I want to talk some more about humanizing interactions. Yesterday, after a pretty horrible Monday and Tuesday, I had an amazing Wednesday. I had tea, pastries & dim sum with a dear friend who is chosen family; had an incredible impromptu “office hours” conversation with a colleague who is leading another part of a grant […]
Month: February 2019
Time for Change
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. — Philippians 4:8 The above picture is my daughter in my messy bathroom with her stuffed flamingo, Gilda. She is almost 4. She is pure […]
Protocol Over People: Why (Educational) Institutions Need to Stop Dehumanizing People of Color
In the fall of last year, I was asked to participate in a faculty diversity panel for a leadership retreat at my university. I did so. I rescheduled my week, drove 8 hours roundtrip, prepared my words carefully, spoke from my heart, and did it all for no compensation. As part of my participation, I […]
Side-lined
I miss running. I haven’t been able to run in 19 days. I really shouldn’t have run for a few weeks before that, but I was training for the Surf City Half Marathon, and despite some nagging hip pain, I figured I could just push through it and finish the race, then rest a couple […]
Coming Together
Tonight, my son and I did our Chinese homework together. We both had similar exercises, with his characters more complex than mine, but with my repetitions more numerous than his. He corrected my pronunciation, but I didn’t mind as much as I did a few months ago because I could hear the difference between what […]
Peace in the Process
Last week, my son got a D- progress report that I received via e-mail with no warning. If you know me (and/or my son) in real life, you might imagine that this was an incredibly shocking moment for me. My son rarely gets a B in his academic classes and since the beginning of this […]
The Frenzy of Multitasking: A Recommitment to Focus
I have been resisting the third exercise, Observing Multitasking, from the book Mindful Tech, for at least a month now. At first, my resistance was grounded in the fact that I hadn’t yet started the semester and felt like my multitasking habits weren’t at their peak. Now that I’m fully in it, however, and feeling the […]
Take Good Care
It’s been a rough weekend. When I think about it, it’s just been a busy weekend that wasn’t much of a weekend. I had a work commitment from 9-3 on Saturday then went straight to church then stayed for a Social Justice committee meeting. All of this was great and would have been fine except […]
Striving Towards Imperfection
Tonight, at family dinner time, I posed this conundrum to my son and husband, “Since I used to work 12 hours a day, and now, I work, roughly 8 hours a day, and am trying to do better about work-life balance, it’s physically impossible to cram the same amount of work into that much less […]
Turning Writing Into Practice
My last few posts have been pretty heavy, and very emotional. While things are looking better for my family and myself, in so many ways, after the past week, I sat down this morning in front of my computer thinking about one blog topic (another heavy one on xenophobia, the “blindness” of people to how […]