About Me, 2011: mayumi_msp_31_07.04.11.

I am a writer, editor, wife, daughter, hanai sister, niece, hanai granddaughter, and friend.

What I want to be most is a mother.

What I want to be second most is more published and more prolific, less good at procrastinating, and less afraid.

I live in Redwood City, California—by way of (most recent to least) ClintonHill-BrooklynHeights-Burlingame-Pacifica-NewYorkCity-Astoria-Bronxville-LosAngeles-Honolulu-Sacramento. RedCity is thirty-odd minutes south of San Francisco, and I feel absolutely zero loyalty to it: it is simply the place my husband and I have landed on this round of the East-West ping-pong game we’ve been playing for years.

I began blogging in March 2006 via Friendster and a year later moved to Blogger and have been tinkering and figuring it out here ever since. As I wrote in my last About Me, “although I arrived in cyberspace years after the trendsetters deemed blogging to be rather passe, per usual I arrived on my own damn time: late, but I'd like to think fashionably so.”

It’s a strange time for blogging these days—days of so! much! information! all! the! fricken! time! We are a wordy bunch, and frankly we all have ADD. How could we not? If you log off Facebook or Twitter or Google Reader (or Flickr, MySpace, Google+, etc.) or ignore your phone’s texts inbox for half a day, you spend the other half trying to catch up, trying to connect, trying to be present for your 1,000 best and closest “friends” and not miss their engagements, publications, promotions, babies. Presence becomes all the more ironic when you consider how far-flung your heart is, in all its pieces. Blogging has gone from an activity that a geeky-cool, highly insidery and technologically able elite performed to one that anyone who is literate can do. I include myself in the latter, not the former. Blogs have evolved: they can be high concept, specialized, encyclopedic and well-researched; they are promotion tools for companies; they are conversations between famous people and fans, or industry folk and those trying to learn from them; they can be anything you can imagine them to be.

This is not one of those kinds of blogs. This is a blog inspired by and now in tribute to bloggers like le petit hiboux—a friend in “real life,” via Sarah Lawrence College, who wrote the first blog I ever read. She wrote what I deem more of a “life blog,” which held under its umbrella the wide wonder of the world through her eyes. She broke my heart on May 17, 2011, when she announced she would no longer be blogging (incidentally, this entry is a great history of blogging, both hers individually and more generally). Like her, I don’t think my life blog fits in among all these brands and profit margins; like her, I trail off and lose my way and don’t post for months, only to follow that up with a month of posting several times a day, almost every day. This is the only way I can do it, the only way I can not quit. I have absolutely no forethought when it comes to this blog, no plotting out what it will yield for me, no vision of it being the home of The Writer Mayumi Shimose Poe, no idea of structure or shape or craft. It is a snapshot of my brain and my life and therefore appropriately messy.

So why should you be here, in this mess, with me? Why spend part of your procrastination at work sifting through?

I don’t know, really.

Maybe you like me. Maybe you like something I said, or wrote, or did. Maybe you added me to your Google Reader back in the day and now are so overwhelmed by your Google Reader, you don’t have the heart to go through and delete those blogs that no longer hold your interest.

Or maybe you are also a writer. Maybe you are also an editor. Maybe you live in northern California or once lived in Hawai’i or Brooklyn and feel, like, deep and complex feelings about those places. Maybe you know, like me, that dogs are the most awesome creatures in the whole friggin’ universe (including people). Maybe you aren’t sickened by hearing about how happy love and marriage have made me. Maybe you like to cook, be cooked for, read books, know about other awesome blogs, listen to me expound upon the people I love so hard it hurts, want to analyze my horoscopes and dreams with me, or like being surprised by a random collection of whatever the hell is interesting to me right now.

Maybe you like a shitton of words being thrown at you from time to time. Maybe concision isn’t your thing, either.

You must like swearing. Or at least not mind it.

Or maybe you also want, badly, to be a parent and in solidarity are interested in my journey trying to get there. Maybe you, like me, yearn to find a place that feels uncomplicatedly like a home but find yourself pulled in opposite directions; maybe you are also learning that the zip code matters less than the people in it, that feeling at home in a place starts with feeling at home in your skin.

No matter why you are here, I thank you--YOU—deeply. I welcome your (preferably nonanonymous) comments* and your return visits.

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* I do reserve the right to ignore any that are vicious in spirit or straight-up spam. In regard to “viciousness,” use this rule of thumb: speak your mind, but keep it kind.