Every time I’ve come to LA over the years, I’ve always looked forward to it and enjoyed my time here. I love the endless diversity of the people here. The beaches are gorgeous. The weather is pretty much always sunny and warm. The diversity of people also means that the food here is represented from probably every culture on earth somewhere in the LA/Orange County area. There’s too much good food here in nearly every neighborhood and at every single price point. Al fresco dining is the norm. It’s hard to beat the quality of life in Southern California.

But then, I think about the number 1 thing I cannot stand about LA: the traffic. Every time I come here, I constantly wonder why there are always so many cars on the road, all this gridlock everywhere. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s 3pm or 6pm; there’s always a traffic jam. It makes zero sense to me.

On a ride from Santa Monica to Hermosa Beach to meet my cousin and his family, the distance was only about 15 miles, yet the ride took nearly an hour! This is an everyday occurrence. In no traffic, it shouldn’t have taken more than 20 minutes, but once traffic hits, a 20-minute ride can easily become 1.25 hours long. And today, on the ride from Santa Monica to LAX, my initial Google Maps estimate said the ride should take 17 minutes given I was leaving at a quieter time. In the end, we got unlucky and hit traffic, and so that original 17-minute estimate ended up being 40 minutes.

I understand why people love LA; I love LA as a visitor. But I also understand why they hate it. This traffic is truly out of control and could easily suck the life out of me if I had to deal with it every single day.

Every time I come back to San Francisco, I am pretty overwhelmed with all the options, both old and new, for food. It’s definitely a fun “problem” to have, but I look forward to planning my trips around who I am planning to see, and what I am going to eat and drink. One of the fun places I knew I had to go to this time around was Garden Creamery, which was conveniently located just two blocks away from the restaurant where my friend and I were going to have dinner. It’s known for having a delicious and fun combination of Hawaiian and Asian flavors that change seasonally, from ube and pandan to matcha with toffee bits to kaya flavored ice cream. They use grass-fed, organic and local milk, and they also have a pretty large variety of vegan flavors to choose from, as well.

I chose the ube and pandan, plus the matcha gold (which has toffee bits), and I loved every last bite of each. The owner was actually scooping herself and was really friendly, and I just loved the variety of flavors available; it was so hard to make a choice! I couldn’t remember the last time I just kept licking my spoon after I finished my ice cream — it was that good.

It excites me to see that ice cream parlors are branching out with flavors that encompass how global of a world we live in now. There was not just one, but two varieties of green tea ice cream (the other one was genmaicha, toasted rice with green tea!), black sesame, ube, kaya, and many others that were so tempting and (naturally) colorful).

Day 1 of our conference was officially today, and on the main conference night, we always host a big party with food, entertainment, drink, and dancing. This year’s was at the August Hall venue, and it was pretty well done other than the fact that each floor had a temperature difference of at least 10 degrees each.

I was chatting with some customers who were coming from the same company, and a few of them were hovering around one of my customers, who is a known social butterfly and party animal. Last year at our conference, she partied so hard the last night that the next morning, she missed all the sessions and did the walk of shame out of the hotel room elevator bank at around noon, right when lunch had started. This year, they are all trying to look out for each other, so they told me that they have to keep a watchful eye out for her to make sure they don’t lose sight of where she goes.

This is when I laugh a little to myself about conference culture in general. There’s always going to be booze, and where there is booze, there will always be a threat or hint of inappropriate behavior. So while we say they are great learning experiences and some of the best opportunities for networking, they are also prime places for total debauchery.

Today is technically day 0 of Opticon, but our festivities have already begun with training sessions, happy hours, as well as customer dinners that we’ve organized, which involve getting similar customers into the same dinner venues for mingling and networking. I sat at a dinner table with various customers and colleagues from AT&T, Cricket, HBO, and Showtime tonight, and what seemed to be the unifying theme among all of them is that not only are they all happy customers who love our technology, but they also all seem like very smart, well-rounded, well-traveled individuals who love to share stories and learn. Overall, it was a very engaging conversation.

It was a fun but exhausting dinner. What I’ve also noticed in hosting customer dinners now is that I seem to enjoy my food less at these events. I used to be able to enjoy the food a lot, but now I feel more focused on ensuring there is customer interaction and engagement that I tend to get more sidetracked with my food. We went to a pretty nice steakhouse, but for me, I felt my steak was too rare, but I didn’t want to send it back since I didn’t want to make a fuss and wait to eat.

It made me feel a bit ungrateful. I get this nice, fancy, expensive meal fully paid for, but I’m not even fully enjoying and appreciating it the way I should.

Last night, I met up with one of my best friends from elementary school for dessert in the evening when I got into San Francisco. She had seen me post years ago about losing my brother to suicide, and given we both spent a lot of time at each others’ homes growing up, we also inadvertently knew each others’ brothers pretty well. At the time, she had sent me a heartfelt message about his passing, and since then, has loyally donated money to my AFSP fundraising drive year after year. I never expect anyone to donate to my drive, especially people who are that distant from me, so it’s always been a very heartwarming and touching surprise for me each year. Facebook has certainly allowed for a type of connection that everyday people would not have normally had in my parents’ generation, and I was happy to meet her this evening. Without Facebook, this definitely would not have otherwise happened.

I wasn’t sure how much time we would spend together, nor was I sure if we’d even still feel a connection to each other, but as soon as I saw her, I immediately felt comfortable and like we genuinely were old-time friends. We ended up chatting nonstop for over three hours about everything: school, work, moving (me), our families, now-husbands, our living situations, San Francisco, travel. But as much fun as it was to catch up, I realize that in leaving her tonight, I actually felt a bit sad.

Her family life seems pretty bleak: she lives in a cramped, rent-controlled apartment with her husband, and it was passed on to them from his family, who originally lived in the place when they immigrated from the Philippines. The house is dilapidated, filed with junk to the point where no one wants to do anything to change it. There’s barely even 12 square inches of counter space in her kitchen, so she feels like she can’t even cook or live properly in her own apartment. She has a brother of the same age as Ed, but they are pretty strained in their relationship, as there’s been a lot of verbal abuse in the past that she hasn’t been able to navigate. They’re constrained by money and dysfunctional relationships.

I can definitely understand the dysfunctional family relationships part, but I guess what made me sad the most is that even though we’re older, some of the things that bugged me about her are exactly the same now as they were then. I started remembering what really caused us to drift as friends, and she openly admitted she still did the same thing: since then, she pretty much has made zero friends because she’s spent all her time with her boyfriends, one guy after the next, and so whatever friends he had, she’d gravitate towards, and no one else. I remember the time when we were in high school and I tried to have her come to some events with me, but she refused because she said she’d rather spend time with her then-boyfriend; this was for my birthday that year, too. I was so angry then; we hadn’t seen each other in months, yet then, even though she saw her boyfriend every day, she’d rather blow me off to spend even more time with him. I gradually stopped making an effort to spend time with her, and because I was the only one making the effort, we drifted in our own directions and away from each other. We occasionally reached out to call, email, and then Facebook message, but that was it.

I guess the other thing that made me sad was that it was clear from the lives we lead exactly how different we are. She seems like she has been paralyzed into indecision and thinks she is fully unable to change all the things that have made her unhappy. I feel like I’ve made massive strides in improving a lot of things to ensure that I’m making progress in my life, emotionally and mentally. Here I am, back in San Francisco on work travel, clearly privileged in so many ways, and she’s never left even San Francisco (and has zero desire to and said she wouldn’t know what to do with herself) and is struggling to make ends meet with her rent-controlled apartment payments.

While it was fun to catch up, I don’t think seeing her again regularly would be the best idea for me. I really need to make an effort to spend time around people who exude positive energy, who are confident enough to take control over their lives, and sadly, she is not one of those people.

Today, we spent the morning at the World of Coca Cola. Despite having come to Atlanta once for fun and countless times for work, somehow I’ve never made the time to come here and finally did today. I guess the main reason I wasn’t super enticed to come is that in general, I’m not a soda person, and I don’t particularly like Coke at all. I understand why people are obsessed with the flavor and kind of see why people prefer Coke over Pepsi, but overall, I’m not enthralled with the brand at all.

But then, they got brownie points with me when I saw that they not only donated land for what is now the National Institute of Civil Rights just across the park from them, but they also supposed anti-segregation back in the day. And, I guess I do quite like their old-school, original bottle design. I also prefer the taste of “real” coke with sugar, as opposed to the disgusting high fructose corn syrup that sweetens it here.

In the museum, the actual recipe/concoction/formula for Coca Cola is locked and sealed in The Vault. It’s very dramatic, and apparently only two people in the world know the formula, and only half of it, and therefore, they can never travel together at the same time if God forbid anything happens to them. The funny thing to me is that I am pretty convinced that given it was concocted in a lab way back in 1892, I am 100% convinced that it is fully made of artificial “natural flavors” and therefore probably has gut-busting, body-ruining, cancer-causing hideous ingredients in it, and that’s partly why they are being so secretive about their formula. If you actually spend time to think about it, what in real life that you eat actually tastes anything remotely like a can of Coke?! It just screams to me of artificial flavorings and therefore, yuck.

We caught up again with our friends in Atlanta today, first at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Birth Home and National Historic Site, then over dinner in Duluth, where the third largest Korean population in the U.S. resides (and evidently, has delicious and authentic restaurants). I feel like the more I listened to our friends talk about living in the South, being in the sciences as a person of color, the more disgusted I was becoming in these conversations. I never would have learned these things other than in random articles unless I spoke with them about these incidents they’d gone through.

She talked about being an intern and working with a white racist attending doctor, who basically determines whether you get to move on to fellowship and becoming a full fledged practicing doctor; they do all your write-ups and evaluations, they decide whether you can take the next step. If you don’t get along with your attending, you’re basically screwed, and the system is set up in such a way where it doesn’t matter if you have been discriminated against; no one wants to care or cares. A patient came in, black and poor without medical insurance, and the doctor says to her in the room that the patient is a “fat n*****.” Our friend raised her eyes at him because she felt powerless and could say or do nothing, and he retorts back to her, “Why are you annoyed? I didn’t say anything about your race.” In her very wealthy and white undergrad experience at LSU, she was surrounded in sciences by 5th, 6th, 7th generation white southern women, some of whom were wealthy because of their slave-owning ancestors pre-Civil War. And these are people who you could probably never have a conversation about civil rights with, as they lamented what a difficult time their relatives had back in the day when slavery ended, “how hard” it was for their families to get by and make themselves into what they now have today. To them, black people and other people of color don’t have it hard; they have it hard because we’re probably taking all their land, their jobs, their rights from them. When she worked in Birmingham for a temporary internship, she told her team openly that she wanted to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the 16th Street Baptist Church where the bombing happened, and it was just crickets in response; no one else had any interest in going or cared. It was chilling for her to witness this… today, in the 21st century, in a time post our first African-American U.S. president.

I couldn’t really say anything because I was just so disgusted. But then I am reminded of the horror stories I’ve heard in California, in Long Island, of people who think just like this. And I realize that the stories our friend shared during this trip — they are not isolated. They are a lively and growing group of hatred-filled people being further fueled by President Dipshit.

Today, we drove to Birmingham for the day to explore this Alabama city famous for being one of the major hubs for civil rights movement activity. We discovered that it has a very fun and eclectic farmer’s market with many vendors selling everything from squash pickles, baby eggplants, to freshly baked wheat loaves and grandma’s handed down recipe for banana pudding. We visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, plus the 16th Street Baptist Church right across the street, where in 1963, four little black girls were murdered when the Ku Klux Klan bombed them in a racist attack. We learned in further detail what went down in Birmingham during the many decades of racial segregation, and got a relearning of the events that happened in cities across the south, from Greensboro with the sit-ins at “whites only” restaurants (which we saw at the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro last year) to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was standing at the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel (which is now where the National Civil Rights Museum is located) in support of sanitation worker rights in 1968.

I can’t help but think about all the parallels between what happened in a segregated America and what happens today. Is it really that much different? Now, it’s just more disguised and nuanced. “States rights” is just code for anti-people of color, anti-woman, anti-immigrants, anti-progress. Shooting unarmed black men is defended as a police officer protecting his own life. Disagreeing with Muslims or brown people coming into this country is based on the lack of desire to allow people to “leech” off our system of benefits… which really isn’t that good to begin with when compared with that of other westernized countries. It’s hard for me to understand or empathize with that way of thinking. Aren’t we all just trying to do the best we can with what we have?

The worst part about visiting all these museums full of history that is supposed to teach us how we can learn from the past and not repeat it is that the people who need to visit these museums and read this history are just not doing it and will likely never do it. They will never be open to visiting a civil rights museum or exhibit or watching a movie about police brutality against black people. There’s no seeing the other side’s story to them. But it goes back to how poorly educated people are here because in everyday schools in the U.S., you aren’t fully taught the full brunt of slavery and the post-Civil War period. It’s not like when the Civil War ended, all white people widely opened their arms to black people; it was actually quite the opposite, hence the KKK. That’s why we had laws around segregation and no interracial marriages. But if you don’t know that or learn that, then you will never “get” it today.

For the long Labor Day weekend, Chris and I headed down to Atlanta for some Southern exploration, including visiting MLK’s National Historic Site and Birth Home, Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Library and Museum, and the National Center for Civil Rights in Atlanta. We’re also doing a day trip tomorrow to Birmingham for their Civil Rights Institute and historic site, particularly since it was one of the key cities of the Civil Rights Movement. As the start to our trip, we met up with two friends we met in Little Rock in October 2016, at an informal gathering that my friend organized. My friend and the female friend were in the same med school program, and at that time, this couple had just started dating after meeting online. Almost three years later, they’ve recently gotten married and are now working and living in Atlanta.

She is Bangladeshi and Muslim, born in Kuwait, and moved to Baton Rouge with her family when she was 10. He is a fifth or sixth generation Mexican American born and raised in San Antonio, having lived in Little Rock and now Atlanta. He’s also atheist, but he “ceremonially” converted to Islam in order to marry her, and they had a Muslim wedding. I remember having a lot of fun with them back in 2016 during our Little Rock visit and feeling very energized during our hours-long conversation. I think the thing that got me the most was that I was spending time around people in the sciences (she was studying to be a doctor at the time; he’s a microbiologist working for the FDA) and learning all kinds of things that I really had no idea about. And it dawned on me then that I rarely get much intellectually stimulating conversation. Work conversations are very occasionally interesting when colleagues are debating certain topics or discussing politics. With long-time friends, we’re usually just catching up on random goings-on in each other’s lives. I read a lot, but I don’t have a book club to discuss the books in. Overall, I don’t feel “sparked” much. But I loved hearing what these two had to say then. And it was also fun to see them nearly three years later and realize that this general sentiment hasn’t changed. They are just as fun and engaging as they were then.

My ears always turn on when people are discussing culture, race, politics, and how their lives relate to all of that from a day to day perspective. In general, I don’t think I spend enough time talking to anyone about these things, and maybe that’s what I am missing.