It’s the first day of spring today, which is the biggest joke at the office because New York is expected to get five to six inches of snow before today ends. The snow is not supposed to continue until tomorrow though, yet the program coordinator at my Saturday mentoring program has cancelled tomorrow morning’s session and has decided to reschedule for Easter weekend.

This made me really annoyed today, not just because I won’t be here Easter weekend, but considering the fact that it will be Easter weekend, didn’t he have the foresight to realize that both mentors and mentees may not be able to make it that weekend? We cancelled this session when it wouldn’t even be snowing on this Saturday, yet our very first session, it was snowing quite heavily on that morning, yet they still held the session. There’s not much rational logic that goes into making these decisions seemingly. I e-mailed him back and told him I thought it was a bad idea to reschedule for the Saturday before Easter given what day it precedes, yet he didn’t respond.

I’ve been experimenting with different recipes and methods of cooking in the last few weeks to not only make more use of the new and shiny slow cooker I bought, but also to incorporate more ways of eating beans, legumes, seeds, and other non-meat forms of protein, especially after a trainer at the gym hinted that I probably need more protein in my diet given what I’m trying to achieve (how often does an American get told s/he needs more protein?!). I also wanted to have more smoothies for breakfast, so after adding in chia seeds for protein, I’ve also been putting in spinach to make my smoothies green. You can’t have too many vegetables in your diet.

Chris didn’t seem to appreciate this idea. When he came back from his trip to Austin for South by Southwest, I had a glass of just blended green smoothie on the counter waiting for him. In it was a mix of orange-peach juice, coconut water, a couple frozen pineapple chunks, pear, tangerines, chia seeds, spinach, and ice. The dominant flavor of the smoothie by far was orange/citrus/pineapple. You can’t taste the spinach at all. But he didn’t seem to agree with me. After one sip, he said he couldn’t have anymore and that this was “too healthy.” He happily ate the pureed black bean soup I made, though.

Well, here’s to trying to convert him. 🙂 My green smoothie post was clearly popular on Instagram, as I think it’s one of my top liked posts ever.

Belonging to a gym in New York City in general is very, very expensive. Unless you are extremely lucky and your company owns a gym that you can either use for free or for a tiny nominal amount, chances are that if you have a membership, you’re paying somewhere between $95-200/month. I’m paying far less than that, but it’s because I pre-paid in advance, and I also get a discount per month through my company’s health insurance company. I was reminded of how exorbitant New York City gym memberships are when I was on the bus going up to Harlem on Saturday, and a woman runs into a man that she is acquainted with as she boards the bus. They are exchanging information about fitness (it looked like she was on the way to the gym given the way she was dressed), and she tells him that she “only” pays about $195/month for her gym membership plus ClassPass, the monthly membership that allows you to go to any specialized fitness studio for an unlimited number of times in a month for $99.

I’m happy for her that she seems highly motivated to keep active and would wake up early on a Saturday morning to hit the gym, but only in New York City would anyone preface $195/month for gym memberships with the word “only.” This city is way too expensive.

My friend and I went to a wedding gown sample sale down in SoHo today, and I knew I was not going to enjoy my time much there when I arrived half an hour before they opened, and I ended up being person #29 there. Yes, 28 people got there before me, and I was half an hour early. The doors were going to open in 31 minutes. It was mostly women in there, of course, with one dopey groom and one man who seemed to be one of the bride’s best friends. It didn’t help when I closed the door behind me, and a woman lightly told me that the end of the line (it looked like a mass crowd to me) was that way.

I tried on three dresses when I was in there, only one of which could have potentially been a dress I’d seriously consider, and the other two were more, “Well, I’m here, so what the hell?” try-ons. Then my friend noticed the damages to these “sample sale” dresses. Even if they were “discounted,” after alterations, they’d probably cost as much a brand new dress. So we left the dresses with the sales assistants, who immediately “released” the dresses to the other bridal vultures.

The wedding industry is really out to get me. Maybe I really should have just bought a dress while I was out in San Francisco. New York may be a worse place to buy a gown because of the insane hoards and the sky-high rent.

It’s always there. And it continues to be there even though I don’t want it to be. Every weekday morning, whether it’s 6:40am or 7:15am, when I am getting out of the 42nd street/Times Square stop along the yellow lines to go to the gym before work, I’m thinking about the workout ahead of me and how productive I’m going to during the day given how early I’ve woken up. And then at the same corner, no fail, that smell wafts towards me — the strong, unmistakable smell of fresh, crisp, fatty bacon, the scent lingering in the air around a tiny food cart set up just a block from the subway station.

I always scowl every time I start smelling that delicious smell. It’s such a tease. It’s like a reminder that yes, I came on an empty stomach to the gym, and no, I did not get to eat any fatty bacon before I got there. No fatty bacon for me — just a healthy workout awaits!

Why can’t the guy who runs that cart realize that he’s parked the freaking cart just across the street from the gym where all of us are just trying to do the right, healthy thing to start their day, and all he is doing is creating a distraction?!

Tonight, despite being a snow day at work, which resulted in the office being closed, I went to a macaron making class that Chris got me for Christmas. The snow storm wasn’t as bad as everyone anticipated (because New Yorkers are neurotic and over hype everything weather related), but despite that, only five out of eight participants who signed up for this class showed up. That was fine by me because that just meant we had more personalized attention, more space, and most importantly, more macarons to take home.

Before the class began, the students and I made some small talk with the pastry chef, who is from a small town in Brittany, France. I knew he was French, which was clear from his very thick accent, so I asked him where he was from in France. As soon as he said Brittany, I said, “That’s the place where kouign amann originates!” He laughs and says, “Wow, you know that!” He then proceeds to tell us how annoyed he is when he meets a lot of Americans, who just assume that because he is French, he must be from Paris. “That’s like when Americans travel and they tell people they are from the U.S., and people were to respond, ‘oh, you’re from New York City!'”

People say the dumbest things in this country.

The funniest thing about big snow storms in New York is how much people panic. Snow is a normal part of winter life here on the east coast, yet it seems that even locals tend to freak out about this. Chris and I went to Fairway to get some routine groceries (fruit, vegetables, dairy), and as soon as we got in, we realized how mobbed the place was because there were no shopping carts or baskets in sight. The “No Carts” line wrapped around the produce area, and I overheard one of the workers tell a customer that unfortunately, they had run out of cauliflower. When a supermarket has run out of cauliflower, which is hardly the vegetable of choice, you know for sure that people are in panic mode and just grabbing everything they possibly can in sight that will keep them fed while they are hiding out from the world.

As my friend so succinctly said on Facebook today, “Most of the country rushes to grocery stores before a blizzard because it can take a week for streets to get plowed. New Yorkers can get around fine, but they shop before a snowstorm because they keep no food and would go hungry in a day.”

I went to my first in-person session of a mentoring program I am doing for high school students tonight. The goal for this program is to get every single mentee into college. That may not seem like a big goal if you come from some privileged middle class background the way I did, but after I came here today, I realized why this goal would be so ambitious.

Every mentor is assigned with a mentee, and usually when you begin, you start with them when they are in the 9th grade and stay with them as a mentor through their 12th grade and final year. I knew my mentee’s English wasn’t amazing from the e-mail exchanges we’ve had, but when we spoke in person, I realized that she almost never speaks English. I asked her about her classes, and she said that every single class is taught in Spanish, as that’s her native language. How is this possible, I thought in my head. This is a public school in the U.S. How could every single one of her classes be taught in Spanish? “What about English class?” I asked her. “What language is that class taught in?” “Spanish,” she said. “English is taught in Spanish.”

So you get taught English in Spanish? I asked. “Yes,” she responded. “We mostly speak Spanish in English, but when we are reading text, we read in English.” No wonder her accent is so strong and she is so hesitant to speak in English. It’s because even in school, she doesn’t have any real place to just practice and speak in and be surrounded by English.

When I was learning French in high school, very little English was spoken in class. When we needed to figure out what a word meant, our French teacher spoke using French to explain what the word meant. In Chinese in college, especially in China, virtually no English was spoken. You learned Chinese by using Chinese and being forced to speak and listen to it.

I am so confused and sad now.

Lonely Planet is pushing Queens as their number 1 recommended tourist destination for 2015. I find this so comical given that I lived there for four years, my cousin lived there, hated it, and complained about how dumb people were there (he thinks everyone else is the problem, not him, though, so not much to take seriously there), and it hasn’t reached anywhere near the levels of gentrification that Brooklyn has seen due to the hipster invasion. The “cool” neighborhoods in which to live in Queens are Astoria and Long Island City; anywhere else is considered foreign to the unknowing white person moving here for the first time who wants something that is affordable but still “in.” When I tell people I lived in Queens and they ask me the neighborhood, I respond “Elmhurst,” knowing that 98% of them won’t have any idea what I am talking about. If they know what I am talking about, chances are that they are either Asian or Latino, or they have Asian or Latino relatives/friends who lived there or still live there.

Well, guess what: that’s the real Queens, not the Queens made prissy by hipsters who claim to not want to be yuppies and the yuppies who want somewhere clean and free of immigrants to live. In Elmhurst, I was happy with massive apartment space, a full sized, granite kitchen with all new appliances, endless ethnic eating options for cheap, affordable groceries, a safe area at all hours of day and night, and incredibly affordable rent. Yes, I had a 45-50-minute commute door-to-door to work, but in the end, the trade-off was worth it to me. I explored a neighborhood that most others don’t even think about or know when they think of New York. And I’m more knowledgeable about the “real foodie” places in Queens than the average person who claims to know this city’s food.

I sat at lunch today with my friend and two of his friends who brought up the Lonely Planet Queens mention. One of the girls said, “I like to walk through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but I wouldn’t really do that in Queens. There, I have to have a destination, like a restaurant I want to go to.” I can understand why people would say that, but at the same time, if I told her of an area of Brooklyn she probably has no clue about, like Bensonhurst or Bay Parkway, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want to wander the streets there, admiring gorgeous brownstones… because while there are brownstones there, they aren’t necessarily the picturesque ones she’s probably imagining from chic areas like Park Slope or Cobble Hill. Gentrification is the reason places like Brooklyn are becoming socially acceptable to live in and be a tourist in. Certain pockets of Queens are being gentrified, but I think that if the immigrant population gets pushed out too much there, what I love about Queens in terms of variety, culture, and cuisine will be gone. I never wanted it to become hip. I want business to get better though and people to more widely recognize it as an extremely important part of food and culture in New York, though, so maybe I can’t have both.