After coming back from Detroit late yesterday afternoon, I had dinner at home with Chris and went down to Radio City Music Hall to see Aziz Ansari perform as part of his “Road to Nowhere” tour. The greatest thing about seeing comedians and other performing artists who are people of color is that they always acknowledge race, the always changing definition of “normal” or “politically correct,” and well, that is refreshing and something I can relate to a lot.

He touched upon a lot of very real, tangible topics in both a touching and a funny way, everything from his involvement in the #metoo movement with the woman who wrote the viral piece about her sexual encounter with him, where she perceived him to be completely un-attuned to her body language saying she was not interested in having sex, to liberals and their obsession with playing a Candy Crush version of a “how progressive can you prove yourself to be” competition, to even his grandmother and her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He even talked about the issue of birth control in our society now: why does it seem like the only options out there have to be so terrible: an IUD that results in, well, his penis getting stabbed, or birth control pills, which make his girlfriend into a moody, worser version of herself?

But while enjoying his standup, I noticed a woman, blonde and white, sitting not too far from us who clearly was not having a good time. Her friend (or whoever she was with) had gotten out of her seat and left, likely to either get a drink or use the bathroom, and that was when I noticed this person and how bored or un-engaged she looked. While Aziz was cracking jokes and the entire audience was roaring with laughter, this woman was looking off to the side, to my direction, expressionless, as though she was possibly counting down the minutes until this event would be over. Her facial expression and body language all screamed out that she was in extreme discomfort.

Did her friend ask her to accompany her tonight, or did she beg because she absolutely needed a plus-one because she didn’t want to come alone? Why would someone like this come to an Aziz Ansari show? You either like his material or you do not, and she clearly did not. I didn’t really feel bad for her, though. At the end of the day, it was her choice. And if Aziz’s material makes her feel uncomfortable, I wonder if she asks herself why it does that to her.

Today, in light of the recent one-year anniversary of Anthony Bourdain’s passing, I re-read one of my all-time favorite profiles of him done by (of course), The New Yorker, entitled, Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast. The article describes Anthony’s travels as “communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous.” The writer says he “makes a fetish of authenticity,” which I can completely relate to. As someone who loves to travel, I think I’m also obsessed with finding authentic experiences that aren’t just about being catered to in a specific way just because I am a tourist, but rather because I want to do whatever that local person is doing or eating. But that desire could easily be read as homogenized, which defeats the purpose, in many ways, of travel.

I’ve never really been that sad by any celebrity’s death, but his passing was just so horrible to me because even though he’s a white man, he embodies what I wish every traveler could be and what I want to be when I travel: the kind of person who wants to fully immerse himself in the culture he’s in, who isn’t scared of eating or doing the things that local people do in their local towns and cities, who doesn’t assume an air of superiority because he comes from a rich, westernized, and overprivileged nation. He also doesn’t make dangerous, sweeping assumptions about the places he’s been that generalize and reduce them down to stereotypes. Why can’t more people be like him?

Growing up, it was a normal thing in our house for my grandma or mom to make a big pot of soup, stock, or congee/jook, and leave it out on the stove overnight, then reheat it each morning or time they wanted to eat it again. We never considered that unsafe, and the logic behind it being safe was that if any weird bacteria were growing in it, boiling it again to reheat would kill them all anyway.

As a result of this, I’ve also done similar things as an adult, though most of the time, I do put these things in the fridge. I’ve left food out at room temperature for several hours. I’ve even taken leftover food from my Seamless work lunch, gone out after work, then taken it home (while it was sitting in my backpack the entire time). I’ve never gotten sick.

But in the U.S., everyone seems to think that everything needs to be refrigerated or frozen immediately. I don’t really get it. Leaving food out at room temperature is apparently a breeding ground for bacteria growth and inevitable food poisoning. When some colleagues of mine did a group lunch order today from Luke’s Lobster, when the food arrived, they were in a meeting. Another colleague panicked, fearful that they would get food poisoning, and put all the food in the fridge. They were just going to be out of their meeting in another half hour; no one would have died. And to add to this, the air conditioning was quite high in the office since we’re pretty much in summer time, and so the office was quite cool already.

The level of panic around food safety here is always mind-boggling to me; if these colleagues knew what I grew up with and what I do at my own apartment, they’d probably wonder why I haven’t already died from food poisoning.

Last year, one of the books that I read on my reading list was Radical Candor, a book about how to build, lead, and inspire teams to do the best work of their lives… while also being honest (while being caring). The main idea is that in order to be a good manager, you need to care personally while also challenging directly. When you challenge without caring, it is called “obnoxious aggression.” When you care without challenging, it is called “ruinous empathy.” And when you do neither, it is manipulative insincerity. This book is considered one of the “it” books across up and coming tech startups. What is sad about that is that while everyone is touting this book, very few to none are actually actively practicing and embracing this.

So if we think about the concept of challenging without caring, that is called obnoxious aggression. And if we really think about it, another thing to call that is just being an asshole. That’s most men in power in tech organizations, and the majority of the time, it’s white men in power). Today, since I was on my way back from Atlanta, I skipped an “Ask Me Anything” session from one of our leaders, when he was supposedly attempting to be “radically candid” about why one of our sales leaders got canned the previous week. I received several messages updating me on what happened this afternoon. There’s a really fine line between being “radically candid” and just being an asshole, and he pretty much failed at the former and succeeded at the latter. And yet, it will all be just dandy because in his position, he can get away with it, and no one will question him. HR is on his side. He’s an Untouchable. For the rest of us mere earthlings, we’d get a massive admonishment from HR if we did even half of what he purportedly said.

There’s the glamour and perks of working at a tech company, and then there’s all the hypocrisy and bullshit. Today was a good example of the latter.

Thai food in Manhattan is mostly like Thai food in any other major city in the U.S.: it’s kind of generic, full of green curries, red curries, yellow curries, pad thai, pad see ew, and all the other ordinary Thai dishes that you would expect. It rarely has the fiery papaya salads of Bangkok or all the other stir-fries and other dishes that would set the average person’s mouth on fire. To get really delicious and authentic Thai food like you would have it in Thailand, you usually need to go out to Queens, either Woodside or Elmhurst, for that food. And when you don’t have time to go there, there’s two spots in Hell’s Kitchen that are good: Pure Thai Cookhouse, which always, always has a wait, even at 4pm on a Saturday; or its new sister restaurant Taladwat, which opened nearby. I originally was able to try it out via delivery a few months ago and enjoyed it, and today, we went in for an early dinner and got Chris’s spicy food craving fixed up. The portions were small, but the food was delicious and spicy, and as an added bonus, the seating was relatively roomy.

It’s hard to give Thai recommendations in Manhattan, but these are two solid ones that are right in our neighborhood that we know we can always rely on.

In my new and elevated role at work, I am being turned to for mentoring both formally (new hires) and informally (through our internal team mentoring program). I was sitting with my colleague who I oftentimes chat with as my new mentee. He sat there and as I would expect, complained to me about his current situation, not being in the line of sight for a promotion, and how he keeps getting told he doesn’t have “executive polish” and needs to work on it. When asked how to improve his “level” of executive polish, he is given no concrete tactics to help this “area of growth.”

I’ve actually watched him present, so I gave him some suggestions. In his case, he lacks poise and confidence both in areas such as his posture and voice. I suggested ways for him to share little anecdotes of other customers and even his own stories in relevant ways during presentations, to speak with more volume and authority during meetings. It’s amazing what wearing an outfit you are proud of or even standing a certain way can do for you when others view you while you are speaking.

“All this is really helpful, and it’s not even that hard to pinpoint if you observe me,” he said, thanking me for my suggestions. “Why wasn’t my own manager or anyone else who works more closely with me able to share this with me?”

I did not respond to that.

For Chris’s dad’s birthday today, we took him to Danji for dinner this evening for their tasting menu. New York City has been experiencing a big wave of modern Korean/Korean-fusion restaurants, and while some of them have been hit or miss, Danji and its sister restaurant Hanjan have been really great dining experiences with high quality and local ingredients. Danji provided the second “tasting menu” of Korean food we’d ever had, and while I enjoyed it a lot, I’ll be honest and say that it was a bit too meat-heavy. Tasting menus should be a good balance of meat, seafood, vegetables, and starches. In this tasting menu, the majority of the dishes were pork and beef based, and there were very few vegetables outside of the different varieties of kimchi and radish that were presented. I wish there was more fish and other types of seafood that were presented. I realized this as the dishes progressed and came out, and towards the end of the meal when we ended up not finishing the final savory course, I found myself feeling bloated and really uncomfortable, and I had a feeling it was probably from the amount of meat we had overall. It was so uncomfortable that I had troubles falling asleep that night… and if I thought about it, the sheer amount of meat was not even that much. It wasn’t like I had a big steak or other massive slab of meat to myself. Ugh.

Tonight, Chris, his parents, and I went to dinner with Chris’s mom’s cousin and his wife, who happen to live just four blocks away from our apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. We usually see them once a year when Chris’s parents are in town. The more I have seen his mom’s cousin’s wife, the more funny I think she is. She is extremely gregarious and social, very opinionated, and quite loud in volume. The last part always cracks me up, especially when she laughs. Like me, she has a loud laugh, and I always love how when she laughs, her husband seems to have a somewhat sheepish look on his face, and sometimes even asks her to lower her voice and calm down. He asked her to do this tonight when she was talking about a series on Amazon Prime about Indian wedding planners and being open about sex. I loved every second of this story, especially her facial expressions as she was describing bits of it.

It’s a bit of a gendered expectation, isn’t it, to expect your wife to be quiet (or quieter, in this case), to not laugh as much, to be less vocal or lower in volume. They have children who are high school- and college-age, so they are older than us, but I am always relieved when I witness little gendered gestures like these that I am not married to someone who tells me to keep my voice down and not to laugh as much or as loud. I’m loud when I laugh, and well, everyone just has to deal with it. And if they want to be as loud, they can certainly join the party.

One of the greatest things about New York City is the incredibly diverse and delicious food you can get here. Having lived in Queens for four years, I still keep going back to that borough even though I no longer live there because of the vast diversity in cuisines represented there (and at low price points). Tibetan and Nepalese food has interested me more and more as the years have gone on, with its spices and chilies, as well as its thick knife-cut noodles and momo dumplings. We took Chris’s parents to a Tibetan restaurant in Elmhurst, my own neighborhood, for dinner tonight, and had a delicious meal of noodles, dumplings, and spicy and garlicky vegetables. They were spicy in a hot and numbing way, and also well seasoned. The dumplings bursted with hot broth. In these moments while eating these meals, I feel very proud to have lived in Queens, and even happier to live here in New York where I have such easy access to this kind of food.

One of the most amusing dishes we had was the yellow fen, which was essentially yellow rolled rice noodles filled with… instant ramen noodles. The server told us that these noodles are either served stuffed with tofu or “noodle.” She didn’t mention that the noodles were instant, though. They were crunchy and spicy. Chris ate these and marveled at what the filling of these noodles were… until I told him that they were instant ramen. 😀