Curating the Curated

A collection of things that I've found and enjoyed on the Internet.

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Postpartum Diaries #1

endless cycles of

nursing,

rocking,

pacifier popping back

diaper changes

spit up burping

googling “is this normal?”

trying to not feel alone.

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Personal Post: Kaia’s Birth Story

Beautiful Kaia was born on November 9th, at 2:40 PM on a beautiful blue skied Tuesday. I chose to get an induction at 39 weeks, partially because I was antsy, had fluctuating blood pressure, didn’t want to use up anymore PTO time, and could make sure the grandparents were in town to take care of Lilah. 

We came to a calm L&D room where I was the only patient that night at 7:30 PM. The hallways were familiar, but we were in a different room. The TV was bigger, and there was an actual flat couch area for Kelsey to sleep on. 

The nurses started prepping me ready by inserting an IV. After 2 nurses tried 4x and failed at inserting the IV, they called the nurse supervisor who inserted it on my wrist finally. IV insertion is uncomfortable and painful - potentially an indication of things to come with needles / tubes going in me. 

The OB on call that night - the same funny Greek man who checked on me to discharge me with Lilah’s birth, came in to insert the cervidil. The cervidil was a nice, painless induction method compared to being hooked up to the Foley balloon last time.

After an hour, around 10 PM, I started feeling light contractions. They were pretty minor for a few hours and I was able to doze off here and there. Around 2 - 3 AM, the contractions started to pick up. They were noticeably stronger around 430 AM when I texted our doula, Susanna, to come. She arrives around 6:30 AM as the morning light starts to come in. I labor best on the ball bouncing, and contractions are coming every 3 - 4 minutes lasting 40 - 60 seconds. 

There’s rotating TV on, some news, but mostly we settle on Friends towards the end. 

Contractions pick up closer to 8AM. I have to wait until 9 AM for my OB to arrive to take the cervidil out and check my dilation. So I patiently moan through the contractions until then. I remained hopeful that this was working and told myself that if I was maybe 7 or 8 cm dilated, I could push through this and not get an epidural.

The contractions get more and more intense and it hurts, I feel like I want to push. Dr Cho finally comes at 930 AM and removes the cervidil. I find out I am only 4cm dilated. I immediately ask for an epidural.

Of course, like last time, they need me to get more IV fluid in me before the anesthesiologist can come. He finally arrives around 1030 AM. The last hour was brutal.

He inserts the epidural, I find out later that he had to do it twice and he hit a membrane. 

The epidural provides me with instant relief. And I can finally sleep and rest for about an hour. Dr Cho arrives around 1250 and we decide to break my water to further progress things. She leaves after and after about 30 minutes, I feel the need to push. The nurse checks me after an hour and finds me dilated at 9CM. I I am ready! But Dr Cho is not in the hospital. So I have to wait about 30 minutes for her to come. These last 30 minutes was also brutal, even with an epidural. 

She arrives, we put the Spotify playlist on. Kelsey’s at my shoulder holding my hand, the nurses and Susanna cheerleads me on and I start pushing. It feels more natural this time around. Dr. Cho massages me to help with the tearing. I push and push on contractions. I feel encouraged every time the drs and nurses tell me what a good job I’m doing. I feel discouraged when you’re not out in 3 pushes! After 20 minutes, i can feel you leave me, I can feel your shoulders and arms and legs come out of me. They put you on me, and take you away to check on you. Kelsey cuts the cord. After a seemingly long time, she comes back to me and we are able to do skin to skin and she latches. 

The playlist was perfect. “This must be the place” by the talking heads and “hey k” by passion pit plays. She comes out weighing 6 pounds 3 oz, and a head of hair. 

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Personal Post: Lilah’s Birth Story

Doing something a little different here, something I wanted to remember, something I wanted to share.

Our beautiful daughter Lilah was born on January 10th, 2019, weighing 5 pounds 8 oz, 18 inches. 

Time is a funny thing. I’ve thought a lot about time in the past 3 weeks since her birth. Time during the labor. And to an extent, time in the 9 months that I carried her. 

There are moments when time seemed to move quickly, and then there are moments like now, when I’m sleep deprived, and counting the hours till the next feed, that time moves so slowly.

This is her labor story - and time moved quickly.

A week before her induction, I was put on bed rest for high blood pressure. My BP had been fine the whole pregnancy, but had suddenly shot up. All other tests that I had to do the following days were normal, but the OB and other doctors were worried that this gestational hypertension could quickly become pre-eclampsia. 

So I was induced. We went in the morning, waited for the OB to show up, had a cervical check and surprise no dilation, no effacement. I opted to do the foley balloon as the OB mentioned that I could get a low dosage of pitocin while on it and the foley balloon had shown to get to 4-5CM dilation by 12 hours instead of the cervadil. The insertion wasn’t that bad. The pitocin wasn’t that bad. Everything was just uncomfortable having something hang between your legs for hours. 

I was doing fine, could have visitors, could still finish up work. 

I started feeling contractions about 6-7 hours in. Minor ones, which I thought might be regular contractions. Silly me thought “this isn’t that bad, I don’t think I’ll need an epidural”. Kelsey’s parents visited and brought dinner. After they left, the contractions started to get worse. Closer together. The next couple of hours got worse. Our OB showed up and checked me around 10PM, I had dilated to 5CM, the foley balloon had worked. We called our doula to come. I labored for a few more hours with her coaching but it was getting worse and worse, and I knew I was in for a longer haul so I asked for the epidural. The nurse told me i had to finish a whole bag of IV before they could give me the epidural - a tactic I assume for them to call in the anesthesiologist. She finally arrived around 1.30AM, the epidural was painless and I suddenly felt relief. It was magic. I watched how close the contractions were happening on the monitor but I couldn’t feel anything.

We got some sleep. At 6AM, the nurse checked me and I was dilated to 8CM. We started to labor down, I started to feel more pressure. My water broke sometime after 8AM. I only remember this because it was a different nurse after the 7AM shift change. And I felt the gush as I laid in bed. 

My OB showed up around 9, said I could start pushing soon. At 9:55, I started taking a few practice pushes. I had my hopes up because she was at a +2 station, which meant she was in a pretty good position. My doula thought it wouldn’t take too long. I pushed and pushed for an hour. But the baby’s heart rate kept slowing down during the contraction. My OB had me stop pushing to see how she reacted when I didn’t push. That 30 minutes was the worst - even though I had an epidural, I could still feel pressure down there and felt the need to push. Finally, the OB let me start pushing again. After 30 minutes, I gave myself a goal of 5 contractions to get her out. I think I got her out at 6 or 7. 

After she crowned, her body followed quickly and I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard her strong lungs scream. The first thing my OB said was, “there’s two of them!” and I very clearly remember panicking and saying “ two of what? Two heads?!” And she said, “no, two cords wrapped around her”. 

I remember Kelsey tearing up as I pushed. As he started to see her come out. I remember him crying as they placed her on me, and how beautiful she was. How real that moment felt, as she laid on me and Kelsey stroked her cheeks and kissed her. I remember him cutting the cord. I remember the hour + that we had with her, as she made herself down my breast. As she looked at us. The calmness that engulfed her and us as all the nurses whirled around us. I remember delivering my placenta. I remember not wanting to see any of that. I remember as my OB stitched me up, and my doula telling me that “it wasn’t that bad.” I remember not crying, just stunned that this was real now. 

I want to remember. So often time passes, and we forget. But the time passed slowly and quickly at the same time - it’s hard to explain. We count the seconds and minutes of pain, but yet it passes by so quickly. 

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Sonic Trash - the importance of sound in a user’s experience

“We found an 86 percent correlation between how sound makes people feel at the subconscious level and their conscious desire to have or avoid that experience in the future. We also know...that emotion is the strongest driver of customer loyalty. Put simply, greater positive emotion will drive greater loyalty, and vice versa.” - Kevin Perlmutter, Wired Magazine 

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In memory of Dolores O’Riordan’s passing, my favourite cover from my favourite film - Faye Wong’s cover of Dreams in Chinese from Chungking Express. 

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Aziz Ansari on the worst food trend

“What’s the worst trend in food?”

“The word ‘foodie:’ stop it. People that like food shouldn’t get this weird fetish-y sounding thing. Call the people that don’t care what they eat ‘food bozos.’”

See more: Vogue’s 73 Questions with Aziz Ansari

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WikiTribune

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, recently started WikiTribune, a platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together to bring evidence-based news to the masses.

Separate thought - as conversations around alternative facts, echo chambers, and more need to read things ‘objectively’, I’m hoping that schools will start to teach and educate kids on tone, language, and manner in order to actually understand whether something is biased or not. That was not something that was highly emphasized in my education growing up, and it’s taken more and more time for me to decipher as I consume content - and it’s mostly who the creator is, not what the content is. 

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The Bingo Method to Solving Problems

Seth Godin presents using Bingo to make sure you’re asking yourself all the right questions because you ask someone else for help.

“Build a 5 x 5 grid. 25 squares. Twenty-five elements that have to be present for your project to have a chance. If it's a fundraising concert, one of the grids might be, "find a theater that will host us for less than $1,000."

Here's the key: Fill in most of the grids before you ask someone for generous help. When nine or twelve of the squares are marked, "done," and when another six are marked, "in process," then the ask is a lot smaller.

A glimpse at your bingo card indicates that you understand the problem, that you've highlighted the difficult parts and that you've found the resources and the knowledge necessary to complete most of it.

You've just asked a much easier question.”

Source: Seth Godin, the Bingo Method

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Hulk Hogan, Peter Thiel, Gawker and another POV

Stephen Marche, a writer, gives an opposing point of view about the whole Gawker debacle - siding with Gawker. 

Gawker is new media, but it possesses an old-fashioned sensibility that dates from the 18th century. The editors and writers want power to be made uncomfortable whether or not it deserves the discomfort, and they believe that the public right to information is more important than any individual’s right to privacy. I would say, to anyone who believes that Gawker is just the gutter press, that those values are worth something even in the gutter.

To that point yes, but if you look at the actual content that was distributed and published, I would differ. There is a difference between having a piece that is “uncomfortable” but provokes thoughts and actions, rather than an “out-ing” of a topic (or in this case, a sex tape) for the sake of being the only one with that news item.

See more: I Stand with Gawker

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Amidst food trends, what people are actually eating.

It’s a nice reminder that even though culture is wrought with the latest trends, the average person is probably not partaking in it as much as we’d like to think.

Case in point: food trends.

Cronuts, Hawaiian poke, grain bowls, etc...Slate takes to allrecipes.com as the quintessential look at what Americans are actually eating today, and everyday.

For the most part, the hall of fame recipes are dishes that don’t require exotic, expensive ingredients. They’re familiar. They’re unpretentious. More than anything, they’re a reminder that although the conversation about food moves at light speed, with new trends pinging across our social media accounts daily, our actual cooking habits change much more slowly. Tastes are passed down from parents, palates developed over lifetimes. Shifts happen over generations, not weeks.

See more: If you are what you eat, America is Allrecipes.com

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This version of empowerment can be actively disempowering: It’s a series of objects and experiences you can purchase while the conditions determining who can access and accumulate power stay the same. The ready partici­pation of well-off women in this strat­egy also points to a deep truth about the word “empowerment”: that it has never been defined by the people who actually need it. People who talk empowerment are, by definition, already there.

NYTimes “How ‘Empowerment’ Became Something For Women to Buy”

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Where's Rey?

Why is the female protagonist of The Force Awakens hard to find in Star Wars merch? An insider says it was a marketing decision.

Going to be a LITTLE skeptical about the source of this, but if it IS true...

Guys...guys...how SHORT SIGHTED can you be? Did nobody notice the trend of kids playing with gender neutral toys? Did none of you watch the awesome videos from GoldieBlox? If you watched Star Wars, Rey was a badass, and all the girls wanted to be Rey and all the boys (and girls) now have a crush on Daisy Ridley. Also, Kylo Ren sucks. 

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The American Rage

According to this article by Esquire Magazine,

Half of all Americans are angrier today than they were before. 

One would quickly assume that it might be because of all the happenings surrounding Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, but surprisingly, as a whole,  White Americans are angrier than Black Americans.

One of the most surprisingly thoughts going into this is the idea that the American dream and the power that America was had and was lauded around the world is seemingly, believed to be dead.

I suppose, that’s why Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great, Again” really resonates with this pissed off crowd. 

See more: American Rage - The Esquire/NBC News Survey

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Alright. If you know me, you know my fascination/love for Korean culture. I’ve spent the past year engulfed in a new guilty pleasure - Korean dramas...to the point where last night, K asked me how the hell is Korea making enough dramas to keep up with my k-drama bingeing habits. Oh...but they do. They’ve got a formula, and they are damn good at it.

Psy’s new video (produced with Will.i.am, and a remix of “i got it from my mama”) is a perfect example of a formula. It’s kind of interesting watching videos completely understanding what the artist’s objective was - not for the sake of producing a good song, but a song that is meant to elevate what Gangnam Style did for Psy and Korea and appeal to western audiences. He saw what worked with Gangnam Style (the dance moves, the humor) and added in MORE Western appeal (remixing a pop hit in the states). 

The video is definitely weird enough, but it also gives a nod to subtle Korean cultural references (the patriarchy, Ha Ji Won, etc). 

Also - I just read this comment on reddit: the intro is totally designed to trick people into turning up the volume. Super smart.

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Too dumb for TV news

This article really captures how I feel towards consuming news media today. I am of course, at fault with that, at times preferring clickbait vs an article founded from a trustworthy source. 

I’m too lazy, too ADD, too used to consuming media in short bursts. Too conditioned, really.

Though, this article really does sum up well how media itself has to blame for creating these instances for us:

This is a horrible thing to have to say about one's own country, but this story makes it official. America is now too dumb for TV news.

It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.

The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.

See more: America is too dumb for TV news

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Thanksgiving 2015

In expressing gratitude:

1. Notice

2. Savour

3. Express

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Duck face is out. Fish gape is in. 

See more: Elle’s Best Pose for Selfies