So I’ve been working from home the last two days due to a massive steam pipe explosion that occurred just two blocks from my office in the Flatiron district downtown in Manhattan. Generally, these explosions have happened throughout the city due to ridiculously old infrastructure that the city is too cheap or careless to deal with, and every now and then, there have been fatalities and injuries. The city seems happier to deal with these fatalities and injuries in payouts than they are to prevent them in the first place. If you think about it, it’s actually the way our healthcare system is: it’s happier to deal with you being sick (and taking you for everything you are worth because healthcare here is the most expensive in the world) than it is to prevent you from getting sick in the first place. Luckily this time, no one was killed, though a few people did suffer some minor injuries.

Based on discussions with our office manager, who has been in contact with our building’s super, who of course has been in contact with city officials, we’ve learned that it’s very much in the air as to when we will actually be able to regain access to the building. The city blocked off entry into the general area due to potential asbestos contamination. I was sulky because I actually do not enjoy working from home and prefer to be in the office. I like the camaraderie at work, the free air conditioning, and my free lunch. I also miss my work computer, which I stupidly left in the office on Wednesday night.

But the scariest part when I think about it is how old the infrastructure is in this entire city, and how many old buildings that are not up to code are being inhabited all over this island, all over these five boroughs. An incident like this one could happen pretty much anywhere, and we all know this will not be the last. Chris always says that the biggest irony of our being required to have renter’s insurance in our building (which is only two years old now) is that we’re far safer and less likely to have a disaster happen here than in our old Upper East Side co-op apartment, which is far, far older, creakier, and who knows when it was ever last inspected for safety? And we never had renter’s insurance at the last place.

We just have to hope for the best.

Today, a semi-new colleague who works remotely from South Carolina was in the office, so I suggested that we take a walk and catch up. Based on the few chats I’ve had with him and observing him when he’s been in the office, I can tell that he’s not quite at ease with his job responsibilities or his place in the company yet. He’s still adjusting to new processes and of course, learning our technology, which certainly can be a challenge. He’s also still trying to find his social niche here, particularly given that he’s a remote employee and doesn’t have a lot of face time with any of us. We spent most of our half hour talking about non-work related things, which I purposely constructed. So I told him about observations and experiences I had during my recent India trip, and he talked about the adjustment of his college- and post-college age children moving out, adjusting to adult and work life, and living a bi-state life (they go between New Jersey, where they’re originally from and have relatives, and South Carolina, which is their primary residence). “It’s nice to have a conversation not about work at work!” he exclaimed to me, smiling. It was clear he doesn’t really talk about non-work related topics with other people here.

It’s almost been like an unspoken role of mine, to make people feel comfortable here and at ease. I don’t even know how that’s really happened. I don’t know if it’s just part of my aura, or the questions that I ask or the efforts I make to talk to people, but it’s just kind of become part of my de factor non-job responsibility here. “You make people feel comfortable with your presence,” a colleague in this office recently said to me. “You keep things calm and organized.”

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems like additional pressure on me. It also seems like a bit of a gender role if I want to start digging deeper into this because what man has ever been told that he has a calming presence that puts people at ease?

When you live in the concrete jungle that is New York City, or just live in this area where a small amount of space costs loads of money, you start realizing how luxurious it must be to have space for things like gardens, vast open spaces for outdoor chairs, tables, and grills, fruit trees, and vegetable shrubs. A remote colleague who works out of his home office in Atlanta had a work meeting a couple weeks ago in Miami, and he’d told me that he and his daughters had spent a few hours that weekend picking peaches that were ripe and nearly falling off his peach tree in his garden. In total, they collected nearly 200 peaches; they had so much that they just couldn’t eat them all in time, so they went door to door handing them out to their neighbors. I jokingly suggested to my colleague that he share some peaches with another colleague coming down to Miami to join him for his meeting. My colleague actually took me seriously and gave my New York colleague a few peaches (and some plums from his other tree!). He presented a few to our New York colleague, who ate the fruit.

This New York colleague proceeded to text our mutual colleague here to complain about our Atlanta colleague’s generosity. “Why would he give me fruit? I’m traveling back to New York, and he wants me to cart fruit back?” he grumbled to our mutual colleague. When our mutual colleague told me this, I was livid. What is wrong with this guy? How can he not appreciate homegrown fruit; who in this area ever gets gifted anything that is homegrown or homemade? You’re lucky to ever get anything gifted to you for any reason!

There are fewer things worse to me than an inability to be grateful for what you have and are given, especially when someone has been so kind and generous to give you something for absolutely no reason at all other than for the sake of giving and sharing. It never fails to shock me how ungrateful and miserable people choose to be in their overly privileged lives that they take small acts of kindness like this for granted. He even ate the fruit, too, and said they were really good!! 

Yesterday morning, I woke up at around 4:30am, likely again from the little bits of jetlag that I’ve faced this week. It’s not something to complain about of course… until about an hour and a half later, I woke up again from a half-sleep, this time to a sharp, stinging, biting pain in my right calf that would not stop, and I started grabbing my calf and trying to depress my fingers on the spot where the stabbing feeling seems to be radiating from. It lasted for a good minute before I could stop holding my calf. I was pretty much screaming or moaning the entire time, and it certainly felt like longer than a minute. It felt like at least two or three times as long as that.

This type of pain seems have happened every now and then for me in the last couple of years, and it always happens when I know I am not getting enough potassium. This never used to happen to me before. “It’s a sign you’re aging!” my colleague, who is in her 50s, told me, laughing. “Welcome to aging, you youngin’!”

That… is not comforting. I actually am very comfortable being in my early 30s. I am probably the most confident about myself than I have ever been in my life. But sudden muscle spasms… no. These are not welcome at all.

In the world of tech startups, I’m basically surrounded by highly privileged people every single day. At my company, which like most companies is mostly a bunch of white people, every single day I interact with people who have no idea what it’s like to have a real life dilemma: to struggle to have food on the table, a roof over their head, legitimate and legal status in a country, the difference between life and death of a struggling loved one. So if I am surrounding myself every day with people who generally have the means to live a comfortable life, then why do I feel like every time I take an international trip that I am the one who is privileged versus them, and they make it seem like they could not do the exact same trip?

I don’t believe it’s because of lack of ability or lack of means or lack of money. It’s really about lack of desire or curiosity. I have shopaholic colleagues who spend endlessly on clothing, shoes, and accessories, and others who spend way too much on rent when compared to what they probably earn. I have another colleague who has an inordinate amount of extremely expensive and collectible Nikes. And then there’s my colleague who loves flashy cars. We put time, effort, and money into the things we care about. They don’t really care about travel or learning about the world. But I do.

A lack of curiosity about the world is so unattractive to me. If you live a comfortable life and do not struggle to make ends meet, it’s hard for me to fathom why you would lack curiosity in understanding other peoples, other cultures, other places in the world and how they operate. The world we live in is so vast. It’s far more than just the tri-state area.

When people think of New York City, the major landmarks that they tend to think about are the Empire State Building, the Chrysler building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park. When people think of food, iconic places like Katz Deli come up. But when we think of generic foods, we think of bagels and… on the higher end, steak. But does steak really need to be “high end”? Why do we need to have such a high price tag on what is really just another cut of of a cow?

So leave it to the people of Japan to come up with the idea of attempting to make steak more affordable by setting up Ikinari Steak years ago in Japan. To save on space and furniture costs, they initially created this as a ‘standing room only’ restaurant, where you would order your steak (served Japanese style, no less) and your sides, then eat it standing up, pay, and leave. It finally came to New York last year, and while the first couple of locations were kept as standing-only, they finally realized that here in New York, we’re too lazy to stand while eating, so they created a few locations (they’ve been expanding like crazy!) that actually have tables. So we took Chris’s parents to one of the sitting locations near Times Square today before our show, and we were shocked at how good it was given how little (relatively speaking, this is still New York) we paid.

This is definitely going to be a cheap-steak fix when we don’t want to pay Keen’s Steakhouse prices, or when I don’t want to deal with cooking sous-vide anything.

I was sitting at Argo Tea this afternoon on my lunch break, chatting with my mentee about the start of her summer and her most recent going-ons, when she started telling me about a guy she dated briefly last summer who suddenly started texting her again. They stopped dating because he became too clingy, and she couldn’t deal with his emotional outbursts, which she claimed happened very frequently. I was not happy to hear this… at all.

“What is the nature of these sudden text messages?” I asked her. “What’s he saying?”

She said that he’s been messaging to ask her to meet up. No context has been provided. He’s already asked her to meet him about three different times, everywhere from watching a movie together to just sitting in Union Square to chat.

That just seems so open ended, I responded to her. Why would you two not communicate for an entire year, then he suddenly starts messaging to ask to hang out without any pre-explanation? That makes zero sense, and you should start ignoring him or just flat out saying you will not meet him. Be direct.

She insisted she hadn’t met him, but she clearly is enjoying the attention because she’s been sending him messages that lead him on and make him potentially think she will eventually meet him… eventually.

The human psyche is one of those eternal enigmas that I will never fully understand.. I guess none of us ever fully will, which is why there’s an entire academic subject area devoted to attempting to understand this. I don’t understand why people think what they think, and why they do all the stupid things they choose to do to inflict irritation, confusion, and pain on others. The worst of these situations is when the person inflicting all this ridiculous crap has no idea he’s causing problems. I can guarantee this guy doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong or questionable. What is wrong with people?!

When I was young, I always looked forward to going to Costco. Because of all my fond memories going up and down the aisles, sampling food and drink, and discovering new interesting foods, as an adult now, I still love it and get excited about it. Today, I took Chris to Costco for the first time, and for the first time at Costco, I actually felt really annoyed. I felt like the clientele were being really rude. People were crashing into my cart, seeing that I was trying to get through and refusing to move. Kids were getting right in front of my cart as I was moving, as though they wanted me to run them over. Chris noticed that there was one guy who seemed to be there just to sample every sample station. He asked each person when their food would be ready so he’d come back. Those are the annoying Costco clientele, the ones who are just there to get the free bites and are nuisances to the workers. I asked one worker where the toilet paper was, and he pointed me to the randomly placed paper towel rolls and told me they were there (no, they actually weren’t; the toilet paper is all situated at the front of the warehouse where all the paper/disposable plates/cups are put).

It was my least enjoyable Costco trip. I wonder if it’s just because of this actual Costco. It’s always felt a little more hectic going to this one in Spanish Harlem than the one in Long Island City, and especially the ones in San Francisco and South San Francisco that my parents frequent. People always seemed a bit more respectful, like they actually disciplined their children, and the workers were more courteous when we asked where things were located.

I’ve always loved crustaceans. I had a short period in my (teen) life when I declined eating it at Chinese restaurant dinner tables because I was too lazy to get down and dirty and pick the crab meat out of the shells I’d have to crack. But other than that, I love the sweet, juicy, fleshy meat of crabs and lobsters, and I feel sorry for people who cannot appreciate how good they are.

The way I have appreciated crustaceans has evolved. I grew up eating crab and lobster the Chinese way, which means either battered in salt and pepper or ginger and scallion and stir-fried. When I got older, and especially after I moved to the East Coast, I started appreciating Maine lobster, simply steamed, cracked, and dipped in some butter. I love lobster rolls Connecticut-style, meaning tossed in butter rather than mayonnaise (Maine-style) and served in a fluffy, toasted bun. I also realized how delicious Maryland blue crabs were after spending a Thanksgiving in Ocean City, Maine, and being completely spoiled with the easily and readily available, fresh, and cheap little crabs of the region.

So it’s been disappointing to me while living in New York when people get excited about Luke’s Lobster, one of the original chains that serves Maine lobster and semi-local crab rolls. The rolls are teeny tiny, even for me. A few bites, and your $16 crab roll and $19 lobster roll are finito. The lobster is mostly claw meat as opposed to tail meat (and we all know the lobster tail meat is really where it’s at). The crab meat is much sweeter than the lobster meat, and as someone who has a deeper love for crab meat, I get it. But then why pay more for the lobster roll, then? After a few years of avoiding it, I decided to use my lunch credit today to get a crab roll, and when I went to pick it up, I was immediately saddened looking down at my bag. The roll was in a skinny container the size of a hot dog bun. That’s all $15 on crab gets you here in New York.

This is another reason to travel — to get better and cheaper access to all the foods you love and can appreciate in different setting.