Tonight, I went to my mentoring organization’s end-of-year appreciation event for some drinks, appetizers, and mingling with the program coordinators. While it was enjoyable and in a lively venue, what I didn’t expect to happen was to run into a former colleague who had left my last company just over a year ago. She was one of the very few people I spoke to and liked — at least, for decent small talk in the kitchen. And since it’s been over a year, she really let it rip when it came to how screwed up things were from an organizational standpoint, not to mention how the technology didn’t even work (and barely existed), and lastly, the level of overt sexism that was rampant there.

It’s really amazing when you’re colleagues and you have no idea that this person you speak with every week has all the same opinions that you do, and you learn them all much later. But the world keeps turning, and the sexism and delusional thinking continues.

In addition to the madness of looking for a new apartment in a place as infuriating and fast paced as Manhattan, the other frustrating thing that awaits shortly after we choose our new place is… what furniture are we going to put into it? For the most part, we’ve decided that the majority of our furniture in our current apartment will not come with us, not because we don’t like it, but more because it was bought specifically for the shape and quirks of this apartment, so if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to sell at least some of it to the next tenant who moves in here.

I visited my friend’s new apartment yesterday, and he showed me the new dresser that he got from West Elm that I thought was nice; he told me it was a good deal. I’ve never seriously looked at furniture there, so tonight, I decided to take a look at their website to see what we could potentially buy for the new place this summer. And again, I had the same shock I had back in 2008 when my then roommate and I went furniture shopping; things are THIS expensive, really? The night stand tables that I liked cost… $299 each?! How is this even possible?!

Maybe I will end up spending time on Craigslist this summer, too, in an effort to save money and get cheaper things and at the same time drive myself even crazier.

In Manhattan, where apartments are oftentimes teeny tiny and cramped with very little storage space, it’s hard to have a well stocked pantry unless you make a serious effort to keep key items and have the very bare minimum to survive in the event there’s a snow storm and all the stores are closed.

When I was growing up, our pantry was always well stocked, and the vegetable and fruit drawers in the fridge were always full of different things. You could whip up many different meals without even going to the grocery store. So when I am stocking up on grocery items, I tend to think about this and think about things I could make quickly and easily when I don’t have much time or energy to cook.

One of those things is noodles. If you have noodles – dry or fresh from the freezer, you could boil them up in less than five minutes and in that time, create a sesame, peanut, or chili based sauce and have a quick meal in a matter of minutes. And that’s what I did this morning when Chris was whining that there was nothing to eat. 🙂 I made spicy peanut sesame noodles in less than 15 minutes, and we ate and caught up on Samantha Bee’s missed episodes over the last several weeks. These are the moments when I pat myself on the back for remembering best practices for pantry stocking growing up.

Facebook has a way of making you realize exactly how crazy people are who you’ve barely been acquainted with. I’m still fairly strict about who I accept and keep as “friends” on Facebook, but a number of them I’ve kept just out of laziness and because I don’t care one way or another to see their updates or if they see mine. Then today, a picture popped up in my feed of a former colleague who left my last company last August. She was in a “I’m not sure where this is going” type relationship with this guy that hadn’t lasted very long, who she then went on a trip to Iceland with, and she said that this trip would either make or break their relationship. Fast forward five months later, he proposes, then fast forward. Then, this Saturday, they’re getting married! They’d been dating seriously for less than a year!

This is how quickly things go when a) you live in New York, and everyone here is so freaking impatient, and b) when you are past your 30s and everyone is pressuring you to settle down.

I have always believed in cooking food from scratch. It’s primarily because I just love cooking and baking in general, so the time invested in it doesn’t seem like a waste as it does to so many, but it also makes sense from a health and awareness standpoint. When you make your food, you know exactly what goes into it, and there are no surprises. There’s no hidden high fructose corn syrup, no monosodium glutamate, no disgusting artificial colorings and preservatives that have complicated and scary sounding names. You can control the amount of salt or sugar or oil or any ingredient you use.

But then I think of all the things I have absolutely zero desire to make, primarily because I’ve made them in cooking classes in the past and realized that they are hard AF to make (e.g. croissants, macarons), or because I know they are hard and laborious, and I simply have no desire to make them (Peking duck, parathas). And then, on my last trip to Jackson Heights to stock up on Middle Eastern and Indian ingredients, I found a VALUE PACK for 25 paratha in the freezer section, which I rarely look at unless I’m getting frozen vegetables as backup. 25 PARATHA FOR SEVEN DOLLARS? And all made of natural ingredients with zero preservatives? And all I have to do is heat them up in an empty skillet? Yesssssssssss.

These are the joys of the modern (and increasingly obese and unhealthy) world, of the lazy person who likes food and doesn’t want to cook it. I can kind of relate now.

In getting ramped up for job training, I’ve been encouraged to look at different people’s calendars in the company and add myself to meetings I think would be beneficial, so everything from customer calls, internal product calls, engagement calls — you name it. I’ve been told to shadow as much as possible and refer to everyone’s calendars. One of our main company values is transparency. All our calendars are visible to all so that our colleagues can know what we’re doing and who we’re speaking with and what we’re working on. That all sounds like common sense, right?

Well, it isn’t really. Because where I came from, we had different people on sales and someone who was once on my own team who refused to make their calendars transparent. So if you looked at this guy’s calendar, instead of telling you what his meeting was and who he was speaking with, it would simply block out a time and say “busy.” If you’re working at an organization where people are supportive of one another and share information to help one another, why the hell would you make your entire calendar blocked from others to see? His response when we actually debated this? “I don’t want you to see when I’m at the doctor’s or getting my teeth cleaned!” That argument is so weak because you can just mark those specifically as “private.” Your work calendar is your work calendar, not your personal calendar. Your work calendar should be visible in a healthy organization. No one is asking you to make your private non-work life visible. At the “top” of that team I started on at my last company was someone who didn’t want to instill any values about transparency or trust in his team, so he stayed out of this conversation and said everyone could make their own decisions about this. It probably wasn’t apparent to him because he was dense and self-seeking, but something as seemingly trivial as this actually speaks volumes regarding the organization he is trying to lead and the culture he wants to instill. Until the last day, there was no real sense of “team” on that team. It was really sad.

My new company is by no means perfect, and every day I’m seeing things that could use improvement, but I never entered this place thinking it would be paradise. But to be frank, it actually does feel like a sort of paradise when you compare it to the last place where I spent 3.5 years. It still kills me when I think about it that I stayed there that long.

During his test comedy show at a small, intimate venue last night, Hasan Minhaj talked about an experience on a plane where a guy who sat next to him was carrying a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 — you know, that one single phone that has been exploding and catching fire that has been banned from planes? Hasan immediately is alarmed and tells the guy that he cannot have that phone on the plane, that it’s dangerous and could explode. The guy gets really defensive and is really annoyed. He responds with questions like, just because other Galaxy Note 7s have exploded doesn’t mean his will. There are plenty of Galaxy Note 7s that have not exploded, so why are the few that have exploded giving the rest of these phones such a bad rap? You can’t just assume that my Galaxy Note 7 will be bad, too! Mine is fine!

Hasan Minhaj’s response? “Well now, my friend, you understand what it’s like to be a minority.”

Tonight, I went to see a test comedy performance by Hasan Minhaj, who I love and have seen live before in his one-man show Homecoming King, and of course, have also seen in The Daily Show. Chris couldn’t make it as he had a work trip that conflicted, and my friend who was supposed to come with me bailed on me right before the show because he was too tired to stay late enough. So it was just me sitting on my own amongst strangers.

It was actually really nice to be there on my own because I ended up having a decent conversation with an Indian-American guy who had traveled from LA for work. He works for Adult Swim, a film company, and was here this week for work. As someone who works in film and writes, he’s a huge fan of Hasan Minhaj and was on a mailing list that alerted him to this show. He looks at people like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Russell Peters as inspirations. As the son of very traditional Indian parents, with his dad working and moving their family all over the country with his career in IT, he’s very well aware of how Asians are stereotyped and hopes to follow in these writer/comedians’ footsteps.

I’m excited to see a more colorful representation of talent now and in the future since it clearly was not something I grew up with. This guy at just 24 gives me hope, just like Hasan Minhaj and Ronny Chieng do.