I don’t believe in dieting. It’s not that I think everyone should eat whatever they want, get fat and obese, and then die from heart disease and other diet-related issues, but it’s that I think everyone should eat what they want to, except perhaps limit themselves on certain things that are not extremely nutritious. Everyone I have seen who has been on a “diet” seems to end up failing in some way, and that’s usually because they are depriving their body of something they love, so they end up binging. I don’t believe in depriving one of anything they love to eat because that just seems very cruel. Everything is a “bad” food when you have too much of it. So it has always bothered me that once-upon-a-time cult diets like Atkins or the currently trendy paleo diet exclude foods that are clearly, clearly “good” for you, things like fruit or beans. That makes zero sense to me.

So I really had to bite my tongue today when our two friends informed us that they would be starting the Keto diet as of tomorrow. That means extremely limited fruit, no carby foods (say goodbye to noodles, rice, and all grains), no beans, and limited sugar. That is so tragic to me. No noodles?! NO BEANS? And even fruit for the most part is off limits? It’s like my total hell.

I actually was very respectful. I didn’t encourage them to do the opposite. I even applauded them for trying to lose weight. Just don’t ask me to follow the same diet because then I’d really have a negative reaction.

There’s a difference between weight loss and better health, though. I don’t really think this is the way.

Adam Grant has said repeatedly in presentations and talks that he’s given that countless studies done, employees do not leave companies. They leave their managers. Over seventy-five percent of employees who left their jobs voluntarily left not because of their position or view of the company, but because of their bosses. It is often times this case when you see “boomerangs” happen at companies, where employees leave a company to go to another, and eventually return to that company they left.

I personally could not relate to this given that in my last few departures, it was always a multitude of factors that contributed to my leaving: lack of desire to work in a specific type of role, pigeon-holing into specific responsibilities, lack of growth, lower than market-rate pay, lack of ethics, sexism, borderline racism, delusion among employees, lack of real product or technology that has any traction with customers of value, lack of respect for manager, manager’s manager, and general colleagues in general.

Somehow lately, though, I can relate to that statement. Adam Grant really does have it right, doesn’t he?

I’m never going to like football. I understand why it’s interesting and why people get obsessed about it, but the hype around Super Bowl every year is never going to be something I will get into. It doesn’t help that for four years, I had to work late for weeks leading up to the day of the Super Bowl and on the night of the Super Bowl (that is the world of online advertising when you have a major car brand as your customer).

So it grates on my nerves to hear a very stereotypically male colleague of mine complain for days on end that he and his friend, whose shared life-long dream has been to go to the Super Bowl, may not be going because all the tickets have exceeded their $3,500/ticket price ceiling. $3,500 for a game that lasts a few hours? That money could be spent on a trip to another part of the world that is fascinating that will actually expose you to something different, something that might actually enrich your life.

Football just makes you stupider, more brainwashed, and ignorant of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the resulting disease of years and years of head trauma from participating in a sport as violent as football.

Because this past Christmas was the first time Chris and I had our own Christmas tree in our apartment, he humored me and allowed us to keep it up through the end of January. We haven’t turned the lights on it much in the last week, but it’s still fully decorated with all its ornaments, the sturdy and the delicate. He insisted that by February 1st, we had to take it down and put it away (it’s fake for a cleaner apartment, plus it’s more economical and environmentally friendly). It’s another year to go through before we can get to the glory of Christmas again. Now, we just have to find a home to put it in since we’re really pushing at the limits of our closet space. I actually think that even though it’s not Christmas season anymore, having it up, along with a few other Christmas decorations around our TV, makes the apartment seem a bit more festive and homely.

Even though I am not in sales, my role is so intermingled with sales that sometimes, the stresses they face with meeting their numbers at the end of a quarter tends to spread to me. It’s never been more apparent than at my current company, which makes sense because for the first time, I actually work at a company where we really are closing deals and driving revenue and success for our customers.

So you can imagine how frustrating it is when about four different people are messaging me, texting me, and emailing me for renewal updates. It’s as though there’s no central way to share information and no streamlined method of disseminating the same piece of knowledge just once. We’re supposed to be a tech company, yet like with all companies, the biggest area of frustration always comes back to what seems to be the most basic: communication. We’re still working on it. Or at least, some of us are while others are just having their hair set on fire.

Today, we had brunch downtown with two of Chris’s brother’s friends who have moved here from Hong Kong (and are originally from Melbourne). Before they moved here, Chris had never met them, and this was my first time meeting the guy in the couple. It was hilarious to see exactly how much he has in common with Chris’s brother. The two of them have been friends for over ten years now, and they’re so similar. They both love sport. Their intonations are similar, and how they tell stories (long-winded, weaving in and out irrelevant past stories) are the same. Their Australian accents even sound the same. Even the way they pause and say, “uh/um” is the same! It’s as though I met Ben’s white Australian equivalent.

And after our brunch ended together, his wife says, “Yes, Chris is just like Ben,” but she’s obviously joking. They’re quite opposite, and the “opposite-ness” is even more pronounced when Chris is there.

“Do you think you’ll settle down here?”

“Are you planning to stay here and raise kids?”

“Do you foresee yourself going back to San Francisco and settling down?”

The question of “settling down” is constantly being asked of me; by friends, friends of friends, colleagues, Chris’s colleagues, Chris’s family and friends — you name it. Chris hates the idea of “settling down” because it’s almost like you’re resigning yourself to a life of monotony and the same ol’ same ol’ every single day, and that grates on his nerves.

So, it’s sad when we hear that two good friends of ours are leaving to “settle down” across the country in the Sacramento area. One of them will be leaving in a few weeks to start looking for a new job, and once he gets it, his wife will be joining him out there. It’s a bittersweet time for us given how much fun we’ve all had together the last two years.

But that’s life, right? People come and go, and especially in a city like New York, there are plenty of transients. That’s what cities like this are made of. We get bored of the people who are New York lifers and are attracted to the people who came here from other parts of the country and world. I suppose that’s how Chris and I came together.

We’re not really “settled down” yet. Maybe we never really will be. I hope we can find other people who aren’t yet “settled,” though, here.

One of the worst things about moving into our new apartment was having to deal with Con Edison, the crappy monopoly of an electricity and gas provider, again. While living on the Upper East Side, we paid a flat amount for electric and gas to our landlord, so we were completely oblivious to all the fluctuations, especially in the summer when we’d have the air conditioning on a lot. It was a really nice perk to not have to deal with yet another bill to pay, yet another provider to gauge us for money when we have literally zero other options to choose from.

So I was pretty mad when I received my bill for electricity late last month to find that it was 25 percent higher than what we paid for the average summer bill. That made zero sense. Why would the bill be higher during the winter than during the summer when gas, which provides us heat, is supposedly covered by our rent? Our building manager told me that they pay for the gas that provides the heat, but we pay for the unit that circulates that heat through the apartment. That still should mean that the bill should be higher during the summer than during the winter. And the bill breakdown was the stupidest: it said something to the effect of, “your bill is higher than average. Three percent can be attributed to weather changes, and 20 percent can be attributed to ‘miscellaneous.'” What the heck does “miscellaneous mean?

I called ConEd to speak with one of their service representatives, who basically told me that our bill is anticipated to be higher during the winter due to using our heat. We do not pay for gas in our building, I said to him. That makes no sense. You can see it right there in the bill — electricity only. I told him the inane breakdown on the actual bill, which contradicted what he literally just said, and he insisted it was correct. “Ms. Wong, we double checked your meter. Your bill is correct. Do you have any other questions for me?” I wanted to strangle the guy.

I just don’t get how people in services roles can be so flippant and incompetent. I work in a services role at a technology company, and if I operated that stupidly, I’d be out of a job.

This year for my birthday dinner with friends, I decided for the third year in a row to drag everyone out to Elmhurst again, and this time, it would be for Indonesian food. There really isn’t any Indonesian food in Manhattan, and even if there were, it would be much more expensive than in Elmhurst. With our party of nine including tax, tip, and a lot of Thai iced teas, we managed to spend just $22/person on dinner tonight. For the amount of food we had, I doubt we could have had a cheaper meal anywhere else. That’s the thing when you organize a group dinner: you want a place that is affordable and isn’t going to make anyone feel poor after.

No one gets excited about Elmhurst, but I still do because of the variety of the cuisines and food, the low price points relatively speaking, and… well, this was my original ‘hood when I moved to New York City. So it feels comfortable to me, like another home neighborhood in my heart. Even though I’m not close to my cousin who is here in New York, he’s actually the reason I even considered this neighborhood in the first place because he lived here, and I feel like I got a more “local” experience because of that. Locals know and would consider living in Elmhurst; people who move to New York for the first time would never even be aware that it existed. And.. it’s kind of their loss because of how rich the culture is there. I’m proud to have lived there for my first four years in New York and have zero regrets.

As an adult, I’ve gradually started learning to like a lot of things I never really was interested in at all as a child or teen. These things range from oysters (raw and cooked), stinky French cheeses (I love blue cheese now!), mustard (I especially like the French mustards… American mustard is still pretty boring to me), fois gras, and now, caviar. Caviar is one of those things that I’ve enjoyed the very few times I’ve had it, but I cannot really say that I fully appreciate it enough to say, spend $120 on a little tin of it every other month. Chris took me to L’Appart, an intimate Michelin-star rated French restaurant downtown in Brookfield place, to celebrate my birthday tonight, and one of the things they are known for is their caviar selection as a course you can choose before the actual tasting menu. The French caviar was served in its tin on ice, along with four long brick-like Brioche toasts that oozed with buttery richness, and a log of different toppings ranging from whipped avocado, hibiscus-pickled cippolini onions, to a chive-specked creme fraiche.

Each bite of caviar, on a spoon made of pearls, no less, was creamy, a bit briny, and decadent. I don’t know how we as human beings decided that fish eggs would be such an expensive delicacy, but I could certainly get used to enjoying this every now and then as a pure indulgence. Who knows what nutritional value these things have, anyway?