Monthly Archives: June 2016

Cousin’s cousin dysfunction

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I received a text from my cousin’s cousin in Montreal letting me know that he’d be in town for work for the next week and a half, and he’d like to meet up if possible. He asked if I could let his cousin, our mutual cousin, in Brooklyn know (don’t wonder why they don’t have each others’ contact information but I have both), so as a courtesy, I did. I let our cousin know we’d be meeting up Sunday late afternoon and evening for dinner. Our cousin’s response was predictable.

“That doesn’t work because <my toddler son’s> music class is at 4:30, and then he has to go to bed at 8:30. So if Andrew wants to see us, he’ll need to come to our neighborhood (in Bensonhurst, really the boonies of outer Brooklyn where no hipsters exist just yet) and have dinner with us,” our cousin responded via text to me.

This is exactly what happened when Andrew’s sister and her family were visiting New York this time last year. Our cousin wanted his entire life accommodated and asked for his cousins to travel over an hour to his neighborhood in Bensonhurst to have dinner, and I rejected it. We should be accommodating them, I said then. They are visiting. You don’t make visitors go to places visitors don’t ever want to go to. Their lives do not revolve around yours. And your life is really boring, so why would they want their lives to accommodate yours?

In this case, I said I would see Andrew on Sunday, and if he wanted to see Andrew, he’d need to connect with him directly and arrange another time.

Some people never change.

10,000 steps

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I’ve been really slacking off this week and haven’t gone to the gym even once. I’m aiming to go tomorrow so that I don’t feel like a complete bum, but I thought about how my Fitbit is essentially tracking all my lazy days. If my Fitbit doesn’t have at least 16,000 steps at the end of a work day, it means that I didn’t go to the gym and was being lazy that day.

I can easily get to 10,000 as long as I take a walk during lunch that lasts about 20-30 minutes once I add in my walk to the subway in the morning, then my walk from work to Grand Central, and then from the subway stop to home. But I have to walk even if I didn’t want to since I take public transit. That made me think about how hard it must be for people who live in areas that are not walkable where people primarily rely on cars. How would they get to the recommended 10,000 steps a day without doing some intense exercise?

No wonder the obesity rates are increasing steadily in this country.

Cooked TV series

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A colleague of mine told me about the Michael Pollan Cooked TV series on Netflix, so I started watching the episodes and loved them immediately. I’ve read a number of Pollen’s books, including his bestsellers Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and I completely agree with his opinions on food and the importance of knowing where your food comes from and being able to prepare healthy, simple meals. He really delves into the science behind food and talks a lot about how eating has evolved over time, and that’s what makes his writing and documentary-style TV series so interesting and educational.

In one of his episodes, he shows a clip of an Indian woman preparing a dosa lunch with all the fixings for her husband. She explains that dosa takes a lot of time and energy to make, but in the end, it is worth it. He notes that in the past, people spent a lot of time preparing their foods that they ate, and they valued that time. Today, people do not value the time spent cooking and want to minimize it as much as possible, but in the process of doing that, the nutritional value of the foods we eat today have diminished — this includes meats (animals eating grain as opposed to grass, which reduces the nutritional value of the meat) and breads (heavily processed with vitamins and minerals added back in… as opposed to being made the traditional way where these nutrients were naturally occurring, and is also very likely the reason so many people have celiac and gluten-related diseases. So time spent cooking has decreased while nutritional value of food has decreased.

The funny thing is that while re-watching this episode, I’m in the process of soaking lentils and fenugreek seeds for dosa this weekend. I’m like that older Indian lady preparing lunch for her husband, just not Indian. 🙂

Series of unfortunate (fake) events

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I’m pretty certain that no matter what I do, no matter how satisfied or unsatisfied I am with the state of my life, I will always be plagued with really bad dreams. Unfortunately, they usually come in a string, so I will be annoyed waking up many many mornings in my future forever. Maybe this is just a sign that my subconscious needs to be cleared and that I need to see some medium who can clear my head completely.

In one dream over the weekend, someone was plotting to kill my brother. Ed knew this, so to prevent this man from killing him, he beat him to the punch and jumped off the bridge. This didn’t really make me happy.

In another dream, two of my best friends are gossiping about me, and I am overhearing their bad words about me when I’m not supposed to. I’m conflicted about what to say, so instead, I pretend I hear nothing and come meet them. I want to gauge their eyes out, though.

Then last night, I dreamt that Chris bought an old fixer-upper house that I did not approve of without letting me know, and he hoped that it would be our primary residence. The house is a three-story, one family home, and there’s no other way I could describe it other than that it looked eerie and seemed like the classic haunted house. Oh, and when I opened the front door, my parents were there. Somehow, they found out Chris had purchased this property and decided they would move right in and make themselves right at home. We’re living with my parents?!

Tomorrow night: what’s it gonna be?

 

On being a manager

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For over three years at my last job, I managed at times up to five direct reports, and it was both rewarding and absolutely exhausting. Being responsible to hire and fully train employees who know nothing about your industry and your work is more than a full time job, but that was what I did. And for the first over 2.5 years at this current job, I was relieved of this responsibility as an individual contributor to my team. Once I got promoted, the management responsibilities began again.

The best part of being a manager is being a mentor to direct reports who welcome your help and want to learn from your expertise. They want to get better, and they take it on themselves to become better employees, better people. The worst part about being a manager? Managing people who don’t want you as a manager, don’t want a manager period, and want to do whatever they want, whenever they want, even if that means coming into the office only 40 percent of the time and feeling like she doesn’t need to justify it to you “or anyone else.”

Boy, is this fun.

Farmed fish

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For a long time, I wouldn’t buy fish to cook at home unless it was wild. Wild fish is the healthiest, most news articles touted, since these fish are eating what they are supposed to eat and we know they aren’t being fed grain and getting pumped chemicals that fish aren’t supposed to have. I told a friend of mine this a while ago, and he responded to me, “Wild isn’t as important as sustainable.” I thought about it a long while, and I realized he was probably right. Just because farmed fish in the U.S. may be questionable, or especially the farmed fish in China (the video images I’ve seen of this are by far enough to make anyone go off of eating farmed fish forever), doesn’t mean that farmed fish in countries with sustainable and environmentally friendly fish farming practices like New Zealand or Iceland are bad or unhealthy. The demand for fish is high, and only relying on fish in the wild isn’t a sustainable practice (plus, wild fish is generally very expensive). So I bought farmed arctic char raised in Iceland and roasted it for dinner tonight. I’m getting over my farmed fish fears little by little.

And as if all the fish I’ve eaten in restaurants in this country were wild!

Di & Viv & Rose

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Tonight, we went to see a show at Theatre Row called Di & Viv & Rose, a play about three women who were roommates in college in England and remained friends through adulthood. All three are very different in terms of their life outlooks and personalities, and throughout the play, we witness a lot of arguments over many misunderstandings, assumptions, and gaps in knowledge that each has about the other. In the final argument between the two remaining living women, I realized how real the argument they were having was. I think the majority of all the arguments I’ve ever had with my female friends have been around some misunderstanding, assumption, or misinterpretation stemming from a conversation, e-mail, text message, or some other form of communication, and it really made me think… geez, are we women so complicated and convoluted.

One yells at the other for never calling on the anniversary of her rape. The other says, I had no idea you wanted me to call, but I thought about calling you. The first replies, It doesn’t count that you just thought about calling me because you never actually called in the end; you should have known to call me! Well, why didn’t she just communicate that to her, then? Sure, it’s easy as someone looking in to make a statement like that, but I know I’ve had similar situations where I’ve gotten mad at my friends over assumptions I’ve made, and they’ve done the same with me. We want our friends and lovers and family to be mind readers, to know what we want, even if we haven’t explicitly communicated it to them. Then, when they don’t do what we want which we never voiced, we get angry at them for never doing said action.

I don’t know how we became this way.

New doctor

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I finally had my doctor’s appointment with a general practitioner today, and it went pretty well. She had great “bedside manner,” asked lots of questions about my life and family history, and was very personable and took her time. I didn’t feel rushed at all. The nurse drew my blood for the lipid panel, thyroid, and other usual tests, and they (sigh) gave me proper Tdap vaccine (take that, whooping cough/pertussis). The doctor asked many questions about my family and my own health.

After discussing my brother and mom, the doctor asks, “Have you exhibited any symptoms or bouts of depression or paranoia?”

Me: “No, not that I’m aware of. I am fine. I think I am fine… But don’t we all think we are fine?”

She smiled and continued writing.

I thought about that on the walk home, though. Don’t we all think we are fine? When do you have people strong enough in your life to point out when you really do not seem fine and need help, people who don’t walk on egg shells and just pretend that everything is fine to keep the peace?

Tahitian

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I met up with my friend tonight over ramen and tsukemen, and we chatted about everything that has happened since the wedding, which is really the last time I spend a good amount of time with her. She showed me this bag that she had bought from a thrift shop and how she customized it to reflect who she was. One patch she sewed on was a cut out of the state of California, with a earthquake marker over San Francisco, which is where she’s from. The second patch was from Air Tahiti Nui, the airline she flew when she went to Tahiti for Tahitian dance with her friend a year and a half ago. She was very proud of her customized bag and declared, “This bag represents me.”

I get how the thrift store bag represents her since she loves used clothing stores and used goods, and she is obsessed with getting good deals. I understand San Francisco, obviously since she was born and raised there and always misses the burritos there. But the Tahiti thing? She’s been there once, and one of her close friends who she traveled with is from there. But how does Tahiti, a place she visited once, represent her? I guess I can make sense of it since there hasn’t been a single time since that trip when she has not mentioned Tahiti or waxed on and on about it, whether it’s the food, the water, the culture, or the languages spoken there. But to say that it represents her seems a little far fetched?

“Everything looks the same”

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I’ve spent the last 24 hours here in Fort Lauderdale for an all-day client meeting that happened today. Truthfully and as spoiled as this sounds, I rarely look forward to my work trips down to Fort Lauderdale because they are always for meetings that I know will rarely have concrete next steps. They are those froufrou meetings that end up being more about “putting a face to a name” and have nothing actionable that comes out of them. However, there are three things I like about these trips: 1) waking up for the sunrise on the east coast, since Fort Lauderdale is on the east side of Florida, 2) getting my trusty Publix sub sandwich at some point during my Florida stay, and 3) getting more American Airlines miles…. Mmmm, miles.

This afternoon during our Uber ride from the client’s office to Publix and finally to the airport, my colleague said to me, “I feel bad saying this… and this may just be me, but does everything in Florida really just look the same?” I’ve only been down here to see Fort Lauderdale and Tampa for work, plus Orlando for fun about six years ago…. but I realized… what she is saying is partially true. Florida feels like a lot of white people, boats, beaches, strip malls, and way too many chain restaurants and stores. Is it just us?

Then, I sat on a plane in first class with a Republican who is originally from Boston but relocated to Fort Lauderdale with his wife and is now raising three children, and he actually said this to me himself. “Everything here looks the same. If you want your children to have culture and be aware of the world, make sure you travel if you live here and don’t just have them stay here. They will be so sheltered and world-stupid.” Hmmmmm.