I was at the gym yesterday after doing some long stretching, and our in-building gym trainer was between personal training sessions, so we had a bit of small talk, which included him suggesting some strength exercises to incorporate into my routine to complement my running (he tends to always come in when I’m on the treadmill). After just a few reps with his guidance and a resistance band around my thighs, I was already exhausted and feeling sore.

We exchanged comments and grievances about health and fitness, and I told him how frustrating it used to be going to the old gyms I used to visit before we had this in-building gym, and how frustrated I used to get when I’d see people sitting in the middle of the floor, talking on the phone or texting, or even just scrolling through Instagram. The gym is where you go to work out, to exercise, to get away from all the distractions of the day, I said to him. Why would you spend all this time and money to go to a gym and not do a real workout? That just boggles my mind.

He responded that a lot of people want appearances. They want to be able to say that they “went to the gym” or “had their workout.” In their minds, when they hear the saying, “Half of winning is showing up,” they are literally thinking that they have won just by going to the gym; whether they actually broke a sweat is another story.

“You know that saying — ‘All the world’s a stage?'” he said to me while I was doing my squats with the resistance band. “Everyone is constantly in a state of acting in this world: on the street, in the office, with their families at the dinner table. But at the gym, this is really your one chance just to be yourself, to be who you really are. No one is really watching you or keeping tabs on you. It’s just you and yourself. So what are you going to do when it’s just you? That’s when the real you comes out, and if you don’t want to actually do what you came there for, it reveals a lot about you. It’s why I love working as a personal trainer. I get to be with people when their true selves come out.”

That was pretty well stated, and he’s right: at the gym or during exercise, you have nothing to prove to anyone but yourself.

At our Opticon conference closing keynote, our team invited Mae Jemison, a well respected and renowned African American female engineer, physicist, and former NASA astronaut, to speak. During her talk, she mentioned this famous quote from Helen Keller:

“Science … has found no remedy for the worst (evil) of them all — apathy of human beings.” – Helen Keller

Apathy. Apathy is evil. This resonated with me a lot, particularly in recent years when I’ve grown frustrated at the indifference or lack of care when it comes to all the terrible things happening in the world, whether it’s President Dipshit’s reign over the U.S., innocent black men getting shot and killed, the Amazon being on fire, and children being locked up cages. How can you sit around and do what you always do, live your life in your bubble, when all these things are happening around us that are just eating away at the world around us? If you aren’t protesting, raising money, and making your voices heard, then what are you doing to make the world we live in a better place to be? I feel terrified sometimes reading the news today, thinking.. is it a selfish thing to want to bring a child into this world, where even the vegetables we are eating have less minerals and vitamins than they used to because the soil they are being grown in has just been fully exhausted? I don’t know. But I think about it a lot and am concerned. While no individual can change these things on her own, it’s individual actions that can be bits of difference along the way. And it all starts with discussing the issues at hand.

As someone who has always enjoyed writing and once edited for middle and high school newspapers as a student, I’ve always been pretty anal when reviewing anything that is going to be published. I obsess over grammar, and with photos, I obsess over lighting, contrast, and brightness. Yet somehow, despite being this anally attentive to detail, I somehow missed in my last two video posts that my end title template had spelled the word “follower” with three Ls. One of my very detailed friends caught that immediately and called it out to me, and I just started groaning. How did someone like me miss something as basic as that? I was way too eager to hit “publish post.”

Chris refused to let me edit and republish, partly because re-exporting the media file would take ages, but mostly because these tiny errors show growth and can also give way to engagement and comments. So, I sucked it up in the spirit of testing and iterating, learning and growing, and have moved on…. painfully. .

I’m nearly close to wrapping up four fully edited videos for my new YouTube channel. It only took about three months of learning and working on this on and off, but I think I finally at least have the hang of basic cutting of clips, and now I need to focus more on adding variety, music, different angles, to make my videos more interesting. I think the big thing is really to do this more regularly so that I don’t forget basic tips and tricks.

I’m planning to upload the fourth video by tomorrow, so before I leave for San Francisco, and then gradually share information about this to friends and family. It’s kind of exciting, but also anticlimactic because it’s not like I have some massive PR team helping me. We’ll see how it goes…

Two years ago they came, and now two years later, they are leaving. Not only are they leaving, but they have a little one on the way and are packing their bags to go all the way back to Melbourne. It’s always exciting when friends move to New York and then sad when they leave because it feels like the friend group just starts dwindling and dwindling. At this point. I don’t even think we have that many friends left in New York to do a Thanksgiving gathering that I’d want. I’m even thinking about forgoing it this year. The friends we have remaining… I really do not want them to be under the same roof again. It was too much the last time for me, and I think I ended the night feeling more agitated than happy about how the food turned out. That’s never a good thing.

I have never enjoyed large friend groups or cliques. I learned from an early age that that just wasn’t for me. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s harder and harder to meet people I not only click with, but also who live nearby and are willing to commit time and energy to spending time together. Time is the one commodity we really need to cherish because it never feels like we have enough of it, and it’s also the one thing that most people can be quite stingy about.

We have an office for our company right in the heart of Manhattan in the Flatiron district. Any rent for a space of our size would be quite considerable, but it’s sad when we think of exactly how little time is spent in our office overall. It’s one thing to be away traveling for work or on vacation, but we legitimately have colleagues who barely come into the office one or two days a week, not because they are at meetings or on vacation, but because they simply do not want to come in. We have colleagues who live less than 10 blocks away who regularly work from home on Fridays, and somehow, it’s just acceptable. The culture in our office has definitely gone down a bit over the last year and has shifted (I would even argue that a tiny handful are trying to foster a stupid “bro” culture that we’ve never quite had before, but that is another story), but this is comical, ridiculous, and pretty unacceptable when I think of how much rent our company is paying for this extremely covetable and nice space, and the cost of the upkeep. We get free lunch when we go into the office from any restaurant in the vicinity that delivers; that in itself is a massive perk.

I don’t really know when this started to be okay, but I suddenly thought about it when I looked around the office today, which is a Friday. When I counted that there were nine of us in the office today, I was shocked, catching myself thinking, “Wow, we have a lot of people here!”

No one would ever say that about just nine people in an average office setting.

One of our least performing, least-in-the-office colleagues seemingly has been forced to resign. After not showing up at work for months, slacking on all his accounts, endangering one of our most loyal customer relationships, constantly online shopping, and even watching porn at work, he’s officially no longer here as of tomorrow.

I lament all the time that life is not fair… because it isn’t. Mass shootings happen where innocent bystanders get wounded or killed. They never asked for that. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s chilling because that could literally be any of us here in the U.S. People are born into poverty and get blamed for being “lazy” when they never really were presented with the right opportunities or role models to help them succeed. And this scumbag happened to be here the last eight months and get paid a comfortable salary to do nothing… Why? Probably because he was a white male who had favoritism with certain people higher up in our organization, and somehow, that’s all you really need sometimes – that white male privilege.

But it’s nice to know that he’s no longer here, and so maybe there really is some justice in the world.. occasionally.

I have a pretty visceral response when I hear people, usually millennial women who are young, ill-informed, and eager to dive into a trend, discuss how bad gluten is for you and your health. Because you could probably assume that they all got educated and have their BAs in nutrition science, they must know what they are talking about, right?

So someone in one of my college alumnae groups posted a pretty straightforward question that… because I am cynical, I was not expecting the responses she got. She asked what the benefit of a gluten-free diet is if you do not actually have a gluten intolerance. I was terrified of reading the comments until I realized that pretty much every single person responding was saying there was little to none.

In general, gluten-free alternatives have been shown to be worse for people from a cardiovascular perspective because they are generally less whole grain and have more sugar to make up for what we perceive to be a stranger texture or taste. It’s kind of like the same rationale that vegan food has: if you take away the goodness of the animal product, just make up for it by adding more of something else deemed “bad” for you, whether that is sugar or salt! Whole grains and whole wheat are actually really good for you, and it’s hard for me to read publications that say otherwise. It’s almost as painful as reading when all these stupid paleo diet websites talk about how evil beans are. Anyone who believes that should go to Italy or Japan and ask them what their opinion of that is.

I think for me, the biggest issue I’ve had with the gluten-free trend is that I feel the worst for people who actually do have autoimmune disorders where their bodies truly cannot process gluten; these individuals end up getting taken far less seriously because of the current trend, and they end up getting judged for just being one of the dumb millennials I referred to earlier. I also do not really believe in “good” vs. “bad” foods; I prefer to think about all foods in moderation, though the “healthiest” diet is definitely heavy on the fruits, vegetables, and legumes side. I don’t think anyone has really argued against that as of yet.

Shortly after reading this post, I was also craving bread this morning. And because our office manager is amazing, she always make sure all the bread here is whole grain or whole wheat. Even she has our health in mind.

In the 11 years I’ve been working full time, I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve never really felt bullied (okay, maybe by my second boss to a degree, but that’s another story for another time). But then, for the first time, I actually heard what could be perceived as bullying right in front of me.

My colleague was eating 4% Siggi’s low-sugar yogurt. Now, I understand most people don’t understand how these percentages work with dairy fat, but in general, 1% is like water, 2% is considered like half the fat, and 4% is considered nearly full-fat yogurt. 0% – don’t even get me started. It sticks to your throat, is super dry, and makes you feel like you are gagging for air once you are done eating it. If you eat that, we just can’t be friends. If I am eating yogurt, I try to eat full fat or low fat. Milk was never meant to be defatted, so why are thinking we are eating natural foods when happily consuming 0% fat yogurt or milk? Gone are the days when fat was demonized (hello, 90’s). Today, everyone is still stupid and wrong, demonizing carbs, whole wheat and grain, and ignorantly and blindly favoring gluten-free diets to the detriment of their well-being whether they are aware of it or not.

Anyway, so my colleague had a mean girl approach her in the office, who went on and on and on about how she had no idea how anyone could eat 4%. “Four percent fat? That’s so gross!” she squealed in her mean girl tone. “That’s like, so much fat. That’s like eating half and half in a cup. It’s not healthy.”

I just couldn’t handle it anymore and had to step in. Once people start demonizing food, I have to stand up for… well, food. “Well, actually if you really think about it, ‘healthy’ is subject to change,” I interjected. “Fat is not necessarily evil in itself. And if you think about it, 0% milk is just not… natural? Shouldn’t we be eating whole food in their whole form to reap all the nutritional value?”

My colleague eating the yogurt was quiet, but finally also made another good point: oftentimes food that is lower fat or low fat makes up for that lesser flavor by adding more sugar and salt. That isn’t good all around. So regardless, you’re not really doing your body any favors by eating a low- or no-fat anything.

I’m not a fan of people food-shaming or body-shaming. Someone needs to stand up for those who are too nice to speak up for themselves.