Gossip is a thing in every office environment, in any environment where there are multiple people who repeatedly interact with each other. Bad mouthing is generally a part of gossip — everyone loves dirt on other people. Some of us are more discreet about it than others. But isn’t it especially toxic when the bad mouthing is done from people who are in leadership positions, speaking this way to people on their teams and cross teams about people who have departed the company?

There’s a colleague of mine who was let go back in the autumn and I was really sad when he left because I got along with him really well. Ever since then, I can’t seem to go a week without hearing his former manager bad mouth him, or people who directly report to the manager saying derogatory things about a guy who they haven’t even met because they started after this guy was let go. It puts such a poor taste in my mouth and is just not a good reflection of a manager, who is supposedly a people leader, nor is it a good reflection of any any current employee who speaks badly about someone she’s never even met. Doesn’t this just go back to basics of what we were taught in kindergarten: treat others as you’d like to be treated? Are we really living in such a world where we can’t do or even think about that anymore?

I have a lot of biases. I am wary when a white person gives his opinion of any Asian food. I won’t take a man’s opinion seriously about how he feels on women’s rights if he’s insistent that she change her last name after marriage and/or be the primary caretaker of children. If you have never lived anywhere outside of a 30-mile radius of your hometown, I’ll probably dismiss your opinions about other parts of the world or the world in general unless you make a really good case for it. But some of my strongest and most easily guessed biases are the ones around food: if you ever say you hate an entire continent’s food, I’ll never respect your food judgment (or maybe even your judgment on anything — who the hell says they will write off an entire continent’s food when that continent will likely have so much variety that this idiot making that comment probably has never even had half of their food?!). If you say you are gluten-free but do not (and very likely do not based on statistics) have a gluten allergy, I will think less of you. If you ever categorically say that an entire food is unhealthy and bad for you (e.g. bread, meat, fruit, and I’ve met people who’ve said all the above), I will not want to have any further voluntary conversations with you. At all. And if you tell me you can’t stand any Indian food, we’ll probably never share a meal, ever.

The reason I say this is because India… is a damn big country. Each region, much less each town or city, has its own dishes, its own way of spicing things. It’s the same reason I take offense when people say they dislike all Asian food, all European food — how much have you really eaten, anyway, to make such a massive statement like that? A Kerala curry is very different than a Punjabi curry; they are NOT the same thing. The base isn’t even the same. So why do people make stupid statements like this? Does it make them feel more comfortable being in their ignorant little shell of “this is what I like to eat and that’s it?” Has it ever occurred to them that a comment like this could be perceived as… racist?

Somehow, I remembered someone telling me she just couldn’t stand Indian food, especially having traveled to India multiple times for work — all while doing research for our India trip this summer. She said she just couldn’t take it even though she tried.

Yep. Never taking a food recommendation from this person ever again.

As someone who enjoys cooking, I like to cook for others and have people over at our apartment. When more people come, it makes more sense to have more dishes, which is not always practical to do when it’s just the two of us. Traditional Chinese meals always have multiple dishes at the table that are eaten family style, so having Chinese New Year style meals with 7-8 dishes is a comfort to me and a reminder of some of the greatest Cantonese meals I grew up with.

At tonight’s dinner, other than 75 percent of me, we didn’t have any other Chinese guests. No one else would really understand Chinese traditions around the Lunar New Year meal unless they grew up with Chinese friends and were invited to their homes. But that’s part of the fun with food: you get to introduce people to different cultures by feeding them. But the sad thing is that people of my generation don’t really do things like this anymore. They don’t really make the foods that they grew up with. They rely on restaurants and their older relatives who will eventually die to make these things for them. So when those relatives die, when those restaurant owners decide to close their shops, who is going to continue these amazing food traditions for future generations to enjoy and appreciate?

Tonight, we went to see the play Queens at the Clare Tow Theater at the Lincoln Center. The play is about two generations of immigrant women, seven of them, who come to the U.S. in hopes for a better future for themselves and their future families. They share living space in a basement apartment and their concerns about trying to make ends meet, even though most of them spend all of their waking hours trying to earn just barely enough to cover their heavily discounted rent. The woman who ultimately ends up owning the building where that basement apartment is located leaves her home country hoping her daughter will come join her, but she never does. Instead, she grows up and builds her own life back home in Poland. She even had a child and got married and never informed her mother in the U.S. Their family and friends back in Poland just assumed her mother was having a grand old time living the easy money-making life in New York.

When I watch shows like this, I always feel even more frustrated and angry at the current political climate which is so anti-immigrant, so anti the American dream… well, according to President Dipshit, the “American dream is for Americans.” He wants a merit-based immigration system. He wants to deny people who are trying to flee life-threatening political situations in their own country the right to come to the U.S… those are people in situations like my mother once was, like so many of the people I know have descended from. People leave their home countries and everything and everyone they know and immigrate for better opportunities, not to enter foreign countries where they can commit mass terrorist attacks and laugh at all the pain they want to cause others. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we think. We just want to live happy, healthy, prosperous lives and be free. We all have that in common. It’s just a shame that people like Dipshit and idiots on the right don’t seem to get that commonality. People immigrating today — their intent isn’t any different than the people who immigrated after World War II or the Vietnam War. They just want a shot at a decent life. That’s all.

Tonight, my friend and I went to see Eve Ensler’s monologue play In the Body of the World. I was eager to see it, especially after having read the original play that made her famous (Vagina Monologues) and seeing it performed by a Wellesley cast during my first year in college.

The play is a monologue of Ensler walking us through the brutality she witnessed over women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The prolonged war over copper, gold, and coltan—minerals used in computers and cell phones—has claimed eight million lives and led to the rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of women. Ensler’s philanthropic organization, V-Day, was beginning to build an urgently needed women’s center there when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. In a series of medical nightmares, she sustains the same harrowing wounds as Congolese women who were gang-raped and is flooded by memories of her father’s sexual assaults. She feels herself gradually being removed from her own body and being separated from it. She aligns her body with the earth and pairs her cancer with the pillaging of the Congo and BP’s poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico. She illustrates her healing through her emotions and courage. Ensler harnesses all that she lost and learned to articulate the essence of life: “The only salvation is kindness.”

This was my friend’s first time joining me for a theater show. I wasn’t quite sure if this would be too intense for her first time, but she actually really enjoyed it and found it very profound, and wants to come to more shows with me.

My usual end of day meeting got cancelled today, so I left work a little early to do some Chinese New Year grocery shopping in Chinatown. I wasn’t sure if it was because everyone in Chinatown was mostly home preparing elaborate celebratory meals or already off to their romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, but I was shocked to find that the grocery stores I usually go to were extremely quiet. The roasted Chinese meat shop still had a queue out the door, but that was pretty much it. I was able to get all my shopping done in less than 45 minutes after hitting three different shops.

The stores were all decorated with Year of the Dog new year’s decorations. It made me a little nostalgic for the types of decorations and traditions my grandma would do when I was growing up. I’m never going to be that person to deck my house out in Chinese New Year decorations or do the odd traditions of not washing my hair on new year’s day or maniacally cleaning the house before the lunar new year begins, but there actually is a little fun and excitement involved in all of that.

It’s all right, though. I can still embrace the food traditions. Food never will die.