Feb 26
2010
2010
Archive for the ‘English blog’ Category
I watched this movie “Up in the Air” in December last year, 2009. I like George Clooney (I’ve been a fan 
when he was still playing a doctor in “ER”), and even though the story wasn’t as convincing towards the end, I still enjoyed it. George Clooney plays Ryan, a jet-set executive flying around the country firing people on behalf of his clients. There was a series of scenes where he told people that they are let go, and he had to handle their reaction and lead them to take a “transition package” and leave the room.
Considering how the economy has been struggling the last few years, one might say that the movie hits too close to home and the storyline is depressing. However, one of the most memorable lines also came from one of those firing scenes. Ryan fired a guy with two children, and he got understandably upset – he stated that he is old and he can’t be a superstar in sports or anything like that. Ryan then said “But you can cook”, pointing out that he has gone to a culinary school by looking at his resume. Then he asked, “For how much money did you to give up your dream?” While I forget what the exact number was (probably mid-20K or low 30K), I thought that was a very powerful question. My husband and I talked about this after the movie. I believe some people know themselves well enough that they know what they want to be when they grow up at an early age, but there are many who still do not know even in their 40’s to 50’s. I wondered how many people can answer that question like the guy did in the movie. Knowing how much your first job paid is one thing, but what about your dream? I believe that some people don’t even know what it was – or is.
In my case, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was 21. I tried to find jobs in my 4th year of college, without knowing what I really wanted to do with my life, and naturally I didn’t find anyone who’d hire me. I believe that I was lucky that I didn’t find a job at that time, because that forced me to look at myself and ask some serious questions. In the end, I decided that I want to work for the United Nations and took the path to pursue that goal. Now, many years later, I am on to pursue my new dream, but it was because I learned back then that it’s up to me to decide what I want to do and do what I need to do to achieve it. I hope that many people will find that to be true for themselves. To assist anyone who needs support in pursuing their dreams, I’ll start a group where people come together and encourage each other in going for their dreams. Stay turned for more information!
Feb 19
2010
2010
Crush It!
Last November, I met Gary Vaynerchuk at a tWineup in San Diego. He wrote a book “Cursh It!”, I talked to him in person, took picture and got a signed copy. I was fist introduced to 
Gary Vaynerchuck by my friend Alan Underkofler – he posted one of many Gary’s talks on-line, and when I watched him speak, I was blown away by how passionate he was about his subject matters which are wine and business development. People say passion is contagious, and you can experience it by reading his book; in his book, he talks about how he has been 100% happy by following these 3 simple rules: 1. Love your family 2. Work superhard 3. Live your passion. This book is a great inspiration to everyone, but particularly to those who are wondering about how they can turn their hobby into business by utilizing various tools that are now available for everyone for little money, if not completely free.
He also talks about how personal branding is now a necessity for everyone – not just for entrepreneurs, but every single one of us, even if you are happily employed. He talks about how he utilized social media in building his personal brand, and how you need to be who you are – in his words, “let your DNA lead you”. He writes; “You may not have connections, or an education, or wealth, but with enough passion and sweat, you can make anything happen”. The thing is, even if you quit your day job to do what you love, you might be putting the same or more amount of hours you did when you were employed, but if you truly feel passionate about it, it doesn’t feel like work. Your personal life and your professional life will be meshed into one, and you’ll be the brand.
While I really enjoyed my job at the Japanese school for the past 4 years, I felt that I could not express myself fully. I started writing a blog in May 2009, but I was still filtering myself on what I should and should not do or say while holding that position at the school, because people saw me as “Executive Director at Minato School”. I started teaching parenting class called “Redirecting Children’s Behavior(RCB)” on my day off, but I felt like I was still representing the school and it started feeling like a cage. My RCB instructor friends suggested that I should try to bring in this RCB courses to my school but I felt deeply conflicted in doing so, and that if I want to continue teaching this and to start reaching as many parents as I possibly can, I could not continue working there. It was a natural course of action for me to leave. Now that I have gained the freedom to be and express myself, I am ready to take massive action in expanding my network. I’m working on setting up RCB course to be offered near LA where there is a bigger Japanese population, and I’m in the process of creating tele-classes on parenting so people can call in to take my courses over the phone. Just like Gary describes in his book, I reluctantly go to bed at night, and excited to continue with where I left off the night before. I’ll also offer my course in English this year. Dear readers, thank you always for supporting me, and stay turned for my next move. I totally intend to crush it!
Feb 13
2010
2010
Princess And Frog
A few weeks ago we went to a military movie theater with our kids to watch a Disney movie “Princess and Frog”. I was curious if our older son could sit through a 90 minutes animation film, and 
it turned out he did fine for the most part, though there were some parts where a voodoo doctor appeared which was scary for him. It was an entertaining story with so much color and music, with an unique storyline; The main character Tiana turned into a frog when she kissed a voodoo cursed frog, thinking it’ll turn him back to a prince. Together they visit Mama Odie, hoping that she’d undo the curse, but she told Tiana that she needs to understand the difference between what she wants and what she needs. (more…)
Feb 6
2010
2010
Gift Of Giving
Today I attended a San Diego Women’s Foundation membership committee meeting. I’ve been a 
member since 2008 and was selected to be a 2008 “class coordinator”, meaning that I am in charge of encouraging people who joined in 2008 to attend events and meetings. This is a unique organization in a sense that we give out a certain amount of money to different worthy organizations, but we do not do any fundraising event. The money comes from membership contribution ($2000 a year). The idea is that there is a limitation of what $2000 individually can do, but if we pull every member’s contribution together, we can collectively do a lot more things that are beneficial to the community. (more…)
Jan 31
2010
2010
My Sister’s Keeper
I recently watched the movie “My Sister’s Keeper”. It is based on a novel with the same title, however the movie differs from the novel slightly. It is about a girl, Anna, whose DNA was 
genetically designed so she could be a perfect donor to her older sister, Kate, who has leukemia. In the movie, Anna, age 11, decides to sue her parents seeking to win control of her own body on the grounds of medical emancipation as she no longer wanted to give her body parts to help her sister due to the potential impact it would have for her own life. Despite this serious theme, I found the movie enjoyable and somewhat uplifting. It was also thought provoking; would parents really go as far as having another, genetically designed baby so they’d have a perfect donor to their dying child? Where is the line between wanting to do everything within their power to help, and going too far? (more…)
Jan 22
2010
2010
Vision Board
Last night I attended “4th Annual Making the Most of Your Personal Strategy New Year Kickoff” event where a group of women got together and each of us created a vision board for 2010. This event was hosted by Ms.Angie Swartz, a founder of Six Figure Moms Club. She is a radio show host, an author, and a social media specialist who owns her own company called “Square Martini Media”. Moreover, she is also a source of inspiration to many of us working women and mothers. At the 
beginning of the event, she asked who had attended this event last year, the year before….and I realized that this was my 4th time attending this event. She again hired Dining Details to cater the food for the evening – the owners and chef couple Julie and Robbie cooked scrumptious appetizers and desserts while we enjoyed sipping wine, chatted among ourselves, flipped through magazines and cut out images that spoke to us for our vision board. It was a fantastic opportunity for us to connect, and take time to think about what we wanted to focus on this year. (more…)
Jan 16
2010
2010
“Life Changing Events”
We all have experienced events in our lives which have affected us profoundly. When we talk about those events, we often use this phrase ”It totally changed my life”. Events such as living 
abroad, going to Zimbabwe to work on an HIV/AIDS project, the experience of giving birth to babies, attending a self-development courses….all of which are my own life changing events. Life changing events are not always pleasant – I am certain that some people would say that losing a family member or a close friend affected them significantly. I know many people who have said that the 9/11 event changed their lives. For me personally, losing Miroku would qualify as one of such events. The other day, I came across a phrase; One of the simplest forms of prayer is to say “Life is a gift from God”. When I saw it, I thought, “yeah, don’t I know it” with a mixture of gratitude and sadness. A part of me is very happy that I do (know that statement to be true), but a part of me feels that I wish I would not be aware of that so keenly. (more…)
Jan 10
2010
2010
What’s Your 3 Words For 2010?
New year or not, I almost always have some kind of goals to work on, but as I wrote in my last blog post, I did not feel like making any big resolutions for this year. Instead, I adopted this simple 
rule that I will do at least one thing that has a positive impact in my life, everyday, and so far it has been working out great. It has been only a week into the New Year, and I am finding so many things I do daily which have a positive impact in my life. My personal favorite is “not having sweets at the office”. It is the time of the year when people come back from different places they visited over the holiday and we have endless supply of sweets that tempt me – chocolate, cheesecake, cupcake, you name it. It has only been three days since I got back to work, but so far I am keeping it. (more…)
Jan 2
2010
2010
Happy New Year
As many of you know by now, I grew up in Japan. Here in the U.S., the New Year holiday is relatively quiet in comparison to the Xmas holiday. Where I come from, in contrast, the New Year holiday is a great deal, even bigger than Xmas. The first few days of January are called 
“O-sho-gatsu” and it is a time for the entire family to get together and eat well, kids receive “O-toshi-dama”(money in a small envelop) from family and relatives, people visit temples and shrines, and watch special new year sporting events such as a famous long-relay marathon takes place between Tokyo and Hakone on January 2nd and 3rd. Most businesses are closed at least for 3 days, if not longer. It is also a time to ponder upon the upcoming year, where people wish all the best and good luck to each other and to themselves. Even though I appreciate the weather here in San Diego, I always miss Japan very much at this time of the year. This year, my mother is visiting from Japan and she cooked all the great food I would have had in Japan, and while it is not exactly the same, I still enjoyed the first day of the year 2010. We spent the morning at the Balboa park, visiting science museum and did a mini-train ride with the kids, followed by a picnic lunch. After coming home, I worked out at a 24 hour fitness club which I had not been to since I became pregnant last October. I know, it’s such a cliché to want to start anew in terms of doing exercise and I was afraid that it might be very crowded, but the gym was almost completely empty and I was pleasantly surprised. (more…)
Dec 13
2009
2009
The Life of Baby Miroku
It was raining really hard and even stormy on Monday this week, highly unusual for San Diego. I canceled my RCB course as I was feeling some pain in my abdomen. Being 16 
weeks pregnant, I felt that I needed to take it easy. I lied down in bed and waited for my doctor’s office to open at 9:10. But before that time came, my water broke and I went into a premature labor. My husband and I rushed to the Sharp Mary Birch hospital where we had delivered our two previous children over the past few years. Long story short, our baby was born at 10:31. It was a boy. His heart was no longer beating. According to the doctor who took care of me, it was a miscarriage because it was before 20 weeks – but to me, whatever the correct medical term might be, what happened was that we had our baby boy and he passed away.
As I wrote in my previous post, I had experienced a miscarriage before I had my first child. Ever since that experience, I was very private about my pregnancy - I waited as long as I could to start telling people each time I got pregnant. I’d tell people only I was into 5th months when my regular clothes no longer fit. So this time, only a few people knew that I was pregnant with our 3rd baby. I just had my OB check on Thursday last week, everything was going well, and I was finally into my 5th months, so I was going to tell people at work this week – then Monday came, and this happened. I had to tell them that I “was” pregnant, but I lost our baby, and that I needed a few days off from work. I stayed at the hospital on Monday night as I had to go through a D&C operation. I returned home on Tuesday. I went to work on Wednesday and Friday briefly to take care of some things, but other than that, I stayed home mostly, trying to recover physically and going through the grieving process. Today I had a meeting at the school where I work that I could not reschedule, so I went in for a few hours. Most people did not even know that I was pregnant, much less about what happened, and I could have just let it be. If I had kept quiet and carried normal conversations with people during the few hours I was there, they would not have known anything at all. But I felt this strange desire to start telling people. As painful and sad it is to think or talk about this experience and our dead baby, if I don’t talk about him, nobody would know about him. I wanted people and the world to know that our baby boy existed even for a short period of time. So I decided to write about him.
We named him Miroku. After he came out, I had to go to the operation room to have the D&C procedure performed, and while I was gone, my husband told Miroku some bedtime stories and about his two brothers. After I came back, I held him for a very long time. His eyes were shut and we never heard him cry, but we have this memory of him, with his tiny arms wrapped around himself. He was wrapped by a blue baby blanket and had a tiny yellow hat on. We finally said good-bye to Miroku later that evening.
We called my mentor Susie Walton while this was happening – I wanted to talk to her, as I knew she could help us get through this experience. She later called back and left a message on my cell phone. She said that Miroku came to us, so he could experience our love. Obviously, I would have liked it if he had stayed with us longer. If I had known that our time was so limited, would I still have wanted him to come to us? I also reached out to my other mentor Pamela Dunn after I came home on Tuesday. We talked on Wednesday, and she helped me work through some of the regrets I had about what happened. She suggested this beautiful “what if”. What if Miroku’s soul needed to be healed by love, before he had to move onto other place to do whatever he needed to do? He chose us to be his parents and stayed with us for 16 weeks. Now that his soul was healed by our love, he had to say good-bye. When I heard Pam say this, I felt something shift in my heart. Until that moment, I had been so focusing on things I wish I could have done better or differently before this whole thing happened. But if he came to us because he wanted to be loved so his soul could heal, I can say that we did the best we could – after he was born, he was never left alone in the room, he was held by either my husband or myself for the whole time – we told him about his brothers, how much we love him, and how much we’d have loved to take him home. We took some pictures, and I video taped my husband talking to our children while holding Miroku, so that they could someday learn about their younger brother. I hope that Miroku’s soul was filled with love by the time we had to say good bye.
There is no point or conclusion to this post as it’s a grieving process that I am going through – I am trying to take one day at a time. I’ve been crying my eyes out every day and I don’t think it will stop anytime soon. My role model Chris Guillebeau whom I had a pleasure to meet back in September has a favorite quote that he posts occasionally, and I dug through his tweets to find it. I think this somehow fits into this situation so I’ll end this post with that quote;
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” -Dr Seuss
