Editions of Me

My brother and sister-in-law love to travel. I am the complete opposite--I'm a complete homebody, I like to stay indoors, and the unfamiliar gives me anxiety. However, one thing on our common bucket lists is to see Vietnam, especially the cities our family are from. Unfortunately, with a young child, that's not going to happen for me anytime soon (I am not traveling to another continent with a toddler, sorry), but my brother and SIL are definitely in a position to go relatively soon, and are working on planning a trip with our parents. Last week, they were showing us some travel vlogs from Americans visiting Ho Chi Minh City (aka, Saigon). Scrolling through the YouTube search results, we were seeing, well, a lot of white travel vloggers, and this had me feeling some type of way. These white Americans have been to my home country, and I have not.  In that moment, I felt a weird sort of possessiveness, and a sense of shame.  But... like... can I even call it my home country? My ...

I have long been frustrated with Facebook, and recently I decided to deactivate my account. (Not completely delete, so my FB friends can still reach me via Messenger.) It started a while ago, when over a relatively short amount of time, I went from about 800 friends down to 80. When I was still involved in roller derby, I used FB a lot for networking with other skaters and teams, as the Interleague Liaison for my own league, so there were a lot of people whom I had known casually, mixed in with people who were my best friends, people I went to high school/college/etc. with (including some former teachers), family members, etc.  I am lucky to be friends with a lot of cool people who get along with each other (and have even become good friends with each other!), but inevitably, when you put a bunch of people in a room together, there is bound to be some disagreement between people. And especially on social media, engagement is paramount, so people will share things that are clickbait...