The Actual Thanksgiving Post + Menu for Today

On this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my health, and that of my family. Married life is hard. Kids are hard. Parents getting older is hard. Life is hard. But there is so much that is going well, to be thankful for, and commonly skipped over as not even an afterthought. It's a good time to reflect on that, if even once a year.

I just got word not 24 hours ago that my uncle passed away a couple days ago. What a year. In May, I took my family to meet my aunt. She was in poor health already. Within weeks of our return to the US, I got word that she had passed. Combine that with my dad's emergency open heart surgery last Black Friday, and that means that within the past year, my father and his entire set of siblings had life-threatening conditions, and my dad was the only one who survived. For that alone, I am thankful beyond words.

I also recently got to spend a week back in the Bay Area, where I caught up with old friends pretty much every single day I was there. It was a great visit; refreshing for the soul. Some friends you lose, and some friends you lose touch with, and it's really hard to say which is worse. But I think as time goes on, you get to cherish every conversation that much more. For that, I am thankful.

Not cooking a full turkey this year, as nobody will eat the whole thing. So this year, I opted for some a smaller serving that will hopefully be tastier. Almost everything else will be "traditional". After all, I have to convince my kids later on that they had a somewhat "normal" childhood, and convince ICE that I'm American enough to not deport.

• Garlic butter roasted turkey thighs
• Chinese-style green beans
• Mashed potoatoes + gravy
• Roast brussels sprouts
• Mushroom soup
• Stuffing w/ jujube (because I didn't want to buy a giant bag of cranberries!)
• Roast Japanese sweet potato
• Blackberry pie

and as I'm typing this I realized I forgot to get cornbread. I have bread, but sourdough.

last minute grocery run? Wish me luck.

Not a Thanksgiving Post: Thoughts After Visiting Japan for the First Time in 6 Years

It's just before 7am on Thanksgiving Day. I've got a big [cooking] day ahead of me. Woke up early, scrolled through Instagram, and this popped up:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jewel Poudyal (@jewel_0620)

 And now here I am, tapping away.

Where Have All the Sane People Gone?

One of the things about emerging from the bubble of childhood is that with the loss of the local superstructure of authority, so much more responsibility is now placed on each individual. As adults, we have so much agency to thrive, as well as (frankly) to go the opposite way. For me as a new adult circa half a lifetime ago, that newfound sense of independence was thrilling. Perhaps encouraged by the fact that I was an only child and who grew up largely without the presence of my parents at most hours of the day, I relished being able to finally and officially plan and act by myself. Getting a driver's license, a credit card, a job, a life. It was great. It was naïve of me, however, to assume that the great "unshackling" granted by adulthood was universally positive. (Trigger warning on following content)

Don't Call Me Chinese American, Pt 2: Asking and Defining Identity

Continued from Pt 1

Remember back in high school, when there were different "groups"? You may have called them cliques or crowds. Some were preps, some were jocks (many were both). To my memory, hipsters were not a thing then, but goths were. I think emo, too? And at a magnet school I always felt that nerds got a lot more respect than Hollywood ever depicted. There were studious Asians and lots of gangbanging Asians, too. That was K-12 life. In adult life, we still have crowds, and I see a ton of confusion on an almost daily basis that surrounds the usage of which group someone belongs to. But set aside the groups themselves, even the nomenclature gives us trouble.

Don't Call Me Chinese American, Pt 1

I can't remember when exactly but it must be over 20 years ago, I was watching a news program on ABC (it would have been Diane Sawyer's Primetime or Barbara Walters' 20/20) whose topic of the week was ostensibly on race relations. An interviewee spoke about her decision not to use the term "African American" to refer to herself. It's been a long time (back when John Stossel was still a credible mainstream journalist) so I'll do my best to paraphrase, but it was to the extent of "I don't have any real connection to Africa. I've never been there. No one I know has ever been there. Just call me Black." It stuck with me in ways that have only multiplied since I first heard it. In the years since, I've decided to take a similar position with respect to the term Asian American, and by extension, Chinese American.

On the In-N-Out Heiress Being the Bigger Person

Knowing that I'm a sucker for any news about In-N-Out Burger, mostly coverage on when locations around Portland are finally going to open, Google News offered me an article that hit me from a different direction: [Fortune] Heiress Lynsi Snyder became President of In-N-Out aged 27. She’s been betrayed by colleagues but refuses to have ’emotional distance’ with her team

The clickbait portion of the article obviously emanates from the word betrayed. That's what caught my eye. After all, scandal remains the most effective dog whistle for readers of "journalism". And the why? Like many others, I've been betrayed at the workplace — it's still pretty fresh for me.

Traumatic Events, Part 3: Bonus Round

Among the memories that haunt me, Part 1 and Part 2 did a good job of capturing most of the linguistically-based incidents. Other similar incidents abound, however. While these were not (strictly speaking) due to the fact that I was a non-native English speaker, the cultural disconnect certainly didn't help.

So as a bonus, here are some more tiny random nuggets of embarrassment from childhood, curated and ranked:

Ugh, SMH