Let me take a moment to crack these mental and physical knuckles a moment to get warmed up.

First off, the apologies:
Dear blog, and readers who still come along here for an amuse bouche (I watch too much FoodTV) of whimsy or mischief, or spontaneous poetry, or photos of whatnot, I apologize. I could say that I’ve been overwhelmed with new motherhood and that’d be mostly true.

I’ve felt a real restriction of freedom of late that is multi-part.

1. Freedom of Time :  There hasn’t felt like much time that I have to myself to clear my head, collect and articulate my thoughts.
2. Freedom of Physical Movement:  While I might feel somewhat less productive than I’ve been in the past, I’m usually handling the baby with at least one arm which makes typing pretty tedious and slow.
3. Freedom of Energy: When I have my hands free and some time to myself I’m usually trying to manage sleep deficit which is not unlike the current national debt, from what it feels like.

Which makes the entire exercise of trying to write at 5:45 AM (at this moment) even more amusing.  Because I am tired, but for whatever reason restless.  The baby is at my left in the crib, gurgling and occasionally sharting in her sleep.   My husband is snoring while diagonally splayed across the bed.  I’m in the middle feeling absolutely disheveled – wearing my highschool PE shirt, silently scolding myself for having chewed, haggard fingernails and knowing I need to pluck my eyebrows while my legs and ankles weep and cry for proper lotion massage treatment.  I can’t be bothered right now to wake the baby to change her diaper or punch/rollover the husband to his side of the bed.

Second: The Pedantics.

And so here I am writing again.

I used to write more frequently.  Exhaustedly involved narratives on my musings of miso soup, on my adventures of the day.  I’d write as if my interaction with the produce staff regarding the invention of the nectarine in southern california by a Korean farmer was somehow extraordinarily important and required sharing.  On things that were so small and yet felt so significant.

These days, of late, I’ve lost a bit of that gusto.

Part of it might be blog fatigue.  Afterall, I’ve been blogging for 10+ years now.

Part of it might be real fatigue.  Afterall, I’m a new mother.

Part of it may be that I just feel like nothing that I could say could really be that significant.

Personal navel-gazing and extrapolated meditations on the minutia of myself seem so — well, pretty puerile and unimportant these days.  At least when compared with taking care of my daughter.

She’s become my sole focus and it stuns me that I’m her world – meals, educator, caretaker, protector, chauffeur, entertainment, stylist, custodian, and occasional mattress.

And I haven’t quite sunk into my skin and felt confident about being a mommyblogger as yet.

I suppose that confessing that here falls into the navelgazing/minutia category again.

There’s blogposts that I’ve been meaning to write:

• On breastfeeding
• On working on Amelia’s Baek-Il (100 day festivities)
• On post-modern feminism and being a stay-at-home mom.
• On NomNomMom.com a blog project that I want to start up about parenting and food. (And yes, the URL NomNomMom.com was reserved and purchased for this specific purpose a while back and has yet to be started)
• On how twitter is driving the death of blogposts => making the statement TLDNR all the more frequent an experience whether it’s articulate or not.

And yet I haven’t.

And maybe I won’t get to it but I want to.

I miss writing.

There. I’ve said it.  At least writing it out in public makes me feel a teeeeeny bit better and maybe that simple act will free me from whatever self-doubt I’ve had about putting thoughts to pixel.

Have you missed reading?

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Dear 2007,

Well. We both knew this was coming. It’s our thing.

This was your year. The year of the pig. The year of wealth and prosperity and good things. There’s been a lot of that together that we’ve shared. Particularly in memories and in laughter.

To do things together to the fullest and to know at the end of it all that we have lots of ridiculously rich memories to share with each other and to say goodbye to each other without regrets and without hesitation.

We’re both old and mature enough now to know that about both ourselves and each other.

And really, my what a year we’ve had.

We’ve traveled to Texas, Michigan, Seattle, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris.

We’ve said hello and farewell to good friends and family. It’s been a year where I’ve felt fury and frustration, whimsy and delight. Snarky giggles and sometimes whimpery nights of needing simple comforts.

We’ve maintained love and seen it grow and bloom into something gorgeous that has outshone any doubt that’s managed to burrow itself into a corner of self doubt or worry in my psyche.

Dear 2007, you’ve even been there for me for some of the happiest days of my life. I mean, getting engaged, getting married(Flashmob version in the livingroom). Getting married again. (In the church and all that good stuff.)

And you’ve given me the opportunity for tremendous hope and joy when Jason and I found out that we were pregnant. And then to lose that pregnancy so soon after we’d grown to glow with the idea of having a physical manifestation of our joy and love for each other come into our lives. It’s been rough, losing that hope, though we both know that it’s only temporary and that hope, well, like our spirits, it too will rise. And that in grief, there is still the opportunity to see and to know true love and to understand its greatest significance in providing strength and comfort during those moments of weakness and tenderness.

To learn that so early in a marriage is, at the very least, an important blessing to recognize and stay focused on.

Dearest 2007, I want to thank you for being such an important year in my life. It’s been a year full of challenges and growth, beauty and some grief, tenderness and laughter, song and heart written personal scripture. You’ve been a year that I’ve learned to love in jagged and sharp moments as well as those glowy and full of firecrackers under my skin.

So thank you, 2007. You’ve been as good to me as you could. And I hope I’ve done right by you as well.

Wish me well with 2008,

Min Jung

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“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”

Last night, while my lovely boyfriend was successfully avoiding being slightly annoyed with me for being a little snookered after returning home from a PR party where i inhaled a couple of vodka tonics, I lolled on my bed and pulled out a seemingly endless series of personal diaries and journals from my past.  Printed out emails. Confessions of having phone sex with near strangers. Guilty bemusings about crushes and lust.  Restrained notations on the archeological excavation of heart bruises and breaks.  Tear stained sheets.  Plane tickets to see a boyfriend.  Rose petals pressed carefully betwen pages. Sketches. Doodles.
I read him excerpts of my past romantic bemoanings and he giggled at me.

And I thought to myself, wow. I’m still the biggest megadork ever. STILL!

But wow. It’s all worth it when I think about where I am now and who I have in my heart these days.

Squish. Mega dork.

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I’m currently sitting on the couch with a lovely silver grey cat who is napping with her fat butt facing me.

Cinnamon & Andrew are geeking out seperatly on their own respective laptops, reviewing blogs, logs, and pictures online.

I am delighted by spending chill “regular time” with people that I don’t get to see or spend time with often enough. Simple things like listening to jazz, making fun of goofy emails, and sharing various silly blog content. We talk about scotch. And cats. And people we know. And bond films. And wikipedia. And etc.

This after an evening with Cinnamon and her lady pals playing “poker” where no shirts or panties were lost, but much wine was had, and many more giggles than that. My stomach is still full and happy from having some Surl Long Tang with my friend JB earlier today (waves hi to jb!) after he was kind enough to pick me up from the train station.

Thunks today:
Any stigma associated with train travel should be abolished. I was pleased to discover the convenience of the transportation did not exceedingly diminish or destroy the romance associated with this mode of travel that I’ve had from movies while growing up.

There’s a lovely leisure to it. Fairly relaxing. Tons of space to spread out. And a fairly reasonable a la carte selection of foodstuffs in the dining car including heinekin or coronas, hebrew national hotdogs, gardenburgers, and other sundries. A more diverse or healthy selection of food stuffs than available on planes including yogurt and fruit, juice, and milk. And did I mention how cheap the tickets were? $26 one way from Detroit to Chicago. With loads of flexibility re: changing the dates of departure or cancelling tickets with nominal penalties. Not a bad way to go when you have more time than dollars, and no manic schedule to be bound to. No wifi or powerplugs though. But that’s ok. I had enough media between naps with the ipod, and episodes of battlestar galactica.

I’m a little sleepy and it’s snowy outside. Chilly, but reasonably calm.
Snow blankets the ground making all things sparkle and clean, quiet, and still.
It’s real weather. Something that I’ve missed from spending too much time in SF where the weather goes from rainy to non rainy during the winter months.

Other things?
I think I’ve been predjudiced or unreasonably terrified to some degree of what those “next stages” in life might mean for me. Something that’s been resonated to some degree by conversations I’ve had with USG and other friends. I guess I’m not the only one who considers with some trepidation, going into that “great fade” once a person does adult things like … getting married, buying a house, having kids, etc. I’d like to believe that adulthood development does not include a lobotomy. I’m always delighted when i meet or read folks who encourage that vibe still as well.

Smoocheritos

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Listen to some dudes in Chicago who are drunk/stoned audio & video blog!

With several horrendous mispronunciations of my name!

For those who only read my text and have never heard my name spoken, here’s a few notes for you.

Min - as in miniscule … like some guys penises that i know

Jung – Not like the fucked up psychologist quack pot but with the actual J sound. Still, it does rhyme with young. Soft g at the end. The second part of my first name should not sound like a Cantonese war yelp before butcher knives and swords (along with random instances of cherry blossoms and/or snow) get thrown through the air and Zhang Zi Yi pretends to not be pouty for once in a film.

Kim - as in Kimberly. That girl in highschool that you had the hots for so badly that you let her copy off of your physics test.

Other ways my name has been mispronounced in the most recent past?
Minja – as in Ninja.
For which I felt obliged to post the Pink Ninja pix.

*shaking head and clucking tongue in dismay*

In other news:
Latest mathematical/socialogical truisms

The liklihood of wifi being present is inversely proportional to the number of doilies on a premisis. Real Doilies. Paper Doilies apparently only mean that there are wifi networks present but locked off.
Tested and true.

Also: The propensity for doily making increases as the frequency of a woman’s menstruation cycle declines.

Also: The size of one’s purse is directly proportional to the number of people that a woman cares for. Those chicks with those tiny little hand clutches? Bitches. They’ll expect to be taken care of. Those women with epic sized bag larger than a mini-cooper are likely trying to take care of a small village in south america. And/or 2 children and a significant other who frequently acts like one. Add additional bags for diapers, yoga gear, and valium. Lots and lots of valium.

Also: The frequency with which one makes drunk dialing calls is inversely proportional to your acceptable level of attractiveness to anyone. ANYONE. And even your friends will feel less likely to try & pimp you out.

Also: The liklihood of trying to run on gas fumes towards the gas station is not indicative of idiocy so much as a chance to experience an opportunity for humility and recognition of a very heartbreaking human condition. (Oblique I know.. I’ll write more about this later)

Also: On a monday, one really does *not* need to hear a friend speak about purchasing a strap-on to spice up one’s sex life. Seriously. Ever. Unclean. Unclean. Unclean.

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