Category: Life
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Only One Way to Go: Down
I was driving a van up a one-way, steep mountain incline. Four of us were on our way to a mountaintop retreat with a van packed with luggage and accessories. I whipped around one steep turn and gunned it in first as I plodded up the hill when a horribly sick sinking feeling struck me:…
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The Reason is Now Clear
In this article “Mom is Shamed for Cake Slice in Kid’s Lunch,” I have begun to understand why the heavens didn’t want me to raise my kids in the United States. It would not have been pretty. And unfortunately, this article isn’t an outlier. There are (regrettably) way too many instances of schools telling parents what they…
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What’s the Future of Complication Like?
I’ve been thinking about my recent blog post The Good Old Less Complicated Days and started wondering about my kids: will they look back upon the 2010s as the “Good Old Less Complicated Days?” The premise of my post was this: our modern world has become so complicated that I sometimes wonder if life before gadgets and…
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The Good Old Less Complicated Days
My brain feels like it just experienced a two hour session as a tackle dummy, and no, it has nothing to do with having just watched the Oscars or network TV. It has to do with modern life. Silly old modern life. The kind of lives we lead in this day and age are insane,…
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My Digital Move
I’m leaving Malaysia in four months. I’ve lived here for eleven years, but now it’s time to move on. So you know how this works: sell stuff you don’t want, pack the rest in crates, and shove the remaining in suitcases. That’s how you move. However, I also realized that there is a different kind…
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Like Cats, We All Leave Stuff Behind
Like cats, we all leave stuff behind. On Christmas afternoon, our neighbors popped over with a delicious chocolate cake to share with us. They were fronted by their two delightfully adorable kids, who still had the magical glassy eyes of Christmas spreading joy to everyone they met. As we chatted at the doorway before they…
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Perhaps the Best Beef Dish in the World.
The Minangkabau are a people group from the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. And man, do they know beef! They make, perhaps, the best beef dish in the world: beef rendang. Here in Penang, near my house, there’s a small lunch stand called Nasi Padang. Nasi means rice. Padang is a town in West Sumatra.…
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These are the moments we remember
Look closely at this photo. What do you see? I see memories which will last a lifetime. Not for me, no, but for that family of aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, mothers and fathers. if you look closely on the center left, you’ll see two children playing in the sand at the edge…
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The Bored Generation
I’ve become quite bored with the bored generation. Okay, that’s not exactly true. But I do wonder what will become of all of these bored kids. Yes, they are bored. They tell me they’re bored. They get bored at all the wrong times in all the wrong ways. It’s like they need to be bored.…
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Indian Wedding Reception
I thought I’d share a few photos from an Indian wedding reception I went to last night. The daughter of one of our school’s guards got married. It was an elaborate and lively event with an Egyptian theme, surprisingly. Oh, and of course, yummy Indian food. Here’s what it all looked like.
Author Mark W Sasse 