch up with her last week. We met at a playground about halfway between us. It was the first time I'd been to this playground, but I had actually been here many times before. When I was little, we used to walk to this park and play at the same spot. Except the playground which existed 25 years ago was completely different. The slides were metal and the climbing structures were wood. About 5-7 years ago, they tore the old one down and replaced it with a new, modern playground for children. I miss the nostalgia of the old playground, but that's about it. It's nice not to burn your butt on the way down the slide during the summer and not worry about splinters from holding onto the railings as you walked across the play structure. 

After our playdate, I took the scenic route home. I drove by my childhood home which wasn't far. It was the first home my dad purchased when he started working in the area. We lived there for just under 10 years before moving to the house my dad currently resides in. When we moved, my parents chose to sell the house for under market value. We knew what was wrong with it and wanted it sold and sold fast. An offer was made and the house was sold in three days. This may sound like no surprise now as we've had a seller's market in the area for the last five plus years. However, this was 20 years ago, and that was really fast. 

The buyer who purchased the house from my parents is not the current owner. That buyer sold the house a few years after we sold it and it was purchased by someone else. They have been there for the last 15 years or so. I've always been curious what the inside of the house looks like now. As I drove by, I noticed the landscaping was completely redone on the outside of the house. The crape myrtles are still growing by the side of the house, and I was happy to see the owners have let them grow properly and trimmed them correctly so they don't form the ugly knots. The front door was swapped out to a modern iron door, and I would only assume the inside of the house has been updated to suit their style and modernized as well. 

I remember having dreams of my childhood home, even after we'd moved out of it. Most of them weren't good because I didn't have many good memories of that house. The irony is, all of the problems we disliked about the house were just normal homeowner problems of age and time. Nothing was really "wrong" with it. When my husband and I bought our own house six years ago, we were seeing the exact same problems as the house I grew up with, but unfortunately, it was a seller's market, so houses were selling above market value and no less. 

Ironically, the house we purchased was very similar to the house I grew up in. Spec wise, the square footage was almost identical and the number of rooms the same. We liked nothing about the inside of the house and remodeled and painted as we could. We are still making changes inside little by little. 

The neighbor’s son came over once a few years back to pick up a package delivered to us by mistake. When he stepped inside, he said how different it looked from before. When he was little, he actually came over to our house and would play with the former owner’s son. So he has seen the true before and after of this house. 

I’m not going to get a reason to walk into my childhood home. Sometimes I randomly check to see if it’s listed for sale and if there are any photos. Honestly, I don’t know if I’d want to see it. My memories of that house include the knotty wood paneling, carpeted bathrooms, and being sent to the garage when I got into trouble. But I also have memories of climbing into the linen closet and laying on the shelves, exploring our master closet and thinking how huge it was, and plucking up the moss which grew in the backyard landscaping and uncovering earthworms. 

I think I’d rather keep the memories. 

How Are You Doing?

My daughter and I were taking a walk around the neighborhood yesterday. When we were looping back around to go home, we passed one of our neighbors out working. We've seen this neighbor many times before and said hi to each other. Then he asked me how we were doing. I replied the same, "We're good." like I usually do when asked. Being that my neighbor and I only interact with each other when we both happen to be outside at the same time, I didn't think much about it, but then he looked at me questioningly and asked again, "You sure?" I hesitantly said yes again, my daughter was saying something about his car, the moment was gone, and we parted ways.

And then I started thinking, and I couldn't stop. I started thinking about the current events. I started thinking about what was happening around us. I started thinking about the world. I started thinking about my past experiences and happenings. And suddenly, I saw everything with a new light. 

***

About 10 years ago now, I was at a friend's house with her and her husband. She was Asian American, although more American, and he was Caucasian. I was single at the time, and he was telling me about how white guys loved Asian girls and how I should go date a white guy. I politely declined, and he kept going about how a lot of white guys out there would kill to be with an Asian girl. I was pretty confused by what he was saying. I'd never felt like a white guy wanted to date me and I never had a desire to date a white guy. 

Now I understood what he was talking about: the Asian fetish. Perhaps he didn't mean it that way. Or maybe he was doing it without realizing. This is not to say mixed race marriages, especially those with Asian women and Caucasian men don't work. But regardless, it exists, it's out there, and it's horrible.

***

A few years ago, my friend was hosting a birthday party and she rented a space on the top floor to use. I arrived early to help her set up. When she let me in, one of the first things she said to me was, "There's some guys who are still in the room and they're not leaving." She was paying to use this space, and it was annoying to have to ask the previous people to leave because they were overstaying their time.

When I got up there with her, the first thing I did was ask them to leave because we needed to set up and our time started 20 minutes ago. The guys, white guys, looked at me and gave me this "What's the big deal?" look. I gave them some time to see if they'd start wrapping up and moving. They didn't, so I said something again. And this time, they finally started making motions to wrap up and leave, although it was very slow and not urgent at all. 

They saw us rearranging the chairs and tables in the space and offered to help us move some. Heh. By the time they left it was close to 30 minutes after their time had ended.

***

In light of current circumstances and thinking back on this particular incident, I wonder if things would have been different had there been a guy with us. I wonder if things would have been different if one of us or all of us were blonde hair blue-eyed white girls. 

You know what should have happened? What should have happened in a respectable society without racism, sexism, prejudice, or bias is I would have asked them to leave, they would have apologized for running late, packed their things up, and left or at least moved their conversation outside of the room. That's what should have happened. 

But it didn't. 

***

In Chinese, we have a phrase which translates to "losing face." It's more commonly understood as shame. And we're taught to avoid it. You keep the peace, you don't rock the boat, you don't speak out. I break a lot of these Asian cultures and I do things that would fall under "losing face." But I don't care.

You want to know how I'm doing? You want to know what I'm thinking? I'm very very angry. I'm angry at our culture for unintentionally allowing these things to fester and grow. I'm angry with the ways Asian culture wants us to fit into their mold of what is "good." I'm angry at the ways we were taught growing up because it has secretly been our demise. I'm angry at how Asian culture is so good at putting down each other, itself, when we really should have been putting down racist comments of others. I'm angry that I'm now realizing these things and I understand the weight of it and what it means and I have to teach my children how to live and survive in this world. I'm angry that when I do teach them, it's going to destroy a part of their youthfulness and innocence and happiness. I'm angry at all the times I should have done or said something but didn't because I was trying to be that good Asian person. I'm angry at society and how anti-Asian as well as other racist sentiments are not taken seriously and minimized.

***

I don't curse or use bad words because I don't believe in their power. I actually tried to curse once intentionally as a teenager, and it just felt awkward coming out of my mouth.  I know the power of words comes from their meaning, their depth, their tone. Curse words are just letters like any other word. H. T. I. S. F. C. K. U. 

Tone speaks more than words. And as you read this, imagine that I'm raging and angry and glaring at you with piercing eyes and speaking with a slow, calculated seriousness.

We come back stronger. 

Chasing a Dream I Never Knew I Wanted

It's hard to deny I have raw talent at music. I'm not a child prodigy, and I'm far from terrible, but I was the kid who didn't practice very hard and still did fairly well. I got to ride this wave for about 8-9 years until I was a teenager. Then there were advanced placement classes, my social life, dating, and everything else which I placed a higher priority than music. The thing was, I didn't love music. My teacher didn't teach me to love it. He taught me how to compete. How to play notes and rhythms on paper. And by the time high school reached its peak, competing lost its gleam. 

Instead of shifting paths to maintain the ability and talent I had already achieved, he pushed me to compete more and learn more challenging pieces. Around 10th grade, he was asking me what I wanted to major in college. I mentioned something about psychology, and he would always come back with a comment about majoring in music, or minoring at least. I had no interest. By the end of it all, I didn't even care. One of my very last competitions, I completely bombed the performance and skipped the middle of the piece. My teacher missed all the signs and kept pushing and pushing. 

And then I quit. 

He sent me a very nasty email, one that still makes me cry to even think about the words he wrote. And that was it. I told myself from then on I never wanted to play piano again.

***

I didn't touch a piano for about six months. But then solo and ensemble was coming up and my friends asked if I would accompany them again. And I did because I wanted to. So I played again. This was fun for me. I liked making music with my friends. (And I liked earning money.) And that's how I played for the next five years. I liked accompanying so much that I would drive the 3.5 hours back on weekends during college, multiple weekends consecutively, to rehearse and perform. Between paying for gas and the money I earned, I probably netted half what I was actually making.

Occasionally when I was back at my dad's house with my piano, I would sit down and just play random pieces from my past. I'd pick a sonata here, or a piece there, and just sit and play. Most of it was rough sight-reading at best. It wasn't good playing, but I liked it. I found it fun. And when I was done, I stopped  and resumed the rest of my day. 

That's when I started to fall in love with music. 

There was one student I accompanied who had amazing talent. Playing with him was like getting to relax and enjoy the music. I'd never played with someone so talented that I myself could begin to listen to the music instead of listening to follow. You have to understand, as an accompanist, you have to follow the soloist no matter how much they're crashing and burning. You crash and burn with them. If they're counting and suddenly skip 3 beats, you skip 3 beats with them. It's a very thankless and under appreciated job actually. The easiest jobs are the ones for the talented kids who play flawlessly. That's about less than 10% of the kids I've played for. The other 90%, I'm constantly on edge waiting to see if they make a mistake and then improvising on the spot to follow them. You can't enjoy the music when your mind is on tenterhooks to be prepared for anything.

I could enjoy the music when I played with him.

Accompanying was my side job for 16 years. I accompanied all the way until 2020 when the pandemic hit and I had a newborn. 

***

When I think back, I'm quite thankful I didn't major in music. (I didn't major in psychology either, haha.) If I did, I would have realized how ill-prepared I actually was. My teacher taught me virtually nothing besides reading music and playing piano. My senior year in high school, I took AP Music Theory. After the first few days in class, I was so intimidated because I felt like I knew nothing despite my 12 years of piano studies. I had one friend in the class who helped me through the entire year. The problem was, although I had played all of the concepts we were learning in music theory in my various piano experiences, I didn't know what they were called in music theory. I knew CEG and EGC and GCE chords, but I couldn't explain to you what a root chord, first inversion, or second inversion was. My friend would patiently explain these things to me and demonstrate on the piano keys during class to help me understand everything from a theory perspective. 

Before the real AP exam, we had a practice test in Irving. The night before, I stupidly stayed awake on the phone talking to a friend until 4 a.m.. I woke up at 6 a.m. to get ready and drive to the school by 7 a.m. for the test. A four hour test. I took that test on two hours of sleep and still somehow managed to get a 5. (Yes, I got a 5 on the real test as well and did not stupidly stay awake all night talking on the phone the night before.)

***

The piano ability I have now as an adult is only about 70-80% of what it used to be. But my musical ability and appreciation is 150% of what it used to be. A lot of it can be attributed to age. I understand and know things now which I could not with the maturity of a 17-year-old. I understand what it means to listen and hear nuances in touch, tone, articulation, which I could not as a talented teenager. Looking back, I wish someone could have spoken some real truth to me before I decided to quit. I wish someone could have told me how talented I was and how gifted I was and how well I played. I wish they could have explained to me ways I could have maintained my talent and pursued things I wanted to do with it instead of pushing me to keep competing. I wish someone had encouraged me to record myself playing more at my peak because those audios would be invaluable for the future. And I wish they would have told me to record it anyway even if it wasn't perfect. Because there was no guarantee I would be able to play it again.

When I passed my music teacher certification exam, I could finally tell myself despite what my teacher did not develop within me, and perhaps even ruined a desire for, I was able to find it myself. 

I had a piano teacher in my adult life for a very brief amount of time. In our conversation, I implied I felt I didn't learn very much from my teacher. He told me, "[Your teacher] taught you everything you know." I just gave him a sad smile and didn't respond. 

My teacher passed on a lot of information to me. I won't deny that. However, I don't give him credit for everything I know today. What I know today is how to listen to sound, how to create it, and how to fall in love with it. 

I didn't learn that from him.

Storage 101: Master the Closet

This is the last part in my Storage 101 series. You can catch up on the previous parts here: Intro 1 2 3 

At the end of 2020, we began organizing our master closet and we finished everything in January 2021. It was a spur of the moment project which had been in the works for a few years behind the scenes.

When we bought this house almost six years ago, I really liked the master closet. It was large, spacious, and had shelves and rods to hang and fold clothes. It never came up as something needing to be redone because its functionality was okay.

But there came a point where okay was not good enough.

I began to realize I wanted more drawer space instead of hanging space. In January of 2019, I found a drawer shelf unit secondhand and went to go pick it up. My daughter was nine months old at the time and it was a brutally cold day. To my lack of preparation, the shelf did not fit easily into my car, and although it did fit when we switched the car seat to the other side, I could not lock the car seat back in place and safely or legally drive home. So the kind husband offered to load up the shelf in his pickup truck and drive it home for me. The drive wasn't far as they only lived five minutes down the road, but he didn't have to do any of this.

Kind people exist. You just have to meet them.

I bought new drawers compatible with the shelving unit and set it up in my side of the closet. I used this set up for almost two years before finally realizing it wasn't working anymore. Clothes would sit on top of the drawers and pile up into a stack. The drawers themselves were not enough space for me to easily store and remove the items, and the overall look was very sloppy. 

One evening last December as we were going through the motions to wind down for the evening, we landed on the topic of redoing our closet again. I asked my husband about constructing a drawer unit the way I wanted and we talked about the price of wood and supplies. This led to a quick google search to see if I could find something pre-made and adapt it to my liking. This google search ended up being a rabbit trail which led us to design our custom closet using Elfa from The Container Store. 

We had perused the Elfa collection years before. One evening for fun about five years ago, we were at The Container Store looking at their custom closet solutions. At the time, I was thinking about getting a shoe organizer. The Container Store had these beautiful gliding shoe racks which actually held a good number of shoes. We got a small design drafted up, but that was the end of it.

This time as I thought about installing some new drawers in the closet, we decided to redo our entire closet so it could be almost completely custom. Translation: Hubby saw how good my side looked and he wanted his side to look that good too. In order to do this, we had to remove three closet rods, retexture the wall to match, and paint. It sounds easy on paper, but it was actually a two-day process because we needed to wait for everything to dry properly. I also ended up redoing the wall texture twice because the first time did not match as well as I wanted it to. 

Then we began installation. The Elfa system is designed to be very DIY-friendly. First, we installed the top tracks. We measured and had them cut so every single screw would hit a wall stud for the most secure installation. It is a few extra steps, but I believe it's worth it considering these are going to hold up to 100+ pounds depending on how much clothing you're storing. Then we hung the hanging standards and used brackets to install gliding drawers, gliding shoe racks, and shelves. It was a lot of fun. Was it a lot of work and did it take a few tries to get it the way I wanted? Yes, it absolutely did. But I found the work very therapeutic and exhilarating from my normal SAHM and working part-time duties.

I'm not going to lie. After we finished the closet, there were a few times when I would purposely go to the closet, sit in it, and admire our work. 

Wifey's Drawers

Wifey's Hanging + Shoes

Hubby's Hanging + Drawers. The picture is deceiving. Our halves are almost equal.

Wifey's Long Hanging

That is all my clothes I own and wear in our closet. Do I own a lot, less than average, or a normal amount? I've always wondered because I never thought I owned a lot. But once I realized how much storage I needed to store it all, it made me start to wonder if I actually have a lot of clothes...or just normal amounts. 🤷🏻‍♀️

This was not an inexpensive makeover of our closet. However, I was also able to reuse some of the old storage solutions in our kids' closets. The shoeboxes that used to hold our shoes are now in my son's room holding his shoes. 

I was able to fit 3-4 pairs of shoes in each box and labeled them by putting
a scratch piece of paper under the lid as a simple DIY label. 

I was also able to repurpose the shelf and drawers I originally had in my son's closet to hold his clothing in larger sizes. My daughter already had one of these shelves because hers is one I inherited from a friend back in college for my apartment. 

This is the original drawer unit I purchased second hand
being repurposed in my son's closet. There was never anything wrong with it.
'I just realized I was exploding each bin with clothes and needed more space.

I'm not one to spend a lot of money, and especially not spending money on things to hold my things, but this was completely worth it. Even now, as I finish this blog, I'm getting excited all over again for how functional and aesthetic this closet makeover is. Good things are worth the cost. Thanks for reading. 🙂

Cut Your Lotion Tubes

 I'd seen a few vidoes circulating around the internet about how you should cut your lotion tubes to get every last bit, especially for those more expensive lotions. I'd always thought I was someone who tried very hard to squeeze every last bit out of the tube before tossing it. So how useful was it to actually cut the tube?

I did an experiment and found out for myself. 

Both my children had and my son still has infantile eczema. It's super annoying and we constantly have to remember to keep him lotioned and lathered or else these red patches start appearing on his arms and legs. Because of this, I've bought a lot of baby eczema lotion. It's not off-the-charts expensive, but it's not cheap either. It retails at approximately $8.00 for a 5 oz tube.

With my daughter, I would squeeze the tube from every direction to try and maximize what I could squeeze out before tossing the tube. I'd even pull the cap off and try to squeeze some more. Was that good enough? 

No, it really wasn't.

We got a food scale last year so it measures items down to the gram. Super helpful for baking with precise accuracy or just nerding out and weighing all sorts of random things. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how accurate the weights were on the package from manufacturers. 

I had three tubes of the same lotion for this experiment. One was completely new. One was completely empty after I cut it and finished what was left inside. One was empty to the squeeze and what I would normally deem as empty and toss if I didn't cut the tube.

The completely new bottle was 162g. The labeled weight of the product is 141g on the package. This meant that if accurate, the packaging itself was 21g.

The completely empty bottle I'd cut and used was actually 20g which meant the manufacturer's label was very accurate. 

Then I weighed the tube which was empty to the squeeze: 50g! Unbelievable. This meant there was 30g of lotion in there I couldn't squeeze out unless I cut open the tube. 

Guys, that means if I had just thrown the tube away (which I had many times) and didn't cut it open, I would be throwing away $1.70 worth of lotion every time. 😱

This is how much lotion was left inside
after I cut it open to have a look.

So here it is. We all need to be cutting open our plastic tubes to get every last bit out because there is a baffling amount left inside, even if it is empty to the squeeze. Someone needs to invent a better way to squeeze lotions...

When did you start cutting your lotion tubes?