Changes
I have been feeling like I need to make changes with this blog newsletter. I have been feeling unsettled lately. That includes this newsletter. Is it because my birthday is next month? I don’t think so, but it’s possible. So, what am I doing here? Still don’t know, but the old formula had reached its expiration. I’m not saying I’ll never do a 5 Things Friday post. But that’s not what I’m wrapping this blog around.
Little Purple Potatoes is an odd name for a blog. Why would I name it that? Well, I was listening to the Radiolab podcast episode “Small Potatoes” and it’s about little things like grains of sand and almost empty tube of toothpaste. Little things that don’t really matter, but are part of life. And that’s kind of what this blog is to me. It doesn’t focus on the big, messy parts of life. I don’t talk here about genocide or abortion or any other things that make headlines in newspapers. This place is for the little things of life. Tiny distractions or petty life complaints. I thought of naming it Small Potatoes like the podcast episode, but of course the name is so perfect that it’s already being used.
Then I thought about purple potatoes. The first time I went to China was to meet my in-laws and celebrate my marriage to my husband. It was a 3 week trip that involved Beijing, Shanghai, and the town where my husband is from. The trip was busy with some highs and some missteps and I got really sick toward the end of it. But one thing that stands out for some reason in my weird brain are little purple potatoes. At a family banquet in my husband’s town was a lot of foods offered. That’s how family dinners at restaurants work. Lots of dishes that everyone shares. One of those things were little purple potatoes. They were delicious. Those same kind of potatoes were also eaten by me when we were in Beijing and I thought it would be fun to eat at a KFC there for breakfast one morning. Those potatoes do not matter at all when looking at that trip. It was a pretty big deal: first time outside of North America for me, first time on a super long flight, first time meeting my new family, first time being in a country where I did not speak the same language as most of the people living there, first time accidentally offending new family members, first time celebrating the Chinese New Year, first time having fire crackers explode in greeting me to the home of my mother-in-law at the wee hours of the morning. And I could go on and on. Those little purple potatoes mean nothing amid all of that, yet I still remember them.
So, this is for the little purple potatoes of my life. Not the big things. Not the particularly personal. It’s for the little things that pop up in life that are either delightful or annoying, but don’t really matter. I’ll leave the profound and important things for other people to discuss. I’m just trying to go through my days living each one as many people have for many years, regardless if this is the end of the world as it feels sometimes or just another chaotic period of life that’s happened in civilizations for thousands of years. Life goes on and it’s filled with lots of mundane stuff.