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What my dog knows about life

“Hi, can I pet your dog?”

“Sure, if she lets you. She’s shy, and everything is on her terms.”

The guy crouched down, his hand extended. Kona paused a few feet away, assessing, stranger danger mode activated. Slowly, she stepped forward and stretched out her neck. The smallest of sniffs and an accidental nose boop. She backed away, signaling that was all she was willing to give.

“That’s the most anyone really gets from her,” I sigh.

“It’s ok, it was enough. Thanks, Kona!” they say, as we walk away from the stranger danger.

This is a common scenario. Kona catches the attention of almost everyone walking by… and very few get more than a tentative sniff.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what we tell people: “Everything is on her terms.” We say it lightly, but I don’t think we mean it lightly.

Kona doesn’t do things out of obligation. She is a typical shiba with no desire to please her owner. She is cat-like and does what she wants, for the most part, and not because we are laissez-faire pet parents. She moves when she’s ready, stops when she’s done, and engages only when it feels right — usually only if there’s something in it for her.

She doesn’t wake up wondering if her day will be meaningful or productive. She doesn’t scan a mental to-do list or stress about her calendar. She doesn’t have the Sunday Scaries. She gets out of bed every morning — thankfully, only after we do — stretches, and makes her way upstairs for her morning walk and breakfast. She doesn’t care what’s going on that day, she’s gotta meet her needs first: fresh air and food.

The other day, it was nearly 70 degrees F and sunny — in Denver, in February. We had to take advantage of the spring-like day, and we headed to Golden and walked along Clear Creek Trail. With Kona, of course.

The sun beamed on our faces, the creek babbled beside us, and we couldn’t get over how gorgeous of a day it was. Kona trotted along happily, occasionally stopping to investigate something deeply important that we could not see or smell. She set the pace. When she moved, we moved (just like that).

Everything is on her terms.

She eats when she wants to. If she isn’t in the mood for breakfast at breakfast time, she saves it for lunch.

She stops to smell the flowers, literally, even if we have somewhere to be. Satisfying her curiosity is worth the side quest, even if it’s not “useful”.

She finds sunny patches and sunbathes because she likes to. And she’ll move not because the sun wants her to move, but because she wants to move with the sun.

Kona doesn’t need to have a productive morning to deserve an afternoon walk. Joy isn’t a reward; it’s just part of being alive. There’s no internal ledger keeping track of whether she’s done enough to justify rest. She rests all the time, and purely because she wants to loaf around on the couch.

This way of being is deeply uncomfortable if you have a brain trained in systems, efficiency, and tradeoffs. I’m very good at making cases for things. Dogs do not care about your business case. They care about whether the sun is out and whether they get to be outside. Their tradeoffs involve napping on the bed away from their people vs. napping on the couch next to their people.

Kona also doesn’t care about progress. We weren’t going anywhere that day in Golden. There was no destination, no milestone, no desired outcome besides going on a walk. The wandering itself was the point. How much of our dissatisfaction comes from insisting that everything must be in service of forward motion, of achieving goals?

And Kona knows when enough is enough. When she’s tired, she stops. She plops herself on the ground to take a break. She listens to her body and acts accordingly. This isn’t the most convenient when we’re still a half mile away from the parking lot, but I let her rest for bit, cheerlead her while she pushes through, and carry her for small stretches if needed (ok, so Husband usually carries her, but I do sometimes).

Everything is on her terms. Maybe that’s the whole point. 

Be more like Kona.

I unintentionally learned a lot of skills from video games, of all things.

I recently started listening to video game music while creating at the studio. I didn’t think much of it other than life is better with a soundtrack, and that it was probably a good choice because it’s meant to be background music while you’re doing other things… like pottery. 

Some of the tracks brought me back to where and when I was when I played those games. The town music was relaxing. The dungeon or temple music put my brain into problem-solving mode. The battle music spiked my cortisol (and was immediately skipped). And it made me think about how much video games were such a big part of my life, until they weren’t.

I actually don’t remember a time before video games. I was only a toddler, yet I vaguely remember playing my Atari (I guess it was my dad’s Atari), with its joystick-and-single-button controller. I also kinda remember the Christmas I got the OG chunky gray Game Boy with a huge carrying case that included slots for the game cartridges and a Lightboy, an attachable light and magnifier! I definitely remember playing games on our original Nintendo console, hooked up to the boxy TV. My favorite Nintendo game was Chip N Dale, Rescue Rangers. I always played as Chip, and my little brother played as Dale (side note: I think as adults, he’s more of a Chip and I’m more of a Dale now!).

The consoles changed over the years. What we didn’t have at home, we played every weekend at our cousins’ houses. Super Nintendo. PlayStation. Sega Genesis. Sega Saturn. New versions of the Game Boy. New versions of the PlayStation. N64. Wii. My brother and I were mostly PlayStation kids, and I think I’ve touched an Xbox exactly once. Controllers got sleeker, graphics improved, sounds and music got crisper — but the play stayed the same. Sit down. Focus (or as the kids say, “lock in”). Destroy some monsters. Solve some puzzles. Die. Try again.

At some point, I stopped playing.

It wasn’t a dramatic decision. I didn’t renounce games or declare them a waste of time. They just fell away, right around the time I started working full time, which feels telling in retrospect. Adulthood crowded out play, and I didn’t really question it. That’s just what happens, right?

I’ve always told my parents that video games taught me some of the most foundational skills. Admittedly, I was reaching for reasons to stay up late playing games, or spend hours in front of the TV instead of playing outside. Doesn’t make it any less true. 

What I didn’t realize until later: I was learning how to learn.

I played Japanese RPGs (role-playing games where you assume the role of a character progressing through a storyline) before voice acting was standard, which meant reading was mandatory. Dialogue boxes, item descriptions, weapons classes, menus, lore. If you didn’t read, if you didn’t pay attention, if you didn’t know how to put two and two together, you didn’t progress. There was no way around it. There were plenty of times I got stuck for hours because I read a map wrong, or I couldn’t defeat a boss because I wasn’t paying attention to the random town villager telling me a very key detail about what his weakness was.

This kind of reading wasn’t passive. You had to infer meaning, remember details (or write them down — was it just me?), connect threads, and realize patterns. You learned through context and repetition. After watching an unskippable cutscene for the fifth time, oh, you learn. You learned that understanding came gradually, not all at once. And you learned to be OK with not fully understanding something the first (or fifth, or fifteenth) time. Looking back, that feels like an early lesson in navigating complexity without panicking.

Then there were the puzzles. The actual puzzles. (The temple puzzles in Final Fantasy X are what I’m thinking about right now, because they were especially grueling for me.)

Games didn’t really explain themselves back then. There weren’t always glowing arrows telling you where to go. You tried things, and sometimes they worked, and sometimes you found yourself free-falling down an abyss (cue Mario failure music here). If you were really stuck, maybe you asked a friend. Maybe you begged your parents to buy you a “strategy guide” from GameStop (before they were widely available online) because how the hell do you get out of this maze?

What games taught me here was patience with being stuck. Not everything is immediately solvable. Not knowing is not a failure state. Sometimes progress looks like circling the problem until your brain catches up. Sometimes you just have to walk away from a problem and come back to it later. That lesson has aged surprisingly well.

And then there was failure — constant, expected, unremarkable failure. You died. A lot. You respawned at a save point, sometimes — oftentimes? — way before you’d like it to be. You tried again. (If I’m not mistaken, Super Mario World on SNES allowed you to save only very infrequently.) 

Failure wasn’t personal. It just meant you mistimed a jump, or chose the wrong move, or hadn’t understood the pattern yet, or just didn’t have enough experience. What that built was grit. Not the hustle culture kind, but the calm, boring kind, lol. The kind where you don’t spiral when something doesn’t work the first time. The kind where iteration is normal and persistence is rewarding. The kind you build when you realize that picking Charmander as your starter Pokemon maybe wasn’t the best choice against the Rock Gym and Water Gym. In a lot of adult environments, failure feels high-stakes and shame-laced. In games, it was just part of the loop, part of the fun that sometimes didn’t feel like fun.

I also played a lot of racing and fighting games, which trained a different set of skills.

Racing games taught timing and spatial awareness, and how to drive at high speeds (which may or may not have translated directly to real life…).

Fighting games taught pattern recognition, anticipation, adaptation, and muscle memory.

Both taught me how to compete. Most of the cousins I spent time with growing up were the boys, and I learned how to take a virtual beating — and what to do to fight back and win. (They learned how not to be sore losers for losing to a girl!)

Video games taught me that mastery isn’t talent — it’s repetition and iteration. It’s showing up again and again until something clicks. There’s no shortcut. There’s just time and attention.

At some point, the games changed. They moved online. They became more social, more optimized, and more monetized (you want me to buy a monthly subscription to play a game?!). Play became performative. You weren’t just playing — you were being watched, ranked, and compared. Fun started to feel like work. That made me lose interest. This isn’t a critique of online gaming so much as a recognition of what I personally lost: solitary play. Offline focus. The freedom to be bad at something in private, with low stakes.

What I’m still unpacking is what it would look like to reclaim some of those early lessons — iteration without shame, patience with complexity, joy without optimization — in a world that increasingly treats every activity as something to measure, share, or monetize (yuck).

This reflection somehow led to “ugh! these systems and society we live in!” but hey, that’s the beauty of writing, right?

By the way, after many years of not gaming, I do have a gaming console in my house once again: a Nintendo Switch we bought a few years ago. We bought it because The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was supposed to be the new hotness, but I played it and got really stuck and never picked it up again, ha. We mostly play Mario Kart now, but I might have just inspired myself to properly game again.

What I mean when I say I want work flexibility / a list of benefits I actually want

I found a note in my phone listing the benefits of remote work. I don’t remember why I started it, but it feels relevant to surface now — especially with return-to-office mandates making their latest comeback tour.

I keep seeing the same argument recycled: spontaneous collaboration leads to innovation. Sure, fine, whatever.

That argument falls apart pretty quickly when you’re forced back into the office only to sit on Zoom calls with teammates in other locations. But I digress.

Let’s say requiring people to report to a physical office does occasionally result in spontaneous collaboration and innovation. What does it cost?

Time and energy, for sure. Physical and emotional well-being. Freedom.

We proved in 2020 that a lot of work could be done remotely. Workers were productive — in many cases, more productive — and we sent shareholder value to the moon. And now employers are clawing those remote policies back for… reasons. Control. Real estate. Optics.

Besides the more obvious benefits of remote work — like skipping the commute (and all the time, stress, and maintenance that come with it), or wearing your comfiest sweats — I want to name the underrated benefits. The ones that never make it into a benefits presentation, but matter just as much.

Here’s a list of benefits HR teams at remote-friendly companies should be proud of:

• Knowing your bathroom is clean, available, and not half a city block away
• Being in control of the temperature (no more office-wide thermostat wars)
• Full environmental control: light, sound, seating, silence, smells (have you ever lit a scented candle while working? It’s great.)
• Being able to enjoy your “stinky” lunch — kimchi! fish! most delicious food, really — without judgment or complaints
• Spending more time with your pets, including the kind of pet cuddling that improves your mood and lowers your blood pressure
• Throwing in a load of laundry between meetings so weekends stay… weekends
• Avoiding the office stomach bug that somehow takes down half the floor
• The luxury of being able to lie down between meetings — or during an all-hands. To lie down, period.
• The freedom to fidget, pace, stretch, or sit like a pretzel
• Choosing your own desk and chair instead of suffering through corporate-issue furniture
• Choosing where to work — no more envying the desks at the sunlit corners of the office
• Less pressure to mask — emotionally, socially, neurologically
• Being able to walk away when you need a moment
• Having your notes visible to you, but not everyone else (soooo helpful for presentations)
• Wearing comfy clothes that don’t drain your will to live
• Taking care of minor health things without an explanation
• Transitioning between meetings without sprinting down a hallway
• Not having to hover awkwardly outside a conference room you booked, wondering when it’s socially acceptable to kick people out
• Regulating your energy instead of performing productivity (thinking is working, even when an executive is doing laps around the floor.)

None of this shows up on a company’s list of benefits and perks. It’s all folded into a single line item called “remote work”.

There’s no KPI for “never crying in a bathroom stall” or “not losing half your day to fluorescent lights and overstimulation” (seriously, why the Big Lights?)

But collectively, these things add up to something that does matter: more autonomy, and more room to be human.

So yes, we can debate office attendance policies. I do understand why some people prefer working in an office (couldn’t be me, but you do you!). But we should also be honest about what people are actually being asked to give up.

The cognitive dissonance of celebrating small joys while the world falls apart.

How do I celebrate my husband’s birthday the day after we all witnessed ICE murder Renee Good in broad daylight?

How do we carry on with our days after such atrocities occur? How are we still answering emails, joining Zoom meetings, and going grocery shopping when the world is burning around us? When Israel is committing genocide? When there is a mass shooting in America nearly every day? When ICE is dragging people out of their homes or kidnapping people at school? When people with so-called authority are shooting people in the head for… sitting in their car? 

It felt really weird to be baking a birthday cake last week. We had to keep telling ourselves, and each other, to avoid social media. Was it the “right” thing to do? Unsure, but it protected our mental health, on a day that should have been full of joy. A birthday! A day to celebrate another revolution around the sun!

It’s felt weird for a while. On the medium screen, the endless barrage of bad news: looming war (WWIII or Civil War II, which will be first?), political chaos, climate collapse, economic downturn, bad, bad, bad. On the tiny screen, personal moments of joy: birthday celebrations, milestone achievements, good meals, cooking tutorials, pottery content, dog videos. 

Both screens show reality. And holding those distinctly different versions of reality at the same time is exhausting.

I think what a lot of us are experiencing right now isn’t only stress or burnout — it’s cognitive dissonance. The mental strain of trying to reconcile two realities that don’t sit neatly together: a world that feels like it’s on fire, and a personal life that keeps… happening.

I’ll feel happy about something small and almost immediately feel disoriented. Like “am I allowed to feel this?” Like joy requires a footnote. Like celebration needs context. Like happiness is somehow irresponsible. Like if I am posting dog photos, I don’t care about the truly horrible shit happening in the world. 

This dissonance shows up everywhere. We’re expected to be informed but not overwhelmed. Engaged but not consumed. Compassionate but still productive. To care deeply about the state of the world while continuing to function inside systems that feel increasingly broken. To hold grief and normalcy in the same body, sometimes in the same hour.

We keep reaching for the word “balance”, but balance implies two sides evenly weighted. What we’re dealing with feels much more volatile than that. It’s not balance; it’s constant reconciliation. A daily attempt to make incompatible truths coexist without tearing ourselves apart.

One of the ways people cope with this is compartmentalization, a word that tends to sound colder than it actually is. It’s often framed as avoidance or denial, but I’m not convinced that’s fair. I don’t think compartmentalization always means pretending the house isn’t burning. I think sometimes it means stepping out of the smoke long enough to breathe.

There’s a version of awareness that’s clarifying, and another that’s paralyzing. When we’re exposed to suffering constantly, our nervous systems don’t magically rise to the occasion; they shut down. So we scroll. We numb ourselves. Or we swing the other direction and try to perform constant seriousness, as if joy is something we should temporarily suspend until the world improves.

That’s where I really feel the dissonance: the idea that personal joy and global suffering are mutually exclusive. That to be ethical or awake or compassionate, we must flatten our own lives. That small wins don’t count right now. That happiness is, at best, a distraction — and at worst, a moral failure. But refusing joy doesn’t actually resolve the contradiction. It just adds another layer of loss.

The world doesn’t get better simply because we suppress happiness in the name of taking the world seriously. All that really happens is that our own lives become smaller, more brittle, easier to break. At the same time, I don’t fully buy the counter-narrative either — the idea that joy is inherently radical or that happiness alone is a form of resistance. That framing feels too clear-cut for something so complicated.

Joy doesn’t fix the world, but despair doesn’t either. This isn’t about disengaging or sticking my head in the sand — it’s about surviving long enough to stay human.

Coping with cognitive dissonance isn’t about choosing one reality over the other. It’s about learning how to let them coexist without demanding resolution.

That might look like:

• Staying informed, but setting real boundaries around how much you consume
• Allowing yourself to feel joy without immediately qualifying it
• Letting grief be present without insisting it dominate every moment
• Accepting that some days you’ll feel okay, and other days you won’t, and neither is a failure of character

None of this feels elegant. If you are an empathetic human being, the discomfort doesn’t go away. The dissonance doesn’t resolve; it just becomes something you learn to carry with more awareness and care.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to eliminate the tension (it sure would be nice though), but to stop letting it convince us that we’re doing something wrong by continuing to live.

The world is on fire. That’s real. And we’re still here, making dinner, learning new skills, celebrating birthdays, creating things that don’t solve anything but make life feel inhabitable.

Holding both is uncomfortable, but pretending one cancels out the other somehow feels even worse.

So this is me, trying to cope — not by resolving the contradiction, but by acknowledging it. I’m letting the dissonance exist without letting it erase my humanity.

I don’t have a better answer than that. I don’t have advice to make life feel less heavy. My coping mechanisms are just that: coping mechanisms, and not a panacea. I don’t even know why I started writing this, but if this makes you feel seen, that’s my tidbit of joy today.

Two hours of scream-singing Backstreet Boys songs healed my inner child and my outside adult.

This past weekend, I went to Backstreet Boys: Into the Millennium at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

I was really excited about it, because it was my first BSB concert. Millennium is one of my favorite albums of all time (there are NO SKIPS, though, to be fair, I sometimes stop before the last track, “The Perfect Fan”). And I’d heard that the Sphere itself is an experience.

Saturday night exceeded all of my very high expectations.

Singing “I Want It That Way” with 20,000 strangers felt like a form of therapy. Screaming like a 13-year-old when the Boys first appeared on stage was genuinely cathartic. Bopping along to cheesy pop songs transported me straight back to 1999. Realizing I knew every word to songs I haven’t heard in decades was wild. I don’t think I stopped smiling for the full two hours.

My heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest — in all the best ways, if that’s a thing. I told R that I don’t remember the last time I experienced that much intense, pure joy.

And from what I understand, I’m not alone. This tour is making millennials lose our damn minds. I’ve thought a lot about why.

—

Before Everything Got Heavy

On the surface, it’s easy to explain. Millennium came out in 1999. A simpler time. Pre-9/11. Pre-social media. Pre-constant terrible news. The world felt smaller, slower, more understandable… and our lives did too.

There was a shared monoculture. Everyone knew these songs. Everyone watched the same TRL countdowns (I didn’t even have cable and somehow still absorbed the boy band culture). Going to this tour isn’t just nostalgia for a boy band; it’s nostalgia for a time when the world felt more synchronized and connected.

Now, most of us live in algorithmically curated little bubbles. No wonder there’s a loneliness epidemic.

The Teenage Version of Ourselves

I think this tour is tapping into something deeper: a longing not for the past itself, but for the version of ourselves that existed before everything felt so hard.

Late childhood and early adolescence are when music fuses to memory, identity, and emotion, and these songs imprinted on us during those formative years. When emotions were loud and unfiltered and occasionally nonsensical, like some of Max Martin’s lyrics. Music wasn’t background noise; it was identity formation. You didn’t just like a song. You felt it in your body. You built entire inner worlds around it.

You were obsessed. You played that CD on repeat on your Sony Discman and let it become a part of you.

Revisiting that music doesn’t just remind us of who we were. It returns us to that version of ourselves, before adult responsibilities set in and stayed.

Millennial Exhaustion

Millennials came of age into irony, detachment, self-deprecating coping humor. Being “chill.” We learned how to intellectualize our feelings instead of actually feeling them. We learned how to laugh things off. How to keep moving, how to be productive even when we were exhausted. Ugh, especially when we were exhausted.

And now here we are, late 30s and early 40s, deep in the squishy dog shit of adulthood.

Careers didn’t quite turn out the way we were promised. Systems feel rigged. There’s constant pressure to optimize everything. Our bodies don’t bounce back the way they used to. Some of us are navigating aging or sick parents. Some are raising kids. Some are doing both. And layered on top of that is the general chaos of the world right now. It’s a lot, and it’s non-stop.

So for two hours, we didn’t have to be resilient, productive, or self-aware. When the opening notes of “Larger Than Life” hit, we collectively reverted to our screeching teenage selves, and it felt like a deep sigh (scream?) of relief.

Big Feelings, No Irony

Back then (“back in my day” lol), sincerity was allowed.

The pop music of that era was unapologetically earnest. Big feelings of devotion, longing, heartbreak. Full-volume emotion. Yes, it was corny. The youths today might call it cringe. But it made us happy, SO HAPPY.

That night, we got to scream the lyrics to “The One” and mean it with our whole chests, without judgment, because everyone else there was doing the exact same thing. Just feeling all the feelings and becoming the purest expression of corny teenage selves.

Collective Nostalgia

What’s especially powerful about this tour is that it isn’t a private moment of nostalgia. It’s communal. I’ve seen TikToks of people calling this concert “millennial church,” and honestly, if what I felt that night is what religious diehards feel every Sunday? Ok, I get it.

Nostalgia usually happens quietly, alone in your car, or late at night with headphones on. A song comes on and suddenly you’re 13 again, but only for a minute, before real life intrudes. But a concert at the Sphere turns remembering into a shared ritual.

There’s something deeply comforting about that collective remembering. About realizing you weren’t alone then — and you’re not alone now. (omg, do I now truly understand cults?)

Validation

This one surprised me, but it feels very real: this tour retroactively validates the teenage era of our lives.

There’s something profound about seeing a venue full of grown adults scream-singing lyrics that were once dismissed as teenybopper nonsense. So much of what we loved as teenage girls was minimized and categorized as too emotional, too silly, too cheesy.

Yet here we are, decades later, filling the Sphere every weekend, after fighting for our lives in Ticketmaster queues. Proving that those feelings counted, that they mattered, and that they still do.

—

I don’t think most millennials actually want to go back to 1999.

We don’t want to relive dial-up internet or low-rise jeans (shudder) or the specific flavor of insecurity that came with adolescence. What we want is relief. A break from constant decision-making and pressure of modern life. 

For two hours, this tour offers a suspension of all the bullshit we have to deal with every day.

You don’t have to be impressive or self-aware or emotionally regulated. You don’t have to explain yourself.

You just get to sing “Show Me The Meaning of Being Lonely” — ironically, not alone — at the top of your lungs and mean it, without apology.

Millennial nostalgia isn’t about believing the past was better. It’s about acknowledging that the present is heavier. And this concert made me remember what it felt like to be wild and free (… reaching out like you needed me).

Distance, desert, beach, ocean, mountains.

We’ve been away from home since the first week of December.

We’ve made an annual tradition of driving from Denver to San Diego sometime at the end of the year — last year it was for Thanksgiving, the year before it was for Christmas. This year, the timing of our San Diego trip revolved around a holiday party in Phoenix. And since we were already on the road, why not Crested Butte too?

We drove 2722 miles to get here. Actually, I drove 2722 miles — R had last-minute retina surgery the week of Thanksgiving, so him driving wasn’t in anyone’s best interest.

I’ve learned a lot in 2722 miles and 2.5 weeks. Oh no, it’s another post about sharing things I learned (or re-learned)!

I can do anything, and it’s even easier when it’s enjoyable

For one, I proved to myself that I am capable of anything. Thirteen hours from Denver to Phoenix, with a 3am wakeup, is not for the faint of heart. But for two, it wasn’t that bad because I love spending time with my husband and doggo, even if it’s just sitting in a car staring at the road, singing along to whatever was on the radio, and asking each other random questions as they popped into our brains. This next thing shouldn’t be surprising: quality time is my top love language.

Novelty really works my brain, especially when I’m driving

Any time I had to navigate a neighborhood or parking lot I’ve never driven through, your girl was STRESSED. I don’t know what it is about the last 50 feet of finding a place — despite Google Maps loudly announcing “turn right, and your destination is on the left” — that makes me lose all sense of direction. The number of times I yelled something like “This right?? THIS ONE??” in panic on this trip… Same with finding a parking spot. It’s like my brain sees the empty spots a half second too late. But I managed. Because, again, I can do anything. Even if it takes me longer. Even if I park crooked. Even if I have to get out and re-park while pretending no one saw. 

Routine keeps me grounded

I (re-)learned that I need some sense of routine. I’m not a super regimented person, but there are certain routines I have at home that get lost when I travel. So I often start a new routine, just to give my days some semblance of grounding and structure. I know some people use exercise as their routine — thus the existence of hotel gyms — but I am not one of those people. I’m more of a “routinely support a local business” kind of gal, so my go-to is a daily visit to the local coffee shop. Our routines were Peixoto in downtown Chandler, Coffee Cycle in Ocean Beach, and Camp 4 Coffee in Crested Butte (Rumors is a close second).

Familiar scents comfort me (maybe I was a doggo in a past life)

Routine and familiarity go hand in hand, and as it turns out, familiar smells are really important to me. I usually just live with the hotel shampoo and soap. This was fine in Chandler. But when we got to San Diego, I HATED the smell of the shampoo at our rental, and certainly couldn’t live with it for a week. I figured if I needed to buy shampoo and wasn’t restricted to travel-size, might as well splurge and buy what we use at home. And let me tell you: the first shower with familiar scents made me feel like a brand new person. It wasn’t just comfort—it was familiarity. It made me feel like myself again.

As much as I like to travel, I get homesick

The two-week mark is when I really start to miss home. My bed, my pillows, my shower, my cookware, my smells… As much as I dream of a digital nomad lifestyle, I’ve learned that I need a base that feels truly like home where I can reset for a bit. 

The ocean is a healing force

If you’ve been following along, I’ve had a pretty good year, all things considered. There wasn’t much I had to “fix” or release, but damn the ocean washing over my feet fixed everything in that moment. There’s something about any body of water that is reenergizing, but the ocean in particular calms me deep in my soul. The salty air, the range of blue-green hues, the sounds of crashing and gushing water, the bubbling sea foam, the predictable unpredictability of the waves — it all washes away any bad vibes. Add a bouncing Kona-pup romping around on the sand, and every day at the beach was bliss. The drive to Dog Beach in San Diego was worth every minute. 

Cooking on a trip is a stretch

It isn’t that I dislike cooking, or that I don’t want to do it when I could be exploring new places instead, but the mental load and limited resources make it so hard to cook! If we’re driving to our destination, we pack a kitchen knife and small cutting board in the event we want/need to cook. This is because the knives at the rental will be dull af (I have experienced this 100% of the time). But we sometimes don’t end up needing those things at all. Figuring out what to make with a limited or nonexistent pantry is a chore. Going grocery shopping is a chore. Cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, with pots and pans that are damaged to hell, is — you guessed it — a chore. I did manage to make eggs for breakfast every morning in San Diego though! And so far, I’ve made pancakes and chili (not together) in Crested Butte. If anyone has meal suggestions, I would love to hear them. 

I’m sure there are more lessons learned, but I’ve been too busy driving to write them all down. 

Happy holidays to you and yours, and I’ll catch you all in 2026!

I’m less employed but more myself.

I made a joke early on in my pottery journey, as I explained glazing to a friend. “They will be brighter and shinier after getting fired! … Ha, the same could be said about myself”

Anyway, I knew that had to be the title of this post.

It’s been one year since I got laid off. For the third time. And this was the layoff that I think changed me the most. My first layoff shook me to my core. This one shook everything loose that wasn’t my core. 

This time, I didn’t panic, didn’t spiral, didn’t scramble, didn’t doomscroll job boards or scattershot my resume at the internet. (Ok, maybe a tiny bit, but I caught myself before I fell into the abyss. Is this… growth?)

Instead, I did the opposite. I slowed down and gave myself grace. And I let that shit go.

I thanked the universe — truly, genuinely — for forcing me out of a toxic relationship I’d been trying to “fix” with grit and over-functioning. I knew that job was draining my soul and was not the best situation, but it wasn’t until I was severed from it that I realized how horrible it was. I had never worked harder at a job, I had never given a job more of not just my time and energy, but myself. And for what? To treat me like trash to be discarded, which they eventually did.

Hindsight is 20/20. A cliche for a reason, as it turns out.

Then I got a little… spiritual? Not (entirely) in a woo-woo way, but in an “accept what I cannot change” way. Getting laid off became a blessing in disguise for me — and I say that with deep awareness that this isn’t true for everyone.

What I didn’t know at the time was that 2025 would become my year — a whole year! — of rest and rediscovery.

I started asking different questions. Not “What’s next?” or “How do I fix this?” but “Who am I without a job title?” and “What do I actually like to do when no one is watching?” So I began to rediscover myself — not by reinventing, but by remembering.

A list of what I’ve learned and tried and did, in no particular order:

• I started writing on Substack(!!!).
• I fell deeply in love with pottery.
• I partnered with an old coworker-turned-friend to start a podcast.
  I rediscovered my love of drawing (well, doodling). 
• I revisited my cookbook collection and cooked a lot of new recipes (though still fewer than I aspired to).
• I set up an LLC and learned all the annoying business things around that.
• I learned how to drive a stick shift.
• I tried my hand at gardening.
• I began learning how to taste wine and coffee with intention.
• I got a record player and now listen to full albums again.
• I nourished my relationships — with friends, family, and of course Kona, my sweet pupperoni. 
• And I learned how to be with myself without immediately turning that into productivity or feeling guilty for not doing “more”. 

None of these things made me more employable, but all of them made me more me.

Along the way, I found my voice — not my corporate voice, not my “manager ready” voice, not my “please promote me” voice. But my actual voice. Unfiltered, unoptimized, no mask. Just me.

I stopped contorting myself to fit into what I thought I was supposed to be, especially in a professional sense. I stopped optimizing. I stopped squeezing every ounce of myself into work and leaving nothing for the rest of my life.

When I zoom out, I see this clearly now: everything I did this year pointed me back to my core values.

When I read Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, I did the values exercise, the one where you’re only allowed to pick two. They’re meant to represent who you are at your best, and they don’t change depending on context. Your personal values and your work values aren’t different values. They’re just expressed differently. 

The two I landed on were curiosity and joy. And I think I nailed it. Somehow, without consciously trying, I spent the year living them.

Curiosity showed up in learning new skills, in tasting things slowly and deciding if I like them, in asking myself who I am, in wondering what my life could look like if I think outside the box. Joy showed up in making things with my hands, in meals with friends, in laughter, in choosing presence over optimization (breakfast without checking emails? Amazing!).

This year wasn’t about becoming someone new. It was about returning to the best version of myself. The version of me who leads with wonder. Who does things because they’re interesting or delightful, not because they’re useful or profitable.

Early in the year, I realized that our jobs get the best version of us. We give our energy and creativity to work in the name of passion and dedication, and our loved ones get whatever is left over. That realization stopped me cold. And even darker was recognizing that in this late-stage capitalistic hellscape, there often isn’t anything left over at all.

Today, I know who I am outside of my job. I know what fills me up. And I’m far more intentional about protecting that version of myself — for me, and for the people who actually get to share a life with me. (And that includes you, dear reader! I mean it!)

I really am brighter and shinier after getting fired.

Figuring out what I like is a skill and a tool for learning who I am. (Wow, that sounds like an identity crisis.)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I actually like. Seems weird, right? How do I not know what I like?

Not in some grand philosophical sense, but in an everyday kind of way: the wine I sip, the coffee I drink, the music I listen to, the clothes I wear, the snacks I reach for. What I realized is: I often don’t know why I like or dislike something. For example, I’ve been really into Sicilian wine lately, and I can’t articulate why other than “It’s interesting because it tastes like volcano.” And I definitely can’t describe why I like one Sicilian wine over another. They both taste like volcano. But I like one more than the other. Shrug.

I’m realizing this isn’t just about wine — it’s about taste itself, learning to understand it, and finding the vocabulary to describe it.

I’ve started thinking of taste as a skill, not just instinct. You can train it, notice patterns, and get better at articulating your reactions. With wine, it’s paying attention to acidity, sweetness, tannins, viscosity, booziness. With coffee, it’s noticing which notes I like — fruity, floral, chocolatey, nutty. With music, its melodies and harmonies, lyrics, instruments. With clothes, it’s what textures (soft, not itchy), colors (jewel tones), and silhouettes (TBD depending on the day, honestly) make me feel like myself. With food, it’s figuring out which flavors I crave and why. The more I practice noticing, the more I can describe what I’m experiencing. And I definitely need to learn the vocabulary, as if I’m learning a new language. There are SO. MANY. WORDS. to describe taste — have you ever looked at a flavor wheel?

I also realized how much taste reflects identity. Our preferences can be a window into who we are: our curiosity, our values, our personality. That wine that tastes like volcanic rocks? It mirrors my willingness to explore. That small-batch pour-over I can’t stop thinking about? It reflects my bougie side, lol. The song I listen to on repeat? I’m a sucker for catchy pop tunes. That hoodie I keep reaching for? I choose comfort over fashion, every time. Even the snacks I choose — sour candy over sweet cookies — probably reveal something about how I approach the world, though I’m not entirely sure what yet.

But taste doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Culture, marketing, and social norms shape what we’re “supposed” to like. Think about the stereotype that bros love beer and women prefer rosé. That dudes love rock music and girls love boy bands. Sometimes those patterns line up with real personal preference (I do love rosé!), but sometimes they’re the result of expectation and reinforcement. Over time, those expectations can seep into how we see ourselves — and probably influence our preferences too.

Recognizing this has made me more curious about my own tastes: which ones are truly mine, and which were handed to me? Do I actually like this coffee, or do I like it because it won awards? Do I love Japanese denim, or do I only like it because it’s supposed to be The Best? (The answer to both is yes, I genuinely like those things.)

I’ve also realized that while I’m easily influenced to try something, I’m not easily influenced to like it. For example: Dubai chocolate is fine, but I don’t love it. Quarter-zips offer the stabby discomfort of a zipper without any of the convenience of one. But I’ve loved matcha since before it was trendy — how hipster of me.

Taste isn’t static, and that’s part of what makes it interesting. What I love today might feel different a year from now. Figuring out what I like isn’t about arriving at a definitive list — it’s about paying attention and experimenting without judgment. It’s noticing patterns, revisiting old favorites, revisiting old not-favorites, and being open to surprises. 

A fun fact about me is I regularly try foods I used to dislike, since taste buds (and taste in general) change. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised! A non-exhaustive list of things I used to hate but now love: peanut butter, pickles, dark chocolate, Manchego cheese, peaty scotch, olives (but ONLY Castelvetrano olives, for now). 

In the end, learning to like is really learning to know myself. Taste isn’t just about pleasure. It’s a tool for reflection and a way to express identity. So I’ll keep tasting, trying, noticing, and naming — whether that’s wine, clothes, food, music, hobbies, or anything in between. Because figuring out what I like is more than discovering preferences; it’s discovering me.

He taught me how to tip well and talk back, among other things.

Today would have been my dad’s 76th birthday.

Every year, our only tradition is a steak dinner — nothing fancy, just something he loved. Sometimes we go out, sometimes we stay in, but the point is the same: we remember him. Tonight I’m making ribeye and baked potatoes, and we’re opening a good bottle of red.

I think of Dad often — how can I not? And it’s usually when I realize I do something the same way he used to, or the way he taught me. There are things he taught me on purpose, but there are others I learned from observation.

Here are some of those things.

—

How to Tip Well

When I was a teenager, Dad and I went on a father-daughter date, just the two of us, to get dessert at Komegashi Too, a little Japanese restaurant at the Jersey City waterfront. 

We both really wanted tempura green tea ice cream that evening. So we walked in, sat at the bar, had our ice cream and a good time. When the check came, Dad tipped 100%. It wasn’t much since all we had was two desserts, but it was 100% of the check. I was confused, because wasn’t 20% “the rule”?

He said the staff works hard, it still took some time and effort for them to bring out our ice cream, and we took up two seats at the bar. Besides, the extra money meant more to them than it did to him — they were working, and we were having a good time.

That was the day I realized the entry fee for a night out. And he never made a show of his generosity, either.

How to Have My Own Income (and therefore, my own independence)

My first summer break since going off to college, I decided I needed a summer job. My mom asked me if I was sure, I worked hard all year and could use a break.

Yeah, but I also wanted my own money.

The way I remember it, Dad convinced her to let me do what I wanted — I was his stubborn daughter, after all. If I worked to make my own money, no one could tell me how to spend it. And it would teach me what it takes to make money. 

What it took was six hours a day on my feet, making coffee for cranky undercaffeinated customers and getting through a lunch rush on the register, all for $8 an hour. I don’t even remember what I spent my first paycheck on, but I remember him being proud of how pleased I was with myself. I earned that check, all $300 of it, or whatever meager amount it was.

He taught me to make my own money and not have to rely on anyone to make it for me.

How to Appreciate Nice Things

Dad was a blue-collar man, but he still liked nice things. Nice things that happened to be expensive.

I was a bit more practical — maybe too practical. I saved my money for a rainy day, a rainy week, maybe a rainy decade. I treated every purchase like a high-stakes decision instead of something meant to bring joy.

Dad convinced me to enjoy my hard-earned money. He didn’t tell me to blow it all on frivolous things, but he wanted me to understand that life is short and pleasure counts. That sometimes the thing you really want is worth it, even if it’s not the cheapest option on the shelf. An iPod Nano, in blue, for example. He reminded me that music mattered to me, that I’d love it every day, and that working hard is partly so you can have the things that make life feel good.

Well, he’d be proud that I have some really nice things now, and I didn’t wait for a monsoon to spend that cash.

How to Love Music

Life’s better with a soundtrack, and I know I got my love of music from my dad. I don’t think there was ever a silent car ride — at least I don’t remember one. There was always music playing, and more often than not, some singing along too.

When his schedule allowed, he drove my friends and me to school in the mornings. After Dad passed, one of those friends reached out and told me she’ll always remember him belting Enrique Iglesias in the car. How specific, and how accurate.

From him I learned that music isn’t background noise; it’s memory-making. It sets the tone for a day, it sticks to you. I’ve tried to carry that with me — starting my mornings with a song that makes me feel awake, or alive, or just a little less rushed. And I still sing along to everything in the car.

How to Drive… Er, How to Know Your Limits

He tried.

He started with the basics — mirrors, signals, both hands on the wheel. We drove around an empty parking lot for me to learn how to control my speed and turns. There was a lot of braking. A lot of deep, fatherly sighs.

At some point, I think he realized (1) I was going to pass my driving test and be a competent driver someday, and (2) he didn’t want to get frustrated with me, so he wasn’t the person who was going to get me there. So he did the smartest thing possible: he paid for driving lessons. 

That might’ve been the real lesson: knowing when to teach, when to step back, and when to outsource to a professional for the sake of the relationship.

How to Care Quietly

He wasn’t someone who announced what he was doing for you. He just… did it. Filled up my tank without mentioning it. Moved my car before the street sweeper came. Bought extra cases of water at BJ’s because he knew I’d take one back to school. Picked all the mushrooms off his plate and put them onto mine because he knew I loved them.

None of it was loud. It was just his way. What I understand now is that quiet care is still care, just delivered differently. It’s love in shorthand. It’s attention disguised as ordinary tasks.

How to Be a Smartass and The Art of Talking Back

My dad had a gift for talking back — the quick comeback, the one-liner that cut straight through the nonsense. He didn’t tolerate bullshit, and he didn’t sugarcoat things. He could cut through a conversation with one sharp sentence and then move on like nothing happened.

When I went to Singapore during one of my school breaks to visit my aunt and grandma (his sister and mom), Grandma kept giving me shit for wandering around on my own. I basically told her that I was there on vacation, I came home for dinner, and therefore I was going to do what I wanted — so who cares? She complained to my dad, and he just said, “What do you expect? She’s my daughter. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

The irony, of course, is that he absolutely hated when I did it to him. Anytime we argued, I’d storm off to my room and toss out a final “It’s not fair” or some other dramatic last word. And without fail, he’d call after me, “You always have to have the last word, don’t you?” (Fun fact: this is why my parents wanted me to be a lawyer.)

Whether it’s in my blood or something I picked up from watching him, I know how to stand my ground. I know how to speak up for myself with a little bit of edge. It was never about disrespect — it was about knowing my voice and using it.

—

These are the lessons he left me with, the ones that keep revealing themselves over time. I didn’t realize I was paying attention back then, but it turns out I was taking notes the whole time.

Happy birthday, Daddy.

A reminder that good things often start with what’s left.

I stood there, fridge door wide open, and stared at a Costco-sized tub of kimchi.

I had bought it because it was a deal, and “we would eat it!” And we did eat it. But there was still so. much. left. Because, again, Costco-sized tub.

Kimchi never really goes bad, so it probably would have been fine living in the fridge for a bit (or a lot) longer. But I didn’t want it taking up precious space anymore, so I did what many Asian grandmas would do: I made it into soup.

And that’s when it hit me. For millennia, people — and let’s be honest, mostly women — have been doing this exact thing: taking what’s on hand, refusing to waste it, and turning it into something comforting. Not out of trendiness or moral virtue, but because they had to.

Before “zero waste” and “farm-to-table” were hashtags, this was just life. The art of stretching. The daily creativity of feeding people with whatever was in your kitchen.

What I made that day was kimchi jjigae. It’s what happens when kimchi gets really fermented and a bit too funky to eat raw — some people like it that way, but I find it too sour. You toss it in a pot with onions, tofu, and pork, and let it simmer into something new. The Costco kimchi I was tired of looking at became lunch and dinner for two days. And I was so pleased with myself — being able to make a delicious meal that lasted us for days out of whatever we had on hand.

My train of thought continued down the track of other “reimagined leftovers” foods. Of course, I thought of fried rice first — the ultimate leftovers food. The sad leftover carrot from the bunch you bought for something else? The random quarter of an onion in the fridge? The scraps of leftover chicken that aren’t enough for a full meal? The bag of frozen peas you forgot about at the back of the freezer? Add some leftover rice (better than fresh because it’s drier and thus better for frying), a bit of soy sauce, and an egg, and you’ve got dinner. Fried rice is resourcefulness turned into comfort food.

Every culture has its own version of this kind of ingenuity. In Japan, extra rice can be shaped into onigiri. In Spain, leftover chicken or fish becomes croquetas.  In Italy, yesterday’s bread is soaked and turns into panzanella. In Mexico, stale tortillas transform into chilaquiles. In Cuba, leftover beef is shredded into ropa vieja (literally “old clothes”!). In Hawaii, Spam became a staple after World War II, when imported meat was scarce; now Spam musubi is a cultural icon and proof that what begins as survival can evolve into identity. Across continents and cuisines, people have been practicing the same instinct for centuries: don’t waste, just reimagine.

It’s proof that good food doesn’t have to start from scratch. It starts from what’s left. And in many cases, those dishes become culturally iconic.

All of this feels especially relevant again. The vibe right now feels a bit like the early days of COVID lockdown — everyone staying home, cooking with what they had, googling “how long does x last in the fridge.” Between layoffs, inflation, and grocery prices that make you want to puke, everyone’s trying to make things last a little longer. The old ways — the scrappy, make-it-work ways — suddenly look a lot like wisdom.

While it can sometimes be stressful and overwhelming, there’s something satisfying about being able to look at what’s in the fridge and make something delicious out of it. It’s like a personal episode of “Chopped” but without the curveball of having to use an ostrich egg.

That’s where creativity happens: not in abundance, but in constraint. There’s an art to turning a few mushrooms, some small carrots, and half a lemon into something edible, even delicious. (These are things in my fridge right now. I will be making soup.)

I’ve thought about how we as a modern society have rebranded all of this. Meal prepping and batch cooking are just different names for “cook once, eat twice.” Sustainability and zero-waste are things your grandmother called “using what’s in the pot.” They weren’t doing this with the intention of saving the planet. They were doing it to save their money while feeding hungry mouths.

Our mothers and grandmothers might not have called it resilience, or creativity, or sustainability. They just called it dinner.

There’s comfort in that — in knowing that when things feel uncertain, when money’s tight or plans fall apart, we can still make something nourishing out of what remains.

There’s some deeper thought here that extends beyond food, but I’m too hungry to dive into that.