Yesterday, I met a colleague from my last company for a tea break. We hadn’t seen each other since I left the company, which by now, was over two years ago. I think we had made several attempts, but she had to cancel on me last minute a number of times. And when that happens after a certain number of times, I kind of stop trying. But then, she’s been really kind and generous and has donated to my AFSP fundraising drive for all these years, even with nearly zero communication with me, so I figured I would try to make it finally work. And we finally did.

She’s still at that company, despite how dysfunctional it is. She’s in a smooth-sailing mode, and I certainly know what that is like. Two rounds of predictable layoffs have happened since I left the company, and they’ve gone through a lot of rebranding/re-visioning work. Many of the delusional people I knew while there are still working there, still believing that they work for a real tech company, which is really amazing to me. When I look back on how much I learned about software as a service since coming to my current company, I realized, slowly but surely, exactly how terrible it was at the last place.

It was an awful place to work, but at the end of the day, it was a stepping stone to get where I am now. I don’t really have any regrets about them. Where I am now is in no way perfect, but it’s closer to being “normal” than the other place ever could have even attempted to be. There are so many horrendous places to work out there that are far behind the times, even in 2019 today, that after we parted ways yesterday afternoon, I felt incredibly lucky to be so far away from that place and where I am today.

I was shocked yesterday when I read an Eater article that revealed the beloved pizza joint DiFara’s in Brooklyn had forcibly closed due to tax evasion. They owed New York State in excess of $160,000 in unpaid tax bills, and as such, could no longer operate until they would pay off their debts. I guess this doesn’t surprise me given that the business is cash-only (the biggest red flag that they likely under report taxes for obvious reasons), but it was shocking nonetheless given how popular they’ve been for longer than I’ve even been living here.

But what actually disgusted me was that someone actually started a Go Fund Me account to HELP them pay their tax bill. I just couldn’t believe how stupid people could be. So, let’s get this straight: we all have to pay taxes assuming we are American, live in the U.S. and work, and/or earn over what is considered the poverty line. Why should regular everyday people volunteer to pay the tax bill of what is obviously an extremely successful (and clearly shady) pizza business, just because it is so revered? Is that pizza that important to you that you would help them pay their taxes? You are effectively supporting them in their tax evasion effort and saying that just because their pizza is good, that you will be okay with paying them even more money that they should actually be paying themselves given what they have earned. And if you have money to spare, why don’t you actually give it to nonprofits who support individuals genuinely in need?!

Well, I would love it if someone offered to pay my tax bill…

As of yesterday, they have reopened after negotiating a payment schedule to the state of New York. Well, then. I guess their pizza will not be gone forever after all.

Two people from our customer success team have announced their departure from the organization this month. In addition, three others have changed teams. Another had departed a few months ago. So all these departures, whether from the team or the organization, leave our executive team wondering why our attrition, specific to this team, is so high. Many changes have come about in the last 8+ months that have angered or disappointed a number of us, so it’s not surprising to me that this has happened.

What is always sad is when we bring up challenges that we alone cannot resolve and suggest solutions that get rejected. When I say “rejected,” I mean that not only are the challenges we bring up being called “complaining,” but the solutions are also told that they will not even be considered or work. Nothing is done to resolve problems. And then, leadership wonders why employees leave and are puzzled?

There are a lot of perks to being in an individual contributor role once again. I don’t have to deal head-on with these problems, and in many ways, it’s kind of a relief to me.

I was thinking about my car rides back home in San Francisco last month and how depressing it was listening to whatever AM radio station my parents always have on. It’s a local AM radio station in San Francisco that basically reports everything depressing and local: the latest car jacking, the innocent college student who got held at gun point in the middle of the Inner Sunset, a girl who got kidnapped and was found murdered in a random ditch. It’s no wonder my parents go through life always assuming the worst is going to happen and fearing everything and everyone they meet; the limited amount of media they consume makes them anxious to live their lives fully because they are just crippled by fear and hate.

I read a decent amount of news nearly every day. On the weekdays, I start my morning commute with theSkimm and the Morning Brew, and anything I want to learn more about, I dig into later in the day. It’s a bit exhausting to read the news every day, especially since yes, a lot of it can be extremely depressing and blood-pressure spiking. I don’t read all of it because I enjoy it (ahem to the current moron in the White House), but rather because I want to make sure I can at least slightly stay informed. Then I started finding out about ways to listen to the news, kind of like my parents, except actually informative and useful news, via daily news podcasts that give you a brief but well rounded summary of current events, such as theSkimm’s own podcast and NPR’s Up First. I don’t completely love how theSkimm is written because their daily email summaries sometimes can dumb down the news and seem like it’s targeted towards airheads, but I do like the random pop culture news articles and the interesting quotes that they provide at the beginning of each email.

And this morning, when I was listening to Up First, I realized… I wish this was the way my parents consumed their news. It would be great if they heard about the good, bad, and neutral news. It would be better if they heard more about other cities and countries and continents. The world does not revolve around San Francisco. They wouldn’t have to constantly be listening to latest kidnapping or murder and thinking that events like that happen every second on every corner of every street in the world. How does it benefit any of us to be informed of every event like that? What exactly would we be learning from any of that?

The U.S. is so family unfriendly. I never really thought that much of this… outside of the fact that American employers are obligated to provide a total of zero weeks of paid leave to their employees after the birth or adoption of a child, that new mothers are constantly discriminated against when they return to work, that visibly pregnant women cannot feasibly look for new employment, that new fathers are discouraged from taking their full paternity leave (if their employers even provide it). So you know, not too many things, but enough to get my blood boiling. Then, I started noticing it even more when I began traveling more internationally. I noticed things like… completely separate bathrooms for families and actual baby changing rooms that were separated from the main restrooms. I noticed a baby carrying seat in the women’s room stalls so that a mother can properly pee without needing to hold her infant or toddler down. I saw women openly breastfeeding without any cover-up, without people staring at them like they were offensive to God. I heard announcements at airport gates for pre-boarding for families with children. These things never happen here. The latest thing I’ve noticed here in the U.S. is breastfeeding rooms popping up in airports; I was truly amazed by this. Truly.

So I got even more infuriated when I accompanied my five-months pregnant colleague to Old Navy today just a few blocks from our office to find out that they had no maternity section period. We asked a worker when we walked in, and she embarrassingly told us that there was no maternity section at any Old Navy in all of Manhattan, and if we wanted to find a maternity section, we either need to go to Queens or Brooklyn locations for Old Navy, or order online and do in-store pickup. The other option was that on the second floor, they had all their maternity returns for the pieces that didn’t work out.

Ummm, what?

“So basically, pregnant women aren’t allowed in Manhattan?” I asked the worker. She laughed and said she had brought up this issue multiple times to the manager of the store, and he would respond, saying they didn’t have enough space “for that.” The store worker eventually agreed with me. “We’re really just not friendly towards expectant mothers. It’s sad.”

When we went upstairs to view the returned maternity pieces, it was very clear to us that a lot of women were shopping online for maternity wear and doing in-store pickup; the store manager was just completely short-sighted and literally being a dick towards pregnant women. This is just another form of discrimination, another form of being anti-family and ultimately, anti-woman.

“So, I basically have two options,” my colleague said to me, sighing. “I can go to the really expensive maternity wear stores and pay $100-200 for a dress, or I can shop at Old Navy for reasonable prices, but only online!”

Why do we live in such an anti-family, anti-woman society?

The office was like a ghost town today. I was one of a total of six people who decided to show up at the office today, one of whom left shortly after lunch time. Here, people tend to come and go as they wish. We’re generally flexible with working remotely, and everyone seems to mind their own business. Summer time is also a popular time to take vacations, so there’s that to consider, too. But as I waltzed into the office at around 9:45 this morning, I started thinking about the office days of my mom and how this would never, ever fly.

Usually, I call her as I am leaving work, so sometime between 5:30 to 6pm. If I ever call earlier than that, she just assumes that something catastrophic has happened… like I got fired/laid off/something like death has happened. The concept of coming in “late,” or “leaving early” are kind of a big deal to her — “is your boss okay with that? Did you ask your boss’s permission?” She doesn’t realize that here, no one really wants or cares to keep tabs on anyone like that. That’s not how this office works, and selfishly, I hope I never, ever work at a place like that. I’ve told her all of these things probably over a hundred times by now, but she still worries and is concerned… because she’s my mom, and to her, that’s what moms do — worry about their kids even when the kids have reassured the parents a million times.

It’s a privilege, though. I recognize that. So when I complain and get angry about anything at work, whether it’s some isolated moronic incident or general politics that seem to happen every single day, I remind myself that of all the office crap I have to deal with, it’s not even a tenth of what my mom had to endure in her working days.

I would not want to be a delivery person… ever. They are probably one of the least appreciated professions in this entire city, yet they likely work the hardest. As someone who is lucky enough to work at a company that offers free lunch every day to its employees, I get the option of ordering on my corporate Seamless account every day and choosing either delivery or pick-up. Sometimes, if the weather is good and the restaurant isn’t too far away, I’ll opt for pickup, getting a quick break and walk in while also saving a delivery person some work. But other times, I’ll just have the food delivered to me. And I always, always tip the delivery people.

Unfortunately in New York City, what this often means is an underpaid, perhaps even undocumented delivery person taking a bike with his helmet, juggling multiple food orders on his back or over his arms, getting from point A to B to C to D. I’ve seen these guys on my walks along fifth avenue in the Flatiron during lunch time, and honestly, I kind of feel sorry for them. So I get a little annoyed and really have to walk away when I find out that some of my colleagues do not add a tip for their delivery people (ugh), or they whine endlessly when their delivered food is even just 15 minutes late.

While I realize that eating later than you’d originally planned isn’t ideal, especially when you are in back-to-back meetings and feel really swamped at your fancy tech company, realize how lucky and privileged you are to a) get a free lunch paid for by your employer and b) get it delivered to you, every single work day. I bet that delivery guy who had to juggle a dozen orders and is on a tight time delivery schedule doesn’t have that luxury. And frankly, it’s probably not his fault that your food is late; it could be the kitchen’s fault. It could be bad traffic. So don’t take it out on him. He probably needs his tips more than you need your on-time lunch, or your free lunch, or, in this case, both.

There are rich people, and then, there are the super rich of the rich — you know, these are the kind of people who just randomly decide that they want to drop $10,000 for a Birkin handbag or $117 million for a Monet or Renoir painting, and it’s really no big deal for them. We got a taste of what that looks like yesterday afternoon, when we attended a divorce auction for an extremely wealthy couple who is in the midst of divorce proceedings. Chris found a flier in our mailbox advertising that the divorce auction would be held at the JW Marriott yesterday afternoon, and in addition to an endless collection of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, we’d also be getting the ability to bid on authentic fine art, from artists ranging from Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Van Gogh, to Miro and Peter Max. This was completely insane to me.

The flier stated that all of these items were simply in storage for the longest time, so not even a private family was actively enjoying them in their own home. This completely infuriated me. In my opinion, paintings by artists as famous and talented as Monet or Van Gogh truly need to be made public; why should only one person or a small circle of people be able to enjoy them? It just seems so selfish.

Oddly enough, the auction was not that large, and it was likely because we were in the middle of the summer period, when many of these “units” who would be bidding would likely be out sunning in the Hamptons or traveling to Europe for their summer vacations. Those leading the auction kept making statements making it very obvious that they were insulted at the prices being proposed for bidding. I couldn’t even believe it; an authentic Van Gogh went for only a few hundred dollars; a Camille Pissarro went for $7,500. It seemed almost like robbery. But hey, what a deal for the people who bid and won the auction on these!

We didn’t last very long; we left probably about an hour and a half into the auction. It wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be, and I was hoping to see a bigger variety of works. Not to say that the collection was something to sneeze at; it just always shocks me, even though it shouldn’t, how much wealth some families have, and exactly how selfish they are with it.

Last night, Chris and I went to see the Broadway show What the Constitution Means to Me, which is a 2017 play by Heidi Shreck. It was first produced at a smaller theater downtown, and after gaining a lot of traction, opened in off-Broadway in 2018. And this year, the play made its Broadway premiere in the spring.

The general storyline of the play is a woman who reflects back on the speeches she gave as a teenager about the U.S. Constitution and then talks about how she feels about it now, both based on her own personal life experiences from her teen years to the present day, as well as regarding the experiences of women in her own family. She switches between her 15-year-old self and her current adult self several decades later.

The part that struck me the most was how she reflected that overall, the Constitution does not necessarily outline what is your right; it’s actually mostly there to outline what is not your right. And a large part of the Constitution is fully dedicated to the lack of legal protection for women, as she highlights the 2005 Supreme Court case of Castle Rock vs. Gonzalez. The Supreme Court, led by Antonin Scalia then, somehow incredulously ruled that “shall” does not mean “must,” as in, “law enforcement shall protect victims of domestic abuse. Jessica Gonzalez had gotten a restraining order from her then-husband, who then kidnapped their three daughters, shooting and killing all three of them to death. Gonzalez tried to sue the police for ignoring multiple reports of her husband’s abuse and kidnapping, but in the end, she was overruled.

This is the country we live in, huh? I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that awful, especially since this case just happened 14 years ago. That is in my lifetime.

The real cincher here was when she stated, “More American women have been killed by violent male partners in the last century than Americans have been killed in wars, including 9/11,” Schreck said in the show. “That is not the number of women who have been killed in this country; that is only the number of women who have been killed by the men who supposedly loved them.”

The entire theater went so silent that you probably could have heard someone drop a pin. I couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. The saddest thing about this statement was that I actually wondered a few years ago what the statistic was for the number of women who have died from domestic abuse, in light of learning about the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning series written about violence against women in South Carolina. In the series, which I read in full, we learn that in South Carolina, abuse against pet dogs has a harsher and lengthier penalty than abuse against one’s wife. In other words, pets have more rights than women, yet women are human beings. Pets… are just animals.

This is the reality we live in… here in the 21st century, in what is supposed to be one of the most developed nations in the world. And no one seems to care or want to do anything about it.

Today, we went to Manhattan Chinatown for a massage, grocery shopping, and a quick early dinner before our show. Chris always makes fun of me because of how excited I get before our Chinatown treks. He knows that I love grocery shopping in Chinatown, and because he is who he is, he loves to poke fun at me endlessly about it.

What can I say? Lots of reasons exist to get excited about shopping in Chinatown for food: it’s the only place in Manhattan where I can reliably get a good selection of all the Asian vegetables I want (hello, morning glory/kong xin cai, gai lan, amaranth, among a dozen others, while Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s only recognize bok choy; where I can find the freshest in-season “exotic fruit” for a reasonable price (six mangoes for $5 in May? $3/pound for longans in July? $2/pound for rambutans in August? Sign me up!); where I can get freshly pressed and made rice noodles and tofu if I wanted (honestly, I rarely buy these… which I am a bit embarrassed to admit). In addition, once I finish buying all my fresh food, I can move onto things that I can stock up on and store, whether it’s fresh egg or wheat noodles for the next day’s dinner (or our freezer), 100% sesame seed paste, or the best brand of soy sauce available in the U.S. for a reasonable price ($1.95! for nearly 16 oz.!). And after all that, we can get a cheap, tasty, and filling meal at a local restaurant before heading home to fill our fridge and freezer. That’s a pretty productive trip!

While I love shopping in Chinatown here, it also makes me reminisce about all the delicious fresh food in markets we’ve visited in Asia, as well as the meals we ate that were always screaming with freshness. In Vietnam, every noodle dish we had was unmistakably made with freshly made rice noodles… never, ever from dried rice noodles that were reconstituted with water. You could just tell from the bite and the chew of the noodle between your teeth. Fresh herbs and raw vegetables were always neatly assembled and laid out with almost every meal, no fail. They looked as though they’d been just washed and picked. In China, all the dry noodle dishes we ate were prepared with just assembled and tossed sauces. And in Thailand, all the curries and dressings used for our salads were made in a mortar and pestle as soon as we finished ordering. Asia was the Land of the Fresh to me. If freshness is key in food to you, Asia is where it’s at.