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So many swimsuits (Yes, I still shop)

It’s been five months since my last post! I apologize for such a long hiatus – but, I did come back with a more exciting topic than ‘throw everything away,’, which is ;drumroll; ‘ shopping .’ Wait, what? Am I really writing about shopping? Yes, in fact, I am. After all, this blog is titled ‘minimalist shopaholic.’ And more importantly, if we buy more wisely, we can get rid of much fewer things. I love shopping. I love looking at the merchandise, comparing features, finding deals, trying things on, and giving away my hard earned money for shiny new things. I love online shopping. I love offline shopping. I love seeing my refund after returning the stuff I don’t love but bought anyways. My shopaholic-ness, as in dopamine pumping out whenever I click that ‘Buy Now’ button, directly contradicts the minimalist lifestyle and not great for my bank account, either. When I first tried minimalism, I decided to not shop at all except for groceries, paper towels, toilet paper, and soap,...
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Becoming a minimalist: A beginner’s guide.

Welcome to 2019, where we kicked off the new year by witnessing the inauguration of a monumental, once-in-a-decade TV series: Tidying up with Marie Kondo . There is nothing more satisfying than watching a tiny Asian woman who could win the world’s biggest smile contest going into someone’s home to change their lives, or at least whip their closet into shape. With all-knowing New York Times telling us that cluttering is really bad for you , and minimalists’ spirit animal being on Netflix spurring endless twitter storms and internet articles, there is no better time for the rest of us mortals to pick up a dozen of brown moving boxes, mark them ‘DONATE’ with a sharpie, and start. After years of acquiring stuff like good capitalists we are, what we see in our apartment can look anywhere between overwhelming and outright terrifying. Often we open our closet to start looking for things to get rid of, and in no time organizing turns into a one-woman fashion show showcasing 15 years ...
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How I became a minimalist. (Part 2/2)

We move a lot. I can’t use a past tense in that sentence, because every time we move, we say to ourselves that this would be for good when in fact, all of our apartments lasted less than two years. Whether it is voluntary or involuntary, moving is always such a rush — and thank god if it doesn’t turn into full-blown mayhem. I came to accept the fact that you can’t  not  rush when you move — how can you? You don’t want to pay two rents, it’s twice as expensive to hire movers across two days instead of getting everything out (or in) in one day, and no one loves the sight of brown boxes stacked up to the ceiling. So instead of taking the time to make sure we do everything right, we optimize for efficiency. We don’t think through what is the best way to pack things up, nor do we waste time marking boxes ‘bedroom’ and ‘living room’ because at the end of the day everything gets mixed up. Our trick is to get a lot of oversized boxes and just throw things in like robots...
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How I became a minimalist. (Part 1/2)

It was a hot day in New York. We’ve been in a pseudo nomad state of living for three weeks, jumping from a fancy boutique hotel in Williamsburg to a three-star hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, and finally moved to a one bedroom Airbnb in Park Slope. We just wrapped up our convenient but slightly uninspiring suburban life in California and moved to New York City. My husband transferred to his New York office, and I left my job at a tech company. We waited for our stuff to arrive for a month instead of two weeks. We had sent our daughter, Lola (3YO) to Italy to spend the summer with nonna — a unique blend of a fairy godmother and top chef, widely known as an ‘Italian grandmother’ — so that she didn’t have to tag along in the frustrating journey of cross-continental moving. If it weren’t for this precaution, those four weeks would have been significantly more challenging. Instead, I practically considered it as an extended vacation — sort of like, ‘me time, all the time’. I was going to wor...
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