Cocoa With Christine

            For my birthday, Kayla made me a wallet out of duct tape.   So I watched her move all my cards, coins, and dollar bills out of my sophisticated, sleek Louis Vuitton wallet and into a new hot pink duct tape wallet, which would have been completely rockin’ in I were still in seventh grade.               Even though we are all smiles and “happy birthday”s, I have this paranoid feeling that I’m getting played and that someone is laughing at me.   I’m not exactly sure who is sacrificing more- my daughter or me.             I’m not sure why I’m the parent who ends up getting suckered into using all these kiddie crafts.   My husband only wore his puffy paint tee shirt made by our daughter once- and that was to the Daddy Preschool Day when all the other Dads were wearing their kids’ puffy paint tee shirts.   Doesn’t count.               And when my daughter begged him to wear his puffy paint tee shirt another time out in public, he looked into her eager, pleading face a

            I really don't like to brag, but I have great running shoulders;   so my 7th grade PE teacher Mrs. Finley told me as I ran in third to last on our mile run.    Grabbing my shoulders, she arrested them with her eyes and declared, "Great running shoulders!"             So every once in a while, when Won Bin and I chat with friends who are training for octathons or running to China daily, I meekly and modestly chime into the athletic conversation, "I've been told that I have great running shoulders."             You would think that my husband would find great family pride in having a wife with shoulders that   Marion Jones envies.   "My wife has shoulders who's blades are so quick that wind cannot resist them," he ought to be saying with his chest puffed out like a robin.                          But instead, he argues, "There are no such thing as running shoulders.   You run with your legs and feet."          

           As some of you know, I have 9 months left in my 30s. Some of my friends have said that when they turned 38 and 39, they just "considered themselves 40". NOT ME! I'm still in my 30s and I'm hanging on for dear life!                     According to Wikipedia, the United States life expectancy for an average woman runs at 80 years old. That means that when I turn 40, I'll be closer to the day of my death than from the day of my birth! I'M A GONER!!! I'M OVER THE HILL AND SLEDDING DOWN!!!    <uncontrollable sobbing>                     Recently I went to a party with a lot of friends who were mostly in their 40s. One of the guys forgot his reading glasses, so it seemed to me like the rest of the ENTIRE party offered to share their reading glasses! Is this how people socialize when they get old? "You forgot your dentures? Here, borrow mine!"                      Aside: Being that my parents in their 60s and 70

                 My mother in law (may she rest in peace) was a colorful, loving woman who loved to shower us with expensive, obscure gifts: an air purifier advertised as being strong enough to purify the air of a passenger jet, a huge mint green comforter (to remind us to brush our teeth?), an ice cream maker, etc.. . . I suppose the ice cream maker wasn’t that obscure, except that every time I went to buy ingredients to use it, I ended up wanting to buy ice cream .                 Every once in a while, she’d hit gift giving on the nose, and this one time, she bought me a Cartier watch. Having only bought $10 wristwatches from Best, I had no idea what a Cartier watch was.   This was evidenced by the fact that I pronounced the “r” in Cartier.   The correct way to pronounce Cartier is “Car-tee-yay”.   But you can’t say the “yay” like a Yankee, you need to add a soft “h” sound at the end.   If designers would just spell their names properly, like Shanelle, Shhhshaydough and Carteeya

                 Since Won Bin is working so much more, our seasons on the baseball field are on hold, which is fine with me because now I can avoid awkward situations like having   guests over and finding my son's athletic cup on the dining table.             "Haha!" I say, pretending like it's not a normal thing.             I do miss the fun spectrum of parents that I get to meet at the games- all the way from the laid back ones to the psycho ones.   You know the psychos because usually they're the ones who are yelling at their kids with the same intensity as the Hulk,   "JIMMY!   JIMMY!   GEEEET THE BALL!   GET THE BALL!   JIMMY!"   As if someone has pressed the slo mo button on the kid, you can see the light bulb slowly forming in Jimmy's mind, "Huh.   I think they're calling me. Maybe I ought to get the ball?" Then the psychos start screaming with blood spilling out of their pores, "THROW THE BALL!   THROW THE BALL! NOO

             If I were to spend 12 hours in Sephora and emerge as a multi-colored zebra, the only person in the world who wouldn’t notice would be my husband.             After I’ve spent time primping, I say, “Hey, Hon, I've colored my eyebrows thicker!   Do you like them?”   I wiggle them for dramatic effect. He answers, “You look the same.” After I’ve curled my lashes so that they reach astronomical heights- imagine Won Bin getting poked with my eyelashes when I blink- his comment is, "You look the same."   I’m pretty sure that if I said, “Hey, Hon, I got my lips tattooed three times bigger and added three lip piercings!”, he’d probably say, "You look the same.” This might seem inattentive, but in an ironic way, it’s also very reassuring. He does not love me for the molecules which surround my skin, but for who I am inside.   At least that’s what he tells me.             When we got married, Won Bin said to me, “Someday, you will get old, fat, and wrin

             I was looking for the ugliest homeless man in the Santa Monica.   I know that’s not a very Christian thing to think, but if I’m going to be honest in telling this story, that’s what I was thinking.  I was a UCLA sophomore, and I came out weekly with a bunch of collegians from church to hand out sandwiches to the homeless.   Since I had made the effort on a fatigued school day, I wanted this trip to matter, and somehow in my pooped mind, I equated finding a needy homeless man with finding an ugly one.             “Anyone need a sandwich?”   I called out at a group of them.             There emerged the ugliest homeless man I had ever seen- weather beaten, scarred, potholed skin, a bumpy nose pushed out of his raven eyes, with frizzy hair half sticking up like a jiggity top sail at the top of his head, with the rest of his frizzy, oily mass lagging in a sloppy pony tail down the back. Imagine a distant cousin of Cosmos Kramer gone really sour.   He smiled a huge crooke

                 Being that I’m a mom of four kids who have all gone through those toddler years when they say the most awkward things, I should’ve gotten used to it by now- the comments about my bumpy thighs, the counting of my moles, the giggling and jiggling of my arm fat, telling me my nostrils are shaped like a butterfly . . .   In the repertoire of my children, I have the following exclamations said around strangers:                 “Ooh!   Mom!   THAT MAN IS OLD!”                 “Look at that waiter’s moustache!   HAHAHA!   He looks like MARIO!   HAHAHA!   Bye Bye Mister Moustache Man!”                 I’ve had one kid rush up to a Goth teenager wearing all black and chains, hair spiked up a foot high, and just point at him and laugh at him LOUDLY.   That was the first and only time I pretended like I didn’t know English and told my kid in broken Korean to beat it.                 I should be used to these moments.   They really are common.   But this time, my little 3

                I love Broadway musicals and am always starring in them during performances in front of my kids.   The key to starring in a real Broadway musical is to find the Broadway character that you sound most like, that you can emulate the best.         I sound the most like Les Miserables’ Cosette.   Unfortunately not the romantic, beautiful, soprano songbird, but the ragged, sweeping eight year old French child. And no matter how many theaters I call, I can't find a theater who will let a 39 year old Korean woman perform “I Have A Castle on a Cloud”.                 I’ve always been self-conscious about how child-like my voice is.   After several family members, close friends, business people, two pastors, and my husband have mistaken me for a child on the phone, I’ve finally conceded that they probably don’t all have bad phone connections.   Just most of them do.                 Don’t get me wrong- I still laugh when my friends ask me on the phone if they can talk t