25 Random Things About Me

Reposted from my Facebook page because… well, because it’s easy blog fodder :

Today, I Am

hopeful:

Peace Without Pieces

This isn’t a very close copy but I thought I’d share it anyway, with profuse apologies to Sharon Olds:

Peace Without Pieces

How do they do it, the  adoptees who make peace
with their missing piece?  Solid as ocean liners,
and yet sliding forward through life like
scullers skimming the water, guided by something unseen,
hands steady on the wheel, pausing only
to wipe off the spray that makes them as wet as
they were at birth when their mothers gave them away.
How do they come to this place of mastery and sureness,
and not be tossed by the tempest,
the churn of the ocean both constant and
chaotic? These are the ones I wonder about,
the role models, the success stories, the ones who
accept this life instead of that one, embrace the solid
instead of the shadow.  Do they mistake assurances for truth,
or have they simply achieved what I cannot: they know
happiness for themselves rather than for others,
their security neither false nor a blanket–just their truth,
rather than the truth, which is of course
that missing piece, drifting alone in the universe
unknown and unknowable and unnecessary.

Click here for the original poem.

Apparently This Is Funny

I was randomly searching for something else on the interwebz just now, and ran across this blog post at a site called families.com.  Adoptive parent Pam Connell tells this “funny” story:

Friday Funny: the Befuddled Santa

My five-year-old and I were at a smaller shopping mall in our neighborhood. Santa wasn’t busy at the time. He saw my daughter looking at him and came closer to the picket fence of the space defined for photo-taking. “Nee How! Nee How!” he said leaning toward Regina. He waved vigorously. “Nee how!”

I was wondering what was in Santa’s eggnog that day when I remembered that Ni Hao is “hello” in Chinese. Santa obviously thought Regina was Chinese.

“Oh, she’s Korean,” I offered. “It’s ‘AhnYong’”.

“Korean?” said the Santa, wide-eyed. “I don’t know that one…but I know Japanese, it’s konichiwa; I know Spanish, it’s hola; I know Russian…I know Dutch…”

Um, what exactly is “funny” about this?  And to whom?  Five-year-old Regina didn’t seem to care one way or the other about the assumption that she was Chinese, but I can guarantee you she’ll be sick to death of it by the time she’s fifteen.  What remains to be seen is whether she’ll be more sick of the people saying that to her, or the people who try to explain it away using some variant of the phrase “good intentions”.

Pam does write that “Asia has many countries which all have different cultures and traditions,” and  “I ask you to remember not to assume nationality, language or culture based on appearance.”  Part of her point was to dispel the all-look-same mentality that so many non-Asians have, and obviously I agree with her on that.

However, I also got a strong whiff of but-it’s-okay-as-long-as-you-meant-well — in this case, white people excusing the bad behavior of other white people.  It’s okay because Santa’s assumptions are “grounded in reality”.  It’s okay because “it’s understandable and not terribly bothersome to me [the author].”  It’s okay because “he [Santa] was really trying” and “knows the value of reaching out to others in their own language”.  (Regina’s “own” language being English, of course, thanks to the miracle of international adoption.)

People have tried to explain away stereotypes, prejudice, racism, and of course just plain ignorance with good intentions for years — and I guess they still are.  But perhaps the real kicker was from a commenter who seemed to suggest that her internationally adopted children somehow benefited from this kind of treatment because “They too learn tolerance by suffering from intolerance.”

Now if the commenter hadn’t been completely serious when she wrote that, I just might have found that to be funny.

Did You Miss Me?

While I was in Korea last year, I met an L, an adoptee from Germany who was going to appear on a television show in an effort to find her Korean family.  The show is called 그 사람 보고 싶다 ( “I Miss That Person”), and tries to reunite people who have been separated from their families and loved ones for all kinds of reasons — not just by adoption.

I’ve only seen a few of the regular episodes, but it seems like there are maybe 4-5 people on per show, and they are given a chance to tell their story and who they are looking for and why.  The person talks, and they show photographs from the person’s past, and flash the call-in number at the bottom of the screen in case any of the viewers has any information.  If people can’t appear in the studio in person, they have a video/webcam option so that people in other countries can be on it too.  For adoptees, appearances on the show are facilitated by GOA’L, who also provides translators.

L, like me, was a White Lily baby.  Like me, she had absolutely no information, no birth date, no records, no note.

Nothing.

I watched the show itself with a small group of other adoptees, and L was amazing — calm, graceful, and thoughtful.  She balanced the necessary-yet-contradictory passion and detachment in a way that I have not yet mastered.  She was positive and happy and beautiful, all of which are important because who wants to claim a negative, unhappy freak show?

It’s hard to describe the thoughts that ran through my head as I watched her on the screen. I was proud and glad that she was doing this necessary step to search for and reclaim what is hers.  I was annoyed that so many Korean adoptees are ripe for exploitation as we grovel for the same crumbs of information that most people heard as part of their bedtime story.  I was immensely grateful (yes, grateful) for the work of GOA’L and other pro-adoptee organizations.  I was frustrated that agencies (and the Korean government) aren’t doing more in terms of real post-adoption services and support for adoptees returning to Korea.  I was comforted by the fact that I am not alone in how little I know about my past. And I was overcome with an aching sadness that I am not alone in how little I know about my past.

I’m not sure that L ever found anyone as a result of her appearance on “I Miss That Person”.  As I sat there watching, I conjured up all kinds of backstories  just as I do for myself every single day.  I imagined that L’s Korean mother is a shopkeeper and that this show is playing in the background of her store on a quiet Tuesday morning.  She perches on a little stool by the cash register and waits to see if today is the day that a younger version of herself will appear on the screen.  Then the little fish bell rings above the door, and she is is distracted by a customer just as L steps up to the podium.

Another twist by the fickle winds of chance; another miss.

Another person who misses another person.

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Because so many adoptees are searching, there is usually some kind of limit to how many adoptees KBS will feature in a single episode, I think maybe 1 or 2 per show. I’ve also heard that they are a little reluctant to showcase stories like L’s (and mine) where there is so little information available, probably because the chances for successful ratings reunions are considerably lower.  If this is true it would be rather ironic, because of course utilizing the media is our best (only?) shot at finding them.

Anyway, there seems to have been a special all-adoptee episode of “I Miss That Person” for the group of adoptees who were in Korea for the first time as part of the GOA’L/OKF-sponsored First Trip Home. I’ve only watched a little bit, because a similar parade of thoughts as when I was watching L keeps marching through my mind. So many of us.  So many stories, so many non-stories, so many people missing so many people.

And yet so many more people don’t understand that missing a person is like missing a part of yourself.

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For those who are interested, this is the first part of the First Trip Home special episode; other parts are here:

Random Computer Stuff

I think I’ve forgotten how to blog.  Please excuse my attempts to remember.

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Is anyone else having problems with Google Reader, or is it just me? Specifically, when I click on the link I get the top part with the message “Loading….” but then nothing below it, and it frequently doesn’t load. If I hit refresh a few times the info usually appears, but it takes a few tries.

A question for People Who Know About This Kind of Thing: would it have anything to do with the number of feeds I have? I went through a few months ago and deleted all the ones that were making me *headdesk* too often, but I still have around 230. (That may sound like a lot, but many of them are inactive.)  If that might be causing the problem I’ll go back and make a deeper cut, but if it won’t make a difference then I don’t want to bother.  I’m running Firefox 3 on Windows XP, but I had this problem back when I was using Firefox 2 as well.

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A question for People Who Web Clip:  what tool do you use, and would you recommend it?

For the last year or so I’ve been using Google Notebook, and I hate it.  (Note to developers: “drag & drop” does not necessarily equal “faster and convenient”.) I think Notebook is the first Google product I’ve used that I’ve been disappointed in, or maybe I just never got the hang of it.  Some people love it, but I’ve found it to be incredibly clunky and difficult to organize.  But oddly, until now I’d never been terribly motivated to go out and find a replacement.

Recently I’ve been considering, trying, adopting (ha!), and then rejecting (double ha!) several clipping tools, including OneNote, Evernote, Iterasi, and Zotero.  I think I’m going to end up using Zotero, in part because I just made the decision to import my rather sizeable EndNote database into Zotero and it would be nice to have everything in the same place.  (I think.)

Anyway, before I go ahead and shuffle my clips around yet again, I thought I’d see if anyone out there had any thoughts, suggestions, or recommendations.  I’m sure that most people aren’t very interested in the details of what I’ve tried so far, but if you are, let me know and I can write a separate post about it because I’ve spent way more time on this than I should. As long-time readers will recognize, acquiring and organizing things often interests me more than the things themselves.

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This is more a note to myself than anything else, but if you use WordPress and ever have the HTML tags show up when you’re writing a post, try checking the “Disable Visual Editor” box on Your Profile, clicking Update, and then unchecking it again.  If this doesn’t work, you may need to clear your cache and re-start the browser.

I suppose if I wrote more often then I’d probably be able to remember this

ETA 2/22/09:

This has STILL been a problem for me recently (it comes and goes seemingly at random), and I even posted on the WordPress Support Forums for help.  That wasn’t particularly helpful, and then I was getting so frustrated that I finally decided to reinstall Firefox and all my add-ons.

And that worked!  So if anyone else is having a similar problem and is at her wit’s end, give it a try — kind of harsh/extreme, but it worked for me!  (At least so far…. *crosses fingers*)

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