Brain food

One year old

15 July 2011 Thoughts
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Break out the bubbly, it’s my one year blogiversary and my 100th post. And yes, this rudimentary graphic is the best I could do to commemorate it. I actually worked kind of hard on it. Thanks to all of you for sticking around this confusingly-named blog of mine: it’s not ethnic, and I’m not a [...]

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Preparing for BlogHer 2011

15 July 2011 Conferences
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I’ve been unemployed – that is to say, 24/7 home-employed – for 10 years. In the first nine years, I made it out for one conference (Maria Shriver’s blockbuster one-day Women’s Conference). In a few weeks, I’ll go to my second conference in nine months: BlogHer, a women’s blogging conference that began in 2005 with [...]

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Countdown

10 July 2011 Thoughts
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A week from today is my one-year blogiversary. A year ago, I took a summer blogging class at Stanford, knowing that without hard deadlines I might never find the time or overcome my trepidation. At the end of the six weeks, I hesitantly tapped this tiny stake with its makeshift flag into internet-land, hoping to [...]

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Pioneer day

8 June 2011 Columbus, OH
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From my elementary school days in California, I remember panning for gold-painted pebbles and taking a field trip to a local Spanish mission, where we learned about making adobe bricks from clay and marveled at how small the Spanish padres must have been to fit into such tiny beds. But for my school kids in [...]

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David Brooks: It’s not about you

2 June 2011 Brain food
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My oldest niece is graduating from high school. She thinks it’s a big deal, but the adults in the family know how much bigger it is than she thinks. Wonderful times are in store for her, and tough times; eye-opening discoveries and hard lessons. I remember how confident I was at her age and marvel [...]

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Connecting the dots

21 May 2011 Diet
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I wish that House MD from the long-running TV show were my real doctor: he’d start with my stated problem, notice symptoms didn’t even know I had, investigate my lifestyle, diet, home environment and personal history, write out all the possible causes on a large blackboard, systematically evaluate each one and come up with the [...]

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Japan

18 March 2011 Thoughts
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Many thoughts triggered by this past week’s tragic series of events in Japan…earthquakes and memories, stories, fears and hopes. My brief trip to Tokyo and Kyoto in 2001 – I tagged along on my husband’s work trip and spent the days, map in hand, exploring alone. I was charmed by the extreme specialization of Japanese [...]

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New year

5 February 2011 Getting older
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It’s February, and I’m still trying to shake my new year’s angst. I made a single resolution this year – to get more sleep – and I think I liked life better when I was too exhausted to focus on the big picture. This is the first time in 10 years that I haven’t been [...]

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My favorite houseguests

21 January 2011 Family
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The fact that my husband and I were unambiguously depressed to see my mom and dad go back to California after a three-week visit says a lot about them as parents and people. Tiger moms (not to mention Tiger mothers-in-law) are all about applying pressure; my parents are all about relieving it. They come to [...]

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Chinese mothers

14 January 2011 Family
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Many friends have sent me the article by Amy Chua in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” asking what I think of it. For those of you who have not read the article, Yale law professor Chua writes about her experience raising her two daughters in the stereotypical Chinese fashion: command-and-control, [...]

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