In the last few weeks, Chris and I have been indulging on the weekends in watching several episodes at a time of Boardwalk Empire, the HBO TV series that explores the prohibition era of the U.S. in the 1920s… and elaborates on the crime, corruption, and bootlegging that was rampant during the period. The amount of violence and killing in the show is considerable, with the killings looking very real. I’ve developed a low threshold for watching things like this in recent years, but for some reason, this show is actually enjoyable for me to watch and even a little addictive.

It’s making me get nightmares, though. A few nights ago, I woke up from a dream that one of the prosecutors from the show had transformed into a honey bee and started chasing me around a room. The weird thing was that I knew she wasn’t just going to sting me; when she stung me, she would inject me with heroin and either get me really high or just dead. This is probably why it isn’t good to watch too much TV.

Because I cook a lot and have invested time and money into building a pantry that allows me to easily make dishes from many cultures, I oftentimes forget that I live in a city where it’s a rarity that people actually cook meals and have basic ingredients like salt, pepper, or garlic on hand. I’ve tried to give boxed meal companies the benefit of the doubt and be open minded about their offerings and value, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to test one out. Blue Apron and Plated are fairly mainstream, with companies like Purple Carrot coming out to capture those interested in the concept but geared specifically toward vegan customers. My main gripes are 1) each set only gives you a meal for two people, so if you spend 30-40 minutes on making this meal, you have only two servings to show for; 2) because everything is measured out exactly for these two meals, even down to the spices, this means that a lot of packaging is used, adding to excessive waste to the environment. Also, $10/meal per person isn’t that cheap to me if it’s made at home.

My friend, who uses these services, said that a better comparison is not to compare these boxed meals to buying all the ingredients yourself and making a dish since you probably won’t be spending $10/meal per person if you buy everything yourself and make it. It’s better to compare this to the cost of eating out, a situation that rarely has you spending only $10 per person, especially if it’s not a takeout spot and it’s not lunch time. That’s true, I conceded. But then I thought, if I am going to eat out, that means I won’t have to deal with food prep like cutting vegetables or cleaning up. So it’s not a completely good comparison, is it? I guess it’s the best comparison out there to be fair. When I cook, I want to have food for several days given the effort and time I’ve spent to make the dish, unless it’s something really simple and fast like eggs. I guess I will never be a customer, but at least I can see the value these companies bring in terms of getting people wanting to cook themselves and learn cooking and food prep techniques. That’s a big deal since we live in a society today that devalues homemade things and home cooking as an activity.

Chris and I went out for a long walk today and ended up in the East Village, where I finally got to try Oddfellows Ice Cream, one of the new ice cream shops that has been popping up all over the city. They are known for unique and interesting combination flavors such as miso cherry, raspberry red peppercorn sorbet, and buttermilk honey blueberry. I ended up choosing the passion fruit saffron; it was so good and so unusual to find passion fruit flavored anything in this city. Unfortunately, today I also started my period, and while the morning was tolerable with a slight cramp, the early evening exploded into the worst menstrual cramp I’d experienced since about four years ago. That passion fruit ice cream scoop did not help; if anything, it probably exacerbated my pain and made the train ride back home seem even longer and more agonizing than it was. I ignored all the warning articles about having cold and dairy at the beginning of your period because I’d never had a reaction like that before. I felt a combination of dull and sharp pain in my stomach, hot-flash-like sweats, and nausea.

We got home, and Chris prompted started searching for beddy bear, a bear he got that can go into the microwave and be warmed. The bear is filled with scented rice, and I used him four years ago to place over my stomach to calm my cramps. This bear works wonders. He finally found it after some digging, and I was finally at peace.

I know a lot of women use heated water bottles or electric blankets for these cramps, but what could be better than a soft and warm bear?

Americans have embraced Cinco de Mayo to a point where Cinco de Mayo has become a bigger celebration in America (at least, in major metropolitan cities from what I am reading) than in Mexico. I’m sure most Americans aren’t aware of what Cinco de Mayo is really about, the end of the Battle of Puebla, the victory of the Mexicans over the the French. In the U.S., it’s supposedly become a day that celebrates Mexican and Mexican American culture, or in other words, a day that gives us an excuse to eat too many tacos, burritos, guacamole, and get drunk off of margaritas and other tequila-spiked drinks.

At every company I’ve worked during during the last seven years, we’ve always had some Cinco de Mayo celebration. Tacos are catered, sometimes a pinata has been ordered, and almost always, multiple margarita machines are temporarily installed in a conference room so everyone can get tipsy together before they leave work for the day. It was fun and amusing for many years until I realized that we just use these “celebrations” as an excuse to drink and get drunk more. It’s gotten exhausting for me, and I really just don’t want to participate anymore. I sound like a Debbie downer, but what can I say? I love Mexican food, and I love, love tequila since it’s my liquor of choice, but the idea of using Cinco de Mayo, a holiday most of us have no clue about and don’t truly care about, as an excuse to imbibe and have tacos has just irritated me more and more over the years. I eat Mexican food and even make it when I want. I have my margaritas and tequila drinks when I want (and probably have more tequila than most people since for some reason, I’m realizing that people find tequila “deadly” aka hangover inducing. This is a little foreign to me). I don’t need a glorified drinking day to tell me when to have these things.

When you tell people you don’t really want to have tacos or margaritas on Cinco de Mayo, they make it seem as though you don’t care about Mexican culture (at least, my colleagues past and present have). Why is that – because they care more because they will have tacos and “margs” on the 5th of May?

I was sitting in a 1:1 meeting with one of my direct reports last week, and she was expressing her frustration that she only received a three percent pay increase this year. She says that given her long tenure with the company (almost four years, and that’s a long time at a tech startup that’s only been around for five years), she’s disappointed that her pay increase is so small, and that she really should be earning more. “I cannot be turning 31 this year and only getting a $100,000 base salary,” she said to me. “That’s just not enough.” That’s just her base salary and doesn’t include her fairly large bonus.

I told her that I empathized with her situation, but that she would have future opportunities to show her value with new accounts coming down the pipe. At that point, we could try to pitch a raise for her.

That was my empathetic, managerial side speaking. My me-and-I-am-being-real side was trying very hard to not say anything judgmental about this generation’s sense of entitlement and obsession with earning too much money for one’s age. When did a $100K base salary suddenly become small or “not enough”? When I was in my early twenties, as I’m sure most of us working in digital media do, I made an internal goal in my head to hit that coveted six-figure salary by age 30…. as in, total compensation package. Well, I got there a few years before age 30, but to be honest, it was a really underwhelming feeling. We romanticize these situations in our heads and think that these moments will be amazing or pivotal in some way, and then when they finally come, it’s not so incredible anymore. It feels like, “Oh, I got it? Okay, great. Next?” But I don’t mean that as in a “Oh, that was a small, measly sum after all.” Instead, I mean it as “Okay, awesome. Next goal to accomplish!”

But I would never say any of these things out loud — to my managers, to my friends, even to my then boyfriends. Money is important, and we need to survive, but there comes a point where more money really isn’t going to make you more happy. And that’s the exact situation with this report, but she isn’t aware of it yet.

I set up an appointment to register for my New York City ID card today at the midtown Bryant Park library, and with me, I brought my passport for photo ID and my W2 as proof of residence. Well, the entire visit ended up becoming a total snafu (for those of you who aren’t aware, SNAFU is one of my favorite acronyms, and it stands for “situation normal: all f*cked up”).

First, the W2 was not considered a valid proof of residence “because tax season has ended.” Wait, so if I brought the W2 on April 10 vs. today, it would have counted? The W2 is clearly for earnings in 2015, so if her logic made any sense, wouldn’t that just eliminate the W2 completely as a proof of residence in 2016?

Then, because my W2 didn’t count, I had to access a computer to print out a bank statement with my mailing address. But I didn’t have my library card, so I had to request my card number from an employee. The employee was slow, hard of hearing, and barely knew how to obtain my library card number. He gave me a reservation for a computer, which timed out and prevented me from logging in. Another worker sympathized and gave me a guest code. The guest code did not work. She gave me a second one. The system timed out.

Finally, I got another guest computer code to work, but now, the printer payment method didn’t recognize my credit card and insisted I did not provide sufficient payment for my print job. I was in hell. The printer payment machine needed to be reset. Finally, I printed all three pages of my bank statement, presented it along with my passport to the NYC ID workers, and was given the form to fill out. Then, it got processed, and I was told it would take 2-3 weeks to arrive.

The entire process took over an hour. This is why government systems are terrible.

On the bright side, now,  with this card, I can get one-year free annual membership to places like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, all the botanical gardens, the Public Theater, and even Lincoln Center and NYC Ballet. Who would have thought so much trouble would go into getting this single ID card.

A few weeks ago, we had a two-day long sales conference here in our New York offices when one of our sales leads, who is vegetarian, decided to order all breakfasts and lunches for the two days to be vegetarian and/or vegan. Granted, this made a lot of the team angry, and some revolted by not eating the food and either bringing their own or even going out to grab a slice of pizza. We had team members fly in from LA, San Francisco, and Chicago, and the ones from California were especially eager to get their New York pizza fix.

I asked one of them which pizza place he got his slice from, and he said he had no idea; it was just some random corner place two blocks away. “It doesn’t really matter to me,” he said as he took another big bite of his pie slice. “All the pizza here is better than the pizza we have in LA. You guys have no idea! You just take it for granted living here!”

Hm. Well, I do think there is good pizza to be had in California, especially now that foodie culture has invaded pretty much every major city, but it is true that we probably do take it for granted living here. It’s like with every great thing you have convenient access to; you don’t really know what you have until you don’t have it anymore. I guess that justifies Chris and I having pizza for dinner two weeks in a row, the second being tonight.

One of my colleagues is friends with someone who works at SoulCycle, so she was able to snag our company two free weeks of SoulCycle classes. This was actually really good timing for me because I’ve been wanting to try SoulCycle for months now, but I just couldn’t deal with forking over $34 for a single class (plus $3 for the special spinning shoe rental) when I pay about $65 per month for a full unlimited month’s worth of gym membership (which includes full equipment access, all classes that also has spinning, and full locker rooms, showers, and amenities).

I went after work today to a 6:30pm session on the Upper East Side, and it was kind of everything I expected it to be. The front desk staff was a little uppity when I told them it was my first time. They offered to sell me a $2 bottle of water (no thanks), and when I asked where the locker rooms were, the worker said they had lockers, but no actual room (it’s just a hall with lockers), so if I wanted to change, I needed to use a stall in the restroom. They gave me the awkward spinning shoes that I’d need to clip into my bike (I asked if someone would show me.. I’m clueless), and then I went off to get changed.

The class itself is high intensity, very motivational, and now I can see why some people actually cry during class. We all have our insecurities, things we are trying to hide about ourselves that we’re ashamed of and want to change, and things that we are striving to achieve. This class has an instructor that will chant and yell you through all of these things, about letting go of the negative things in life that drag you down and pushing you to get closer to achieving your goals — for spinning and for life. There are times in the class where she will ask you to close your eyes and visualize escaping all the bad and running closer to the good; it can definitely be an emotional experience. And when I was cycling and trying to escape the negative, I thought about my negative relatives and all the stupid things they’ve done to me that I want to move on from. It’s almost like therapy in an exercise class. I suppose that would be worth paying $34 per class for.

I left class drenched, sweaty, and feeling sore in some good places. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the most effective total body workout, but it was certainly a workout. I never learned how to un-clip my shoes because they told the newbies to leave them on the pedals, though. I’m not sure if I will be back, but it was definitely the most intense evening I’ve had all week this week.