Dana Loesch from Mamalogues and Alice Bradley from Finslippy weigh in:

I won’t lie. I was down in the dumps after my Uncle’s passing. As a result, I was kind of “loose” with my normal grooming habits. For instance, I think I wore the same sweats for 3 days in a row. In fact, I probably wore the same everything for 3 days in a row. Just so you know, by day 3 your sweats are starting to sag around the ass and knees which looks REALLY flattering. This may have worked when I was 18 and was all fresh and dewy in my youth, but when you’re 34, you end up looking like a washed out druggie looking for a fix.

I just watched the latest Momversation episode (which was filmed last week) and my hair looks all flat and shiny (but it’s all greasy and gross). Just so y’all know, I spend half the time wearing my hair flat and the other half painstakingly curling it with a 3/4 inch Vidal Sassoon ceramic curling iron that I got at Marshalls for $9.99. (It is the best curling iron that I ever owned and it recently died as well. There was a moment of grieving involved with that too.)

Because I have issues with falling asleep, you can pretty much guess how much rest I got based on whether or not my hair is curly (because it takes so much time to do). I keep telling myself that I am going to break down and get a perm just so I can sleep in and still get the same effect, but everytime that say “perm” to someone, they make a face and say something like, “DID YOU SAY PERM? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? THAT IS SOOOO 80′s.”

And don’t even try say the word “perm” in a salon. It’s like the F-word in there.

But wait, don’t eat too much broccoli!

Too much broccoli causes cancer!

Anytime I think about germs or toxins or product recalls or bird flu or conflicting medical studies, I start to get a bit paranoid. This is especially so since the media tends to gravitate on stories about things that are going to kill me.

Nowadays, I try to take a moderate approach to living. I try to do things that have the least impact on the environment, but I am also human. I make bad choices.

In the great scheme of things, I secretly think that we really have little control over our destiny. Be it God, Allah, Buddha or Ganesh – it may be that we are just hanging on to this life with just a hope and a prayer.

This week on Momversations, Alice Bradley of Finslippy asks Mindy Roberts and I about the terrors of toxins and the things that we can’t see:

This week Alice from Finslippy asks, “How do you discipline your child?” Asha from Parent Hacks and I chime in our words of wisdom. Well, her words of wisdom and my babbling nonsense.

In a nutshell, I totally won the parenting lottery with Paige. When she was in her toddler years she only had one tantrum. I distinctly remember that it was only one because I recall thinking, “Who is this kid? Is it too late to ask for a refund?” I was terrified that it might happen again.

It never did.

Thank God.

The answer is: No, not yet. From time to time, I do some consulting and I am whittling down my savings in order to change my life and be happy. Don’t try this at home. It’s scary and often times I worry about how I am going to pay the mortgage. I waited till I had a mental break down so I couldn’t work anymore.  Do not push yourself to this point. There’s a lot of crying and self-help books and Oprah episodes involved.

Aside from losing weight, I have aspirations about making a living blogging and I am writing a memoir about my dysfunctional childhood. Uh … dysfunctional adulthood. Okay, I am writing a book because I can’t afford a therapist. It has taken a lot of years to realize that at some point you just need to say, fuck it and just live your life already.

But alongside of my blog, I also do a bit of video blogging over at Momversation. The current episode features Alice Bradley from Finslippy, Rebecca Woolf from Girls Gone Child and Heather Armstrong from Dooce. Today’s topic discusses the question:

What’s Harder: Wife or Mother?

I’ve never been married. I’ve been in three long term relationships though and I have to say that being a partner is much harder than being a parent.

I’ve found that you can’t ground your boyfriend.

I would totally be lying if I said I wasn’t over the moon about this. The Korean in me wants to say how excited I am really fast and then never mention it again because that would be almost as distasteful as actually mentioning that something awesome happened in the first place. Now that I think about it, the Korean in me says I shouldn’t even be blogging at all … I am a bad Korean.

The only thing that is equal to the excitement that I am feeling right now is the fact that I am completely terrified. I think that I have taken more photos of myself this past week than in the past 7 years in my Shrinking Giyen project. Now I am going to start videotaping myself. Seriously, this is crazy. I am so uncomfortable looking at myself that I actually had to switch the sidebar widget to my main Flickr feed because I don’t really like looking at myself and things seem all the better when my self-portraits are mixed in with other photos (as to somehow disguise the fact that I am taking pictures of myself). It’s neurotic, I know. You can still keep tabs on my daily self-portraits here.

Okay, I am gonna breathe a bit and let myself lean into the fact that I am happy for the first time in a long time. QB made some crack about me “not going Hollywood on him” then advised me to go read Margaret Cho’s “I’m The One That I Want” – which I actually finished over the weekend. I really didn’t know much about Margaret Cho until I read the book. But after reading it I can definitely say that much of it is familiar to me and my life. There are a lot of commonalities about self-esteem issues and personal hardships in there. At the very end, Cho sums up how I am feeling about life right now:

“I believe that when you take those first steps in loving yourself, the universe conspires with your soul to keep that love affair going.”

A few years ago I the cynic in me might have thought that this was metaphysical crap. Now, I’m drinking the koolaid.

PS. Thanks Mir & Aimee for such great advice!