It has been a long time since I have been on this blog post. I have been managing many responsibilities and practicing self-care as much as possible.
This is a photo of me from today. I also am sharing screenshots of an email that I wrote to Karen S. Lynch, the CEO of CVS Health. If you are someone who needs or wants to hear the email, I am also providing the link to the latest episode of my podcast for Unfiltered Snapshot. It is also titled My CVS Customer Experience.
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On February 24, 2022, I celebrated the two-year anniversary of my mastectomy in the post More Than Transactional. It was only after this post that I found out that Russia had invaded Ukraine. NPR posted Photos: The sobering cost of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. The New York Times has live updates on the Russia-Ukraine War.
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This morning I recorded the podcast episode Dancing on My Own. (You can also find the stream of my latest episodes on the newly added Podcast webpage for Unfiltered Snapshot.) What started off as a conversation about dancing transitioned to one about women and the she-cession.
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Yesterday I recorded the podcast episode Bubble Girl. That is because living in this pandemic has me feeling like a bubble girl. I am not surprised by this; I am simply processing what it means to live in this stage of the pandemic.
We are past the creation of vaccines and boosters. A month ago, medical experts started sharing Why you should upgrade your mask as the Omicron variant spreads. According to the AP News headline, the White House soft-launches COVID-19 test request website.
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I am no stranger to talking about love. Throughout the years, I have written about it in I Fall in Love, When Love Is Not Enough for Justice, Let People Love You: Community Care Knows No Boundaries, My Anniversary, and more. As you can tell from my posts, I discuss love in a number of contexts.
However, I live in a society where people tend to talk about love through very limited and specific contexts. If I say love, people often think about romance and passion first. If it is not the love of a partner or spouse, they think about love within a family context like the relationship between a parent and child, between siblings, or between a person and any number of people in their extended family.
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The New Year brings renewed interest in keeping up with hobbies. For me, this means recording new episodes of my podcast Unfiltered Snapshot on Anchor. You can find the podcast on multiple platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. My first three episodes of the year are up. I invite you to listen to Something New (S3, E1), It’s Our Anniversary (S3, E2), and Let It Snow (S3, E3) if you have not already.
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When I was growing up, I was no stranger to fundraisers. When I was in grade school, I sold chocolate bars for class fundraisers. Then in junior high and high school, I raised money for centers that supported pregnant women. As an adult, I raised funds for survivors of Typhoon Haiyan (a.k.a. Super Typhoon Yolanda) in the Philippines and for survivors of sexual violence in Greater Boston. This is just a sample of initiatives for which I did fundraising.
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Have you ever been the only one with an identity or group membership that nobody else around you has? If you have, what was your positionality within the settings where you were the only one? If you have not, what factors have contributed to you leading a life where never being the only one is possible?
You might not know what positionality means. As I type this term in this blog post, the gods of WordPress have underlined the word with a red squiggly line. This is what happens when a platform thinks you misspelled a term. The fact that the WordPress gods do not recognize this word in itself demonstrates that more people, including those who design website platforms, need to understand the concept of positionality and that it is in fact a real word. You can learn more about what it means by doing your own independent research, but here is the Postionality and Intersectionality webpage from Indigenous Initiatives at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.
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I have not written on this blog for almost four months because I was preparing for, underwent, and have been recovering from reconstructive surgery. I was waiting for a moment to be inspired to write again, but maybe inspiration is too strong of a word.
When you are working to fulfill your basic needs, engaging in an activity that you normally love is not always the best thing. Sometimes when you try to do something and encounter restrictions or discomfort, reconnecting with the activity becomes more work than leisure.
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The following text is a post I shared with friends. Originally, it included a photo of me at the hospital, waiting for my mastectomy. In the photo, I was lying in a bed reclined back at about a 45 degree angle. My body was snugly tucked under white sheets, and my head was propped on a matching pillow. A light blue bouffant cap contained my thick, long dark brown-black hair. I wrote it this morning to reflect on the anniversary of my mastectomy. It goes like this:
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Unfiltered Snapshot 