Musings of a Multi-Cultural Mind

I'll be honest - I've put off working on this entry for the past few days because frankly, I haven't been coping too well myself.  The stress of losing my job, planning my wedding, moving my fiance into my condo and working on getting his place sold has been pretty overwhelming - contributing to a major Fibro flare.  But life has to go on right? So how does one cope with a flare and just the general, every day pain, fatigue, & foggy brain? Many of the sufferers out there are still working full time and have families they need to take care of. We pretty much smile through the pain and get on with our lives, but there are a few things that help. I'd say having an understanding support system is a huge help, for me in particular.  I am so lucky that while I was working, my fiance Stephen was and is super supportive about helping out around the house and doing a lot of the cooking.  My dear cousin, who lived with me for a time, also took a lot of the pressure ...

Besides my musings on cultural stuff, I want to talk a little bit about health on this blog as well.  Especially women's health.  A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia .  This Syndrome affects 7-9 times as many women than men, and there are estimates that it affects around 8% of the population.  What is it?  Surprisingly there isn't even that much research on it and an exact cause for it hasn't been pinpointed.  But basically its widespread pain and fatigue - all the time .   Like if you had a bad case of the flu.  Or some reports I've read have said it would take a normal person 3 days of being completely sleep deprived to feel some of the effects of what Fibromyalgia feels like.  It sucks.  It sucks big fat donkey balls. In my case, I suspect it actually started around 5 years ago.  For several years before that, I had a pretty aggressive career, and on top of that, a bi-polar boss who was boinking one of m...

From a young age I always knew I was different.  Growing up with my mom's side of the family, there were 12 of us grand kids, and 9 were half Mexican, 2 were half white, and then there was me -- the lone Persian.  Most my aunts and uncles went through divorces and were on second marriages, but at least most of my cousins got to spend time with both of their parents.  The fact that I didn't even have a dad didn't occur to me until I was around 3-4 years old.  I remember one day seeing my eldest cousin doing some work around my grandma's house, and I asked him what he was doing.  He explained he was helping his dad do some repairs and it just dawned on me -- "Oh, I don't have a dad."  My older male cousins and uncles all watched out for me from then on. But I was never like anyone else in my family.  I was told they'd find me sitting in my crib just whistling to myself as a 1 year old, and by 3 I was already picking out tunes on my family's electri...

Yes, this is actually something I listed as a requirement on my online dating profiles.  Don't underestimate the importance of culinary compatibility! See, dating in my lifetime was mostly a product of environment.  I grew up in an area of San Diego called Mira Mesa, which was jokingly called "Manila Mesa" because of the large Filipino population. So naturally the guys I dated in highschool and college were mostly Filipino, with a couple of Vietnamese guys thrown in there too.  After college, after I had perfected my Japanese language skills, I started to hang out with a lot of Japanese people, which lead to dating Japanese guys (and even a brief engagement to a Japanese guy when I was 20.)  Filipinos were cool because the culture was similar enough to the warm Hawaiian culture I grew up with, but things never really got serious.  It was fun dating Japanese guys too and this helped me really learn about the culture and improve my speaking, but unfortunately mo...

My grandma's home where I grew up was the nucleus of the family, and my mom was the head chef.  And she cooked army sized portions.  Family dinners were a near daily occurrence; in our house lived my grandmother, myself, my mom, and my mom's younger brother, but my mom's two older sisters didn't live that far away so they were over all the time with their kids as well and we always had enough food for random visitors to pop by. So what kind of food did we eat? Well it was mainly an eclectic blend of Hawaiian fusion dishes, American, Italian, & Mexican cuisine, prominent emphasis on Hawaiian.  Though my grandma was Italian, she was married at the age of 14 (!! yes, I know, it was a different time then), so she learned a lot of her cooking skills from her Hawaiian mother-in-law, as did my mom and aunts.  The flavors of soy sauce and ginger were highly prominent in our kitchen, and all the girls would often form an assembly line to fold hundreds of wontons to go w...

So I have been saying for over a year now that I want to start a blog and get some of these thoughts out of my head and into the universe, so what better time to start than after I lose my job?  Yes, its ironic.  On 9/11, no less, and the one owner of the company where I was working that is super christian, lacks social skills, has a Duck Dynasty calendar and has made jokes about gay and trans people (the list goes on) decides to give me - a Middle Eastern woman -  the boot.  No, I'm not going to go all emo on this blog, I just have the ability to see some sort of irony and humor in it all. See, from the start, the whole CONCEPT of me and who I am can be confusing.  To most people anyways.  My name is Crystal Johnson, but nobody else in my family had this last name.  My mom is native Hawaiian and Italian, and my dad is Iranian.  Kind of a unique mix, right?  So how did I get a name like Johnson?  Well... where do I even start with th...