irish beers and fam time.

Just because we're not in Asia anymore doesn't mean we can't still play. Dad's got his girls back!

"no pain, please."

Peter taught us this phrase in Thai on Saturday morning and I scoffed at it, like the naive child I was at that point.

We thought we were being sooo clever with our plans for the day. What a wonderful way to unwind together, we thought! Who could resist meditation in the park followed by an hour and a half of hot yoga and two hour Thai massages? Why wouldn't people ALWAYS spend their Saturdays like this?

24 hours later, it dawned on me, when I mysteriously woke up as a hobbling 90 year old woman with the flexibility of petrified wood. I spent the entire next day loudly ruing the moment I ever thought I could handle intense yoga followed by a small Thai woman putting her whole body weight on my poor, unsuspecting individual muscles.

Luckily Peter is really nice and in an effort to shut me up, took us to the State Building overlooking Bangkok and bought us dry martinis. This building is PHENOMENALLY BEAUTIFUL and to prove it, will kick you out if you aren't up to dress code (case in point: a man was turned away on the first floor for wearing Crocs. Now I am of the mindset that unless you are a surgeon or an elderly gardener, you shouldn't be wearing Crocs anyway, but that's neither here nor there).

Peter really made us love Bangkok, but since he took off for Manila like the fancy businessman he is, we followed suit and headed north on a sleeper train to Chiang Mai. This is us rounding out a lovely weekend by basking in the glow of the city from it's most impressive building and taking too many dorky pictures that didn't turn out anyway.

wishing.

Once you arrive at the wat, pass by the monks on cell phones and the sparkly gold buddhas and the hands clutched in prayer.

Greet the seven statues representing the seven days of the week, find the day you were born on, and dip a ladle into the river of oil that runs underneath them.

Pour the oil in three circles around your statue's flame and think very hard about your secret dreams.

Voila-- wishing complete.

tongsaeng, onni and omma go to school.

Reunited and it feeeeels so gooood! is the theme song I'd like you to hum in your head as you take a gander at these photos.

Well, after a 12 hour flight alongside every unhappy Korean baby ever born, we finally made it to Seoul and were greeted by my leetle seester (my "tongsaeng"), and no one needs to worry: she is as pretty and cool as ever.

Our first stop this morning was to find out what she's been doing at school all year. Here she is, infiltrating the young, pliable minds of her Koala class with propaganda such as "The Itsy Bitsy Spider."

I suppose now is as good a time as any to start telling you funny kid stories, since I know that's why you're here in the first place. Allow me to introduce you to our new friends, June and Edward, who are the first two candidates to come home in my backpack. Amy informed us today that last week, she overheard a conversation in Korean between these two BFFs that, loosely translated, went something like this:
June: "Did you just fart?"
Edward: "Nope."
June: (crawls over to put his face next to Edward's backside) "Because it smells kind of bad here. I think you farted."
I don't even need to tell you how hard that made me laugh at lunch today, and even though these two didn't understand what the joke was, they giggled along with us with their sweet little faces all lit up. Oh MAN, I think I'm in love again!

So here's a universal fact: kids love cameras. They think you are really cool if you have one and they want to hang out with you. This brings us to the photography portion of the school day, when my Canon got hijacked by rowdy Korean 6 year olds. Here's a photo montage:


practicing their SLR skills in front of the mirror with Miss Amy's older sister ("onni").









lunch, as interpreted by Joon.










Mom ("omma"), as interpreted by Alex.








Checking out some shots of Bolivian kids their age with no idea what they were looking at. Perhaps you have noticed that I look like a bag lady in this photo-- that's because I'd just escaped from the Meysun Beauty Salon, which consisted of two aesthetics-minded boys who ran up to me and said "PLAY?!" only to promptly lead me to the plastic set of salon tools.
Here they are "curling," "drying," and "brushing" my hair and also putting on a full face of makeup with the plastic lipstick. Here's a quandary: how does a 6 year old Korean boy know how to do eyeshadow and eyebrow shaping? Not to mention paint his own nails for real? That's something to think about.







To conclude, an avant garde idea: does this pensive child look like he was born a chopsticks expert? It would appear so.














But closer review proves otherwise. Apparently you can purchase beginner chopsticks, like training wheels for Asian kids, that have little finger holes and spring-lock action. Does it get any cooler than that?!

three glorious days in washington.

No work. All play. Three days of my favorite kind of travel-- at home, with people I love.

Poulsbo and Port Gamble with dad. Coffee, books, and laughing like we used to when things were a little different... a little time capsule of being happy and simple together.

Oh, yes please.

Seattle dinner with three of my favorite girls. Lots of wine, lots of food, lots of love.

Mukilteo with my best friend at his new condo. Big windows with nothing but water and mountains and the ferry behind them. Ice cream like in elementary school. Diamond Knot brewery growlers. Magenta sunsets. Picking out midnight constellations from the hot tub and late night poached eggs before bed.

Puyallup with the boy. Sunny day reading in the park, Mexican cervezas at dinner, and tricking him again into antiquing with me.

I am so, so home and it feels so, so good.

an open declaration of war against korean kidnappings.

Attn: South Korea and its private education system.

You have held my sister hostage for long enough. I miss her SO MUCH. Your youth are the world's bright future, and furthermore are excellent at math and sometimes even English, which is why I'm not worried about her leaving your classrooms to return ASAP to her rightful fold in the PNW. You understand.

Sincerely.

life's a beach.

A brief synopsis of what happened in Huanchaco:

1. Met an artist named Joan Louis on the beach, whose paintings have been exhibited on three continents, who got drunk on pina coladas and hit on my mom, and who became our new favorite Peruvian almost-famous person with the sweetest heart ever.

2. Saw the ruins of Chan Chan and Huaca Sol. We figured that seeing ancient Mochica and Chimu civilizations would make up for the fact that we wouldn't see Incan ruins in Machu Picchu. We were wrong. Not that the second largest adobe metropolis in the world and a couple of Unesco World Heritage sites are anything to scoff at, but HELLO, building in sand isn't as cool as building on the side of the Andes. Fact.

3. Favorite picture of the last four months: slightly drunk taxi driver. Absolute unawareness that he was in the way. Mom with Flat Stanley outside Arco Iris. Pure gold.

4. No peeing.

mamacitas

I cried on accident when we waved goodbye to my mom last night. Even though we couldn't go to Machu Picchu, we had a sweet week on the beach in Huanchaco, Trujillo: massages, surfing, ceviche, ancient Moche ruins, fresh fruit, and matching mani/pedis before she got on her plane.The north coast of Peru is a mellow paradise, we were lucky to spend her President's break thinking more about Keiko Fujimori than Abe Lincoln (may he rest in peace). I love any time I can spend with my sweet mom, especially on different continents. I miss her already!

foiled by mother nature!

Here's a cool site: Macchu Pichu NOT being rained on.













And here's my mama, traveling like a champ in Croatia and being super cute in general.






These two were supposed to meet next week. Mom has a ticket to Lima for Friday night and we were all set to do some hiking, see the continent's most famous ancient ruins, and add another country to our mother/daughter travel list. The day after we were going to buy our tickets to Cusco, the rains hit and Peru declared a state of emergency in our next travel stop.


Apparently, rainy season isn't something to joke around with here. Marlo and I are scrambling to come up with Plan B, which will most likely involve doing everything Mom and I do at home (yoga, going on walks, eating a lot and laughing) just... on the beach. Not that we're complaining. Macchu Pichu, we'll see you some other time...

i wish church were more like aa.

My Uncle Bruce has a scratchy beard, works construction, drives a motorcycle and runs with a gang of other bikers, laughs with a loud, broken cackle and was an alcoholic for a long, long time. His story isn't unique; don't most families have someone who has overdone it with any number of things? I have another uncle who smokes weed in his yellow schoolbus in Yakima, plays the dijeridoo in a band called Blue Tropics, and has a son with a full-scalp tattoo and a pretty wife with depression problems. But he's never caused a problem. Bruce has. Alcohol controlled his life, and the elephant in the room of my grandparents' house during my childhood created a lot of tension. My mom tried hard to protect my little sister and me from the side effects of such an unhappy heart, and most of the time succeeded in being the buffer between him and the rest of the family. Which is why I didn't know how bad things had gotten until he decided to seek treatment.

Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for having 12 steps to freedom from addiction, and I was an observer from the bleachers as Bruce regained control over his life, one step at a time.

On one trek back over the mountains from Eastern Washington, I couldn't help but remark that Bruce and his longtime girlfriend Jeanette, who had also just finished AA, had taught me more about grace and true community that weekend than going to church had the entire year. The two of them had a tight-knit group of fellow bikers who were also in recovery, and I was amazed at how much they resembled what I'd always hoped the church would look like: they kept each other truthful and accountable. They stuck together. They were honest and kind and firm. They were a community in the fullest sense of the word, and admitted freely that they would not have survived without both AA and the mutual support of the group. They acknowledged their imperfections and continual need for grace, and didn't consider AA a one-shot fixit that cured them of everything that led them to alcoholism in the first place.

Church, on the other hand, seemed to be a place where most people had it all together and didn't let any cracks show. People knew the right answers, which was generally enough to get by (my friend Ryan and I laugh about how no matter what question you ask kids in Sunday School, they pop their hands up and yell, "JESUS!" It's funny until you realize that adults do the same thing, with fancier phrasing). And growing up I always had my "church" friends and my "real" friends-- the people who knew all about what I was really thinking and doing, around whom I could exhale and not edit myself before speaking. It's hard to ask questions in an exclusive club, and that sense of in vs. out made church feel constrictive.

I realized that what I really wanted out of church was what Bruce and Jeanette had found in AA: a group of people who have profoundly messed up and admit it to themselves and their Creator, who live in constant awareness of grace and how much it's worth, and hold each other's hands as they take those humble, stumbling steps towards the light.

Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, considers the mentality of AA groups so similar to that which should characterize the heart of genuine Christ-followers that he lists the twelve steps in his footnotes as a basis for developing true disciples. Here are the steps that my Uncle Bruce took to get sober:

1. We admit we are powerless over alcohol-- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.
4. We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We make a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. We make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

What if this list of steps, when applied to a broader context of our entire lives and not just addictions, became a practical guide for shedding our pride and appearing humbly before God and each other? I get goosebumps just thinking about what this life would be like. I get shy when I think about how far from the standard I land. And I get hopeful when I remember that the process, like recovery from alcoholism, is messy and broken, but it's meant to be a journey. Christ asks us to be real, be humble, and be repentant. If that's so, then I want to go to church at AA. I think they really get it.

why you should buy coffee from my friend lauren

Sometimes you meet people who you just know are going to change the world. One of the biggest personalities I have ever met belongs to Lauren Sancken, a funny, fiercely intelligent Seattlite my mom and I met on a bus in Bosnia a few years ago (here we are getting our whirling dervish on). By the time we made it to Mostar, we'd realized that we were actually all family members who had just forgotten about each other, and I've had the privilege of being honorary sisters with this amazing girl who is blasting through law school before taking over politics as we know it. Below is a letter from Lauren explaining her latest project. I'm SO proud of this girl, and I hope you can support her as well! She can be reached for coffee orders at sancken@gmail.com.

"This January, myself and two friends, Anthony John and Dr. Christopher Dodd, established a U.S.-based non-profit organization, "Primary Health Care Nicaragua," to support the ongoing efforts of Atención Primaria en Salud Nicaragua (APS). In addition to helping to train and support more than 160 community-based health workers, APS facilities broad public health and micro-economic projects that permanently alleviate many causes of avoidable suffering. For fundraising, we have launched MARAVILLA coffee. Maravilla is an organic Nicaraguan coffee, the product of a collaboration between Nicaraguan coffee growers, Seattle-based Caffè Appassionato, and Primary Health Care Nicaragua. A 12-oz bag may be purchased for $10, and $7 goes directly to APS.

Maravilla can be purchased at Caffè Appassionato (Fisherman's Terminal and Colman Dock), or directly from me! I'm happy to send coffee to distant places, though a postage fee would apply. More information about APS can be found below, and please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions. In addition, all donations of any kind are appreciated.

Thank you very much for your support.
Sincerely, Lauren"

APS is a Nicaraguan non-governmental organization that has been working with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health to fight disease and promote development in some of the most isolated communities throughout the country. APS funding has been drastically cut in these tough economic times, and our goal is to raise $25,000 by June 2010, and to help APS become a financially solvent organization by January 2011. If you would like to learn more about the work of APS Nicaragua, please visit our website at www.apsnicaragua.org

a belated feliz navidad

Christmas in Sucre was full of picana (the national holiday dish that contains whole ears of corn and up to three kinds of meat), a huge pot of mulled wine that we used to drown out how much we missed our friends and family, and watching Carla open her Christmas presents and try to be feminine with her new doll. We're lucky to have Jorge and Lumen, our surrogate parents here, but it just wasn't the same having Christmas entirely in Spanish and not having my momma there to hug.

But as our Christmas present, you wonderful people gave us over $1500 for the kids at Ciruelitos, and we couldn't be happier. THANK YOU so much for the help; they are already planning to get the roof and windows fixed (these summer storms are not gentle, and building repairs are much needed) in addition to feeding the kids for the next month.

AND PLEASE CHECK THIS KID OUT! The day after we started raising money, he showed up with this Seahawks hat on! He had no idea what it was, but we took it as a sign that we were meant to be at Ciruelitos. On a side note, if anyone is interested in a solar panel project, the girls are working on getting the government papers filed to start a greenhouse with a solar panel to start growing their own vegetables onsite. We can't stay to help, but if anyone has an interest in sustainable development projects on a micro scale, this place is a dream. Your help was just so humbling and generous, and the only glitch we have found is the fact that Bolivian banks are extremely difficult to work with. Other than that, Ciruelitos sends love and they are grateful for everything you've done!

Go Hawks.

relativity, family-style

Alzheimers homes don't smell very good all the time. The conversation isn't always quick-witted (although sometimes it will surprise you). And they can be both wrenchingly lonely and quietly encouraging at the same time. These are all things I thought about as I sat on my grandpa's bed on Saturday, filing his nails and making him eat his sweet potatoes.

My mom's father Eugene is 92 years old and, according to her, "a 7.5 out of 8" on the dementia scale. Generally my mother goes to visit and take care of him alone, which I hate, but she goes cheerfully, which I admire. This weekend, the three of us trekked over together. Part of me thinks I was going to say goodbye to him, and a smaller part is a little hopeful that I was. He just seems to be outliving himself, and it's a difficult thing to watch.

In April, before my sister left to begin her life as a Faux-rean (that sounded better in my head than it looks written down), we went over to spend Grandpa Gene's birthday with him. It was an event that was exceptional only in its unexceptionalism. We sat at a dining room table. We chatted about our day. We laughed and wished birthday wishes for his upcoming year. It was as if we had been catapulted back in time, years ago, when his wife and my grandma was still alive and we sat conversing idly at a table about nothing and everything at once. You know, like families do.

Our food arrived: chicken breasts for us and unrecognizably-chopped-up chicken breast for him. "You've gotta be kidding me," he muttered to himself as he poked at the plate listlessly.

I have to say the following things about my grandpa: he can be one of the most crotchety, cranky people I have ever met, and he is universally popular no matter where he goes. Grace, the sweet Mexican girl who works at the home, came in repeatedly to make sure my grandpa had whatever he wanted. Rather than eating dinner, he drank three hot chocolates in a row, with whipped cream, brought to him by the doting waitress who wanted to make sure everything was perfect for him.

"He's a very special man," Grace grinned affectionately. "I want to be sure to show him extra care. I don't have parents, and I don't know what it's like, to have to take care of someone older."

My dad, as he does at any mention of a life story, tuned in. "Oh no. What happened?"

"They died when I was eight, in a car accident in Mexico." She placed more bread in front of Gene.

"I have five kids of my own now," she smiled bittersweetly, "and I wish they could have known my parents." She left to get more hot chocolate as the three of us sat, a little stunned, feeling the need to observe some silence for her decades-old loss.

Yes, it is difficult to watch someone you love grow old and lose track of the person you once knew. But Grace reminded us that even those things, when viewed correctly, are blessings: my mom still has a dad. We have had a grandfather who, 20 years ago, shaved his mustache so he could kiss us goodnight, and who taught us how to dance and drink McDonalds coffee and play Pavarotti on his record player and take long walks in his apple orchards and cook an egg in the microwave and love your spouse immensely. I'm grateful for everything his years have contained, and especially grateful for the fact that he has gotten so many of them.

Sunday morning hope at the church of IHOP

I was given a reminder this morning of how mankind continues on hopefully, despite circumstances that scream at us to give up. IHOP on Mothers Day in Corpus Christi, Texas was a madhouse of balloon-sword wielding children, overlipsticked mothers, and waiters who literally sprinted from table to table, hurriedly rushing out "Happy Mother's Day" to no one in particular before taking orders.

The slowest moving of the waiters was a heavyset black girl with three colors of hair, who ambled from table to table, rushed by no one, refusing to notice the chaotic scene surrounding her. As I gazed at her nonchalant demeanor, which was set off even more by our tattooed Latino waiter with a bandaid on his friendly face (the classiest of Mothers Days, this was not) who spoke quickly and moved even faster, I noticed her eyes.

They were lidded with the thickest, longest false eyelashes I had seen outside of the Greek system on Halloween.

I whispered to Uncle Dave that I thought her eyes were a perfect example of how amazing humans can be. Humans can get up for work at a stressful, low-paying job serving people who tend to barely look twice at you and still take the time and energy to put on the fancy lashes. God Bless Us, Every One.

Volver

I love Pedro Almodovar, and even though it's a year or so late, I love Volver. And I loved watching it with my mother, because Volver seems to touch on all those things that moms and daughters never talk about, and looks at what it's like to "come back"- what does it mean to begin again, to reconcile, to finish things that were once left undone, say the things that were unsaid, to try again to do them better.
In the last scene, Penelope and her mother embrace in a dark hallway and Penelope says genuinely, "I need you, Mom." And her mom answers her in that brusque tone that you can only use with people you love deeply, "Stop it. I'll start crying."
I wanted to ask my mom if there was anything left unsaid between her and my grandmother, wanted to know what she'd say if Helen Ruth were standing in front of her today. But I didn't, because I know that there are, and I know that they are none of my business. But it also reminded me that I don't want to have anything left unsaid between me and my own mother. Life's just too brief.

27 Big Ones

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!

27 years together and still laughing... either you're drunk or just not paying attention. Either way, I LOVE YOU and hope your day is phenomenal!