🛋️ Read here:
The 4AM Doorbell Olympics: How to Lose Sleep and Alienate Neighbors
open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

#writing #substack #essays #humor #boundaries

4/4 "The Milk Story (Remastered 2025)" - for anyone who grew up in the DMZ of their parents' ideologies.
littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-milk-s...

3/4 It's not really about the milk. It's about being caught between two contradictory love languages and not knowing how to disappoint neither parent.

2/4 Mom (post-war Taiwan, one of 13 kids): "Feed him! Love = food!"
Dad (ex-military health obsessive): "He's getting fat!"
Me: 😰🥛

Warning: contains cache invalidation, Claude hallucinations, and a four-tier privacy system for your diary.

If you’ve ever juggled aging parents, medical jargon, and a sense of humor held together with duct tape and sarcasm… this one’s for you.

It’s about caregiving, cultural translation, and the surreal moment when your immigrant parents become your responsibility—and somehow you’re the one explaining health insurance and pill organizers that may or may not end up storing jewelry.

It’s not a rage-post.
It’s a post-mortem.
On misalignment, fake “happy paths,” and what it’s like to realize you cared more than the system had room for.

“This wasn’t a failure. It was a flashlight.”
littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-happy-...

it was supposed to be a play on "elephant in the room" but then i typed on pink elephants and oh nvm

5/ full story here if you want to read about how time becomes more relative than einstein thought when you're on unemployment: littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/4-brutal-l...

4/ wrote about the messy parts nobody talks about - especially when your tech career path looks more like a jackson pollock painting than a straight line. also there's an ai-generated photo of me in a pink elephant costume because why not at this point

3/ the real kicker? watching my former students get hired faster than me. if you need me, i'll be updating my linkedin status to "professional resume distributor and part-time existential crisis manager"

2/ some highlights: my 1,990 linkedin connections transformed into the mariah carey "i don't know her" gif, i spent 6 hours writing a federal resume that became useless overnight, and my mom keeps asking about a broken dryer. time is weird when you're jobless

Now available for paid subscribers on Substack:

The Seagull Story, by @ErnieAtLYD open.substack.com/pub/littleye...