Tonight, Chris surprised me with a Christmas concert featuring John Legend. This December, he’s releasing his Christmas album A Legendary Christmas, and this concert featured many of his Christmas songs, as well as a few of his mainstream John Legend classics. John Legend is one of those performers who, no matter what, always sounds so much deeper and more emotional live than on his LP. There are performers who are just fine or comparable to their LP  singing-wise when live, then there are the ones who should just rely on lip-syncing (not that I was ever much of a fan, but Britney Spears live… is not for the singing). In Mariah Carey’s heyday in the early to mid-90s, her emotions were felt far more live than on her LP. Her live version of “Hero” is a million times more moving than her LP version, which to me, sounds lifeless.

Then, there’s John Legend, whose LP always sounds flawless, and then you hear him in person singing the exact same song, and you think, “How could you outdo yourself? How do you do those vocal reverberations?!” I’m mind-boggled by his voice. You just want to tell him, “Sing! Sing! Keep singing! Don’t stop! Never stop!” His voice is a paradise.

Every year at around this time, the air turns from cool and crisp to bitter cold and absolutely frosty, and every year at around this time, I just want to hibernate and stay in bed every morning. There’s the routine and goal-oriented side of me that says, “Hey, you have to haul your butt out of bed and be productive! Be efficient! Exercise! Your metabolism is slowing down, so you need to do more exercise to make up for that!” Then, there’s the other part of me that says… it is so cold. I just don’t want to do anything; screw productivity and getting things done off the checklist.  So, that was me this morning in bed. Chris had to drag me out.

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to actually hibernate, to have zero activity for all of winter and basically be a sloth. I have a feeling that my muscles would atrophy, as would my brain. I’d be an antisocial zombie, having forgotten all my basic common sense and social skills needed to survive around other mortals.

But aren’t there already people out there like that, and I just set my standard higher than average and try to get too much done in too short of a period of time? Maybe I would benefit from slowing down and doing less?

We went to see a matinee Broadway show today, and afterwards, we walked up Sixth Avenue to see all the Christmas lights and decoration that gets put up every year. There are the Christmas “tree lights,” the red Christmas ornament balls, the many nutcrackers and trees that line up at the entrance of the corporate buildings along the avenue. Then, there is also the Rockefeller tree that has yet to come out and be lit. It was the first day of December today, and Sixth Avenue was packed with people, some tourists, some semi-locals. It felt so crowded, a bit too much so as we walked through the endless hoards of people trying to take selfies, posing for photos taken by other strangers with the various Christmas lights and decorations in the background.

“This is what makes New York New York,” Chris declared, as we zipped through the crowds.

Yes, the crowds are what make New York New York, this city that I’ve called home now for over ten years. But there are so many times when I absolutely hate the crowds and would really like to just appreciate these decorations with no one around and in near silence. That’s probably what this area might be like if we came back at midnight on a weeknight, or extremely early in the morning any day. After a while, the crowds really do wear on you here. I can tolerate it when I’m visiting other new cities as a tourist myself, but here, it can really get to be unbearable, especially in the cold. But this is Christmas in New York, and we definitely do it well here.

I met my mentee after work today at Starbucks. She’s had a really dramatic last week, which included her mentor (through a program where people formerly in foster care mentor foster care children) x-ing her out of her life, accusing her of breaking and entering, and having her granddaughter threaten my mentee over text; a good (now former friend) getting admitted into the hospital for a pill overdose/suicide attempt, who is now ignoring my mentee and saying she only causes more problems and doesn’t genuinely care about her; this former friend’s boyfriend threatening my mentee. It was an earful for the hour we spent together.

I was exhausted. I was already tired from the work week, which felt way too long after the week away we had in Portugal. My morning workouts, full-days of work, plus going out or having to work the first three days of this week really were catching up to me in the form of a regular splitting afternoon headache every single day after Monday this week. This conversation didn’t help. I want to be there to her, to give her suggestions and offer guidance. She does take a lot of my suggestions, but I always think it won’t really help in the long run. She needs to break herself out of all this mess that she is inclined to be a part of, and that’s going to take the power and strength within herself to get that done.

I told Chris about this before we met our friends for dinner tonight. “You attract dysfunction, and she given her life circumstances is going to keep attracting dysfunction,” he said.

Well, I can’t really do anything about that, can I?

I was the only one who rated this person as a “maybe to a no.” Everyone else gave her stellar reviews. But I had to say what I needed.

“If the question is, ‘can she get the job done and is she competent,’ then I would say, yes, she is, and yes, she is qualified for this job,” one of my colleagues said.

This job is not rocket science. You do not need some advanced degree for it. We are not doing open heart surgery here. This is a customer facing role at a SaaS company that has a complex product. But we really are not looking for people who are going to cure cancer or bring world peace. This is not that difficult.

“I don’t think I’m questioning whether she is competent or can do the job,” I countered. “What I am really saying is — what is this person going to contribute to this team and to her customer in her potential book of business that is compelling? Because frankly, if I had to sum her up into one word and be really honest, the word is ‘boring.’ That’s what I took away from this conversation. My eyes were glazing over.”

That drew a lot of chuckles and laughter. The hiring manager grimaced at me, but eventually let a smile out.

And funny enough, I just finished reading Adam Grant’s book Outliers tonight, in which he argues that organizations should not be hiring for cultural “fit,” but rather “cultural contribution.” So exactly what I said — what is this potential employee contributing to our organization that is notable, or perhaps something we are lacking that we need more of or could benefit from?

She’s moving onto the next and final stage, but she has two other strong candidates competing against her. I really just do not want to talk to anyone who is bland and boring during an interview. Otherwise, what is this company going to become?

It’s only Wednesday, yet somehow, this week has felt so long, likely because I came back from the beautiful fairy tale land of Portugal to a boat load of work and drama this week. It wasn’t made better by the fact that I had to sub in to do an interview of a San Francisco candidate for our team, which meant that not only did I have to spend time interviewing and watching this person’s mock presentation, but I also had to participate until 7:15 my time. So I left the office early to do both the interview and the presentation at home.

It was the most excruciating interview I’d been in. I’ve had good interviewees and bad ones, but this one, if I had to sum her up in just one word, I would say she was the most boring candidate I’d ever interviewed. She gave long-winded answers to the point where I’d forget what my original question was. She constantly was thinking out loud, so it was hard at times to follow her thought process. And although she was trying to appear enthusiastic, she kept using this nasal part of her vocal chords to speak (is that the voice thing that millennial women are accused of doing all the time?!). It was just painful to be in and to pay attention.

For parts of the interview where I did not have my earbuds in, Chris heard it, and he texted me one word in all caps: BORING.

Aren’t we supposed to be looking to hire dynamic people who have personalities that would win over our customers?

A work friend from our San Francisco office is in town for the next three weeks to train one of our new technical support engineers based out here, so we decided to plan for dinner together tonight to catch up. She was born in Korea, raised in Queens, and then eventually moved to San Francisco, where she’s lived on and off the last 10 years. She went to culinary school, was a line cook, decided she didn’t want that life anymore, went to dev boot camp, and has since been a lead technical support engineer in our SF office after being “discovered” while working as a Lyft driver in San Francisco by our head of solutions architects. She said that San Francisco softened her, and if she came back to New York, she’d probably get too hard and angry all the time. She said she could see elements of the SF and New York personality in me. We basically switched places. I love her edginess, her bluntness, how she really breaks all the stereotypes when it comes to being an Asian woman. She is opinionated, feeling, empathetic. But she knows she needs to be heard and says difficult things when they need to be said. She really DGAF. I need more friends like her.

While having dinner with her tonight, I realized even more how frustrating it is to make friends in a city as big and crowded as New York. Really, the only quality time you get to know people when you work full time is at work. But you don’t really want to just be friends or get too close to your work friends. I somehow have work friends I spend time with when one of us is in the other’s respective towns here or in San Francisco. Then, I thought about our couple friend who moved from here to Sacramento earlier this year, and while they are closer to their family, they said they haven’t made any friends in the area. Either way, whether you’re in a big city like New York or a smaller, small-town-minded city like Sacramento, it’s always going to be challenging to make friends once you are out of school. Plus, at our age, people are juggling with different life stages and choices, so that makes it even harder. But that makes me appreciate these times more when I can find commonality and have fun with visiting work colleagues. There is some distance there, but we can still find areas to bond over.

New York City – the land of opportunity; a concrete jungle where dreams are made of; a food lover’s ultimate paradise for the most diverse dining opportunities in possibly the world. When I lived in Elmhurst for my first four years in New York, I lived a 5-minute walk from one of my all-time favorite restaurants ever, Tangra Masala, an Indian-Chinese restaurant that had two locations in Queens, one in Sunnyside and one in Elmhurst. I’d never even heard of Indian-Chinese fusion cuisine before, but it was a thing in India as I learned from several Indian colleagues and friends who grew up in different parts of India. Since I left Elmhurst, I still kept going back to that restaurant because I loved the food so much, dragging many friends, Chris, even my in-laws there during their once-a-year visits from Australia. But now, I found out I no longer need to trek all the way out to Queens to get my Indian-Chinese fix; they have finally opened a location right in Manhattan on the east side in the Manhattan Indian area.

With Chris’s aunt and uncle arriving from Australia tonight and the weather being windy and rainy, we decided to order delivery, and via Uber Eats, we got to get Tangra from there to enjoy tonight. And other than the prices being a bit higher and the lack of options to indicate what spice level we preferred (they probably just assume that because we are in Manhattan that we are heat-averse), the food was perfect, just I remembered and imagined it in my head. And now, we have leftovers for after they leave us on Monday. My fridge is very happy right now.