Whoa! It’s almost March! I blinked and then two whole months went by. These past two weeks have been uncharacteristically busy, so much so that there were moments I actually wanted to blog about my day and couldn’t even grab a few minutes to formulate the thoughts. A bunch of overdue updates below…
Subway Spirituality
I woke up 2 hours late on Monday morning (the reasoning for this, I will explain going backwards in time), but as I stumbled into the L train, my favorite subway performer was there, so I got treated to some ear candy at 10:30AM. The internet makes life a little creepier in that before I’d just pop into the L train station and be pleasantly surprised that a good performer was there, but since he posted his YouTube URLs and such, looking someone up after the fact is possible. o_o Anyway, I’ve seen this guy a few times now but it’s always a pleasant surprise to catch him, because I really like his voice. Shaky start to the week, but leveled by some smooth music.
At Union Square, I grabbed the next connection to the 4/5 going downtown and I caught the end of a spoken word poet finishing his set. I heard only just enough to know that he was good, and made me wish I had been on the train a little earlier. He had a powerful voice that reverberated through the entire car like it was empty. It was a voice that pierced through people.
Of course, when he finished, he solicited for money but when no one reached into their wallets, he just sauntered towards the door and faded into the anonymous crowd while waiting for the long ride to Wall St. Seconds ago, his voice commanded attention so forcefully that we were powerless to ignore him, but within seconds of his silence, he was among the indistinguishable masses again. I can’t get over this quality of New York City. Characters will emerge from the fabric and dazzle with something extraordinary, and fold back into the mundane just as quickly. As with all things evanescent like lifespans and sunsets, I find that disarming and magical.
I thought that was the end of this already very weird, pseudo-spiritual morning (I was registering things weirdly because I was sleep deprived), but two very gospel-choir-church-going ladies who were sitting next to me slowly dug out their coin purses. The woman immediately next to me pulled out some quarters, counting through them as if they were her last (and perhaps they were). She tapped on the performer’s arm and offered them to him, saying, “Young man, you were wonderful. Have you ever performed at the Apollo?” He had the aura of a street scholar, the kind with a calm mouth but angry eyes. To be honest, he reminded me of Josh Bennett from Penn. “Thank you ladies,” he said in a way that was at once both gracious but detached as he accepted the $1.55 from the two of them, “I ain’t ever performed at the Apollo now, but I’ve done some open mics.” The woman didn’t accept that as an answer — “You’ve got to do the Apollo! You’re wonderful, all people got to do is listen. That’s the problem these days; nobody’s ever listening.” At this point, I had headphones in and I was wedged between the two of them having this conversation, but I had actually paused my music at this point. It was a casual subway conversation but something about this felt out of the ordinary, and I couldn’t just keep listening to the same songs I always had on repeat on my phone.
Somehow the conversation (mostly the ladies talking, with the young man nodding solemnly) drifted to the most important things in life. She continued, “Nobody’s really paying attention what’s going on around them, and I can’t stand that. That’s why I moved away from up here. Everyone’s just always running, running, running around.” He nodded, “Mmmhmm. That rat race.” She plowed through him, as if he didn’t need to say anything at all. “They don’t realize what’s really important; they’re all about chasing the paper when all you need in life is the Lord and a college degree. I just finished college myself this year, and I’m 50 years old. 11 kids, and just finished college this year, ’cause I know it’s important. My husband left me with all these kids but I found a new husband who ain’t ever gonna leave me” — she pointed upwards. “And that’s all I need.”
I don’t know what struck me so much about this conversation – maybe that I was wedged in the middle of it, pretending to be listening to my headphones, hearing what I know in my heart of hearts repeated back to me in the most cliche of methods (the subway evangelists, caught at the intersection of charity and art), but it still gave me shivers. I stared ahead but I was listening. I think there was a girl sitting across from us who was listening too.
What’s Been Filling the Days
So now that I finally had that weird experience jotted down, how have I been passing the days?
Early in January I went to Winter Jazzfest. Not usually what I listen to but I was very sad to miss Mother Falcon, a group my brother has been harping about for years but I kept ignoring. He also recommended Daughter to me early on but I brushed him off, and now I love Daughter. The time has come — my brother officially has better music taste than me.
I love the feeling of the Greenwich Village music scene though. Ducking into The Bitter End makes me feel like I’m going back in time somehow, to some imagined, shared NY of the past.
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Since I got an iPhone, there has been a precipitous drop in high quality photos that I would capture with my camera. While I love roaming light, this also makes me very sad :( Is the remedy some retail therapy in the form of a better distance lens (aka not a prime)????
I also got more brunch. Always brunch. This one turned into a big-little double date with Michelle/Tina/Pooreen at one of my favorite brunch places… Spoon! I’m obsessed with skillets/baked egg dishes.
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I caught up with high school friends over my preferred method, Boka/Bonchon (the half/half mixed plate with lychee soju, man — infallible). Danila brought in Calvin and Leslie, two people I didn’t know very well in high school, but Leslie had gone to NYU and convinced us to swing by Chikalicious. As many times as I’ve walked by with my roommates, I’ve never actually gone in because I’m always too full for dessert. That did not stop me from eating half of Danila’s profiterole, though. D:
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The picture is deceiving. I ate most of it.
JTai came to visit NY, which necessitated a WAX gathering. She also went to a happy hour before dinner, which meant it was a SNAFU.
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A SNAFU, but always an entertaining one. Had to clean up after her though. Kudos to Charlie’s patience here. We went to Sake Bar Hagi, which was recommended to me randomly by Barbara Jun one day when I was visiting PAACH as an alum. Food was solid! The sparkling sake was like soda. I could drink that for ages. I also FINALLY got the green tea mille feuille cake, which has tormented me since I first saw it at Gyu-Kaku over a year ago.
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Mmmm, my nutritious dinner of cake and beer. Actually, I had eaten a little before this. There was some sort of office party that coincided with Wayne’s last day. :( Sad times… both he and Chiara left in the same month. That means my total number of work friends is reduced down to…. just Kawin! Ha. I actually convinced Kawin to come to the office party and told some entertaining stories of my HIMYM-like life to him, Wayne, Hyun, and Jay. I play the too-cool-for-school card with regards to office events, mostly because I got influenced so strongly by Chiara and Kawin, who were so not into networking and such, but I actually really really like nearly everyone I’ve met through my work. Such chill people. I really wouldn’t mind going to more of these events.
There’s been a lot of board game playing recently, too. Jing and Ben (the Benjaming) are a veritable treasure trove of board games, and they recently bought Bang!!!
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The first time I played Bang was at Harvey’s house for New Year’s my freshman year of college, and had such a blast that I was automatically excited to play this again. I got really into mind-fucking people and trying to mix up identities, but shortly after, I played Resistance with Dean and Kawin’s crew and that was such a mental bruising that I decided to change my entire approach for how to play these psychological games. I used to like to wreak havoc but it’s not very sustainable, and plus I will occasionally have the tendency to fly off the handle (I very ashamedly blew up at Ben during the Bang game we played during the Super Bowl), so I calmed it down. Since board games have become a “thing”, they have been a central focus of most Friday/Saturday nights…
Of course, the other thing that occupied most of my January was climbing. I bought a month-long pass at MPHC mostly on a whim at the urging of my manager Clay, who is a climbing fanatic. I knew Jing had been going, so I went ahead and bought one. Turned out Jackie got one too! And then Clay got excited and we got Kawin to go a few times. Then I went once with Dean and he got hooked and came back like 5 more times. Even went once with Mike and Kelvin. And DTruong. Basically, it’s a thing and I’m excited to be a part of it. I got a lot better after some practice =]
The day of that video, I was trying to win lottery tickets to Wicked. I actually tried twice – feels impossible! Will I ever be able to see Wicked??? Who knows. :( It sucked because we had to wait outside in the bitter cold too. When I work out of the Tower in FiDi, the Hudson River was actually frozen.
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I might write more about this later, but I’m actually rolling off the Amex account this week. This is my last week and I’m actually going to not be on the account anymore. It’s a big deal to me since it’s what I started with and I feel like it’s almost the same as if I changed companies all together. There’s a weird, lingering sense as if I were leaving a party prematurely. I don’t know what to make of it. I know I need to do something else to grow, but I like working on the project a lot, there’s so much flexibility, I’ve become an expert at this point, I’m still solving problems creatively even to this day (spent 16 hours doing that yesterday actually…) and I’ve gotten so close to the team. It’s also so much fun just trolling with Kawin all day, and while by now we’re good friends, it’s still hard to go from spending 14 hours a day chilling with someone to… not. I enjoy working with other coworkers but it’s work, not messing around with a friend. Anything I do now is not going to be like what I did at Amex; I know that for sure. I’m kind of forcing myself to move forward because I’m afraid I will be stagnant forever if I don’t. I don’t know if that’s a good rationale, but I’ve been feeling so comfortable recently that I wonder if I am not living up to some ambiguous “potential” that I was drilled on as a child.
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So Brooklyn. This was a table at Shake Shack FiDi. I came here one Friday with Kawin and the burgers were so good, he started crying (crazy kid). Apparently Brookfield is putting in an Umami Burger, Num Pang, AND Mighty Quinn’s after I’m leaving. Whyyyyyyyyyy!
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Kind of mixing up days now, but I went to the Met to see the Inked exhibit about Chinese ink on the same day I went climbing with Dean and Kelvin. I love seeing contemporary Chinese art; it speaks to me very personally for the cultural aspects and the critiques of modernity.
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Looks like a typical classic Chinese painting, right? Look again. The mountains are made of skyscrapers and the trees are electric spires.
FREAKIN’ EERIE! I love it I love it. Great exhibit. I want to go to museums more but having a hard time summoning people who are interested.
The days started blending together in their cold, wintry monotonous way, but this winter was so much happier than the last.
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There is something inside me that is anchoring me. To be totally honest, I think it’s because I’m comfortable with my life now. The second I make some changes and introduce risk, it will turn upside down again, but there’s always some balancing of comfort and progress.
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I also went snowboarding for the first time! I was also having a hard time finding people who wanted to hit the slopes, but turned out that Ten’s friends were already planning a trip. I’ve been meeting a lot of people randomly that all know Kawin/Dean, and they’re all super duper friendly/good clean fun. It reminded me of how much I like meeting new people in a college-like setting, and is a little affirming to feel like I can still meet new people in the city? There is absolutely no replacing the people I know from college – they are family. But new faces once in a while is refreshing.
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I know I’m a snow newbie but I really wanted to snowboard (much influence by playing Cool Boarders 3 as a child hahaha) so I skipped the skis and went straight for this. I am not used to moving so quickly, so I basically grinded down the bunny slope the entire time, though I did do one green at the end of the day. I started getting the hang of the balance by the end, but I wish I could manage to do the carving thing that makes it look so smooth and seamless. Balance is hard. I wish I invested the time learning to longboard during the summer like I was planning on doing.
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I still think I prefer summer sports (because LESS CLOTHING REQUIRED, omg) but the view is beautiful. Seriously though, I lost so much sleep the night before waiting to intercept Jackie from karaoke to borrow her track pants. I am so unprepared for winter.
More recently, I signed up for an internal company hackathon on a whim. I didn’t know what to expect…
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As I’ve said, my experience with the ADO team has made me kind of a “cool kid” and I treat everything company/bureaucracy-related with a grain of salt. However, it was hard not to get excited working with the teams. It was a Hospitality industry hackathon and they brought three accounts together to work on some innovative hacks to improve the hospitality industry.
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This was my team. The 2 back-end developers were so stereotypical but they were also WHIZZES and whipped up a NLP/TTS-based search system while I did the entire front-end/app mock-up. We were led by an SM who I normally would definitely not feel comfortable bossing around in the context of anything but this hackathon. It was actually a really valuable experience… also, my team ended up winning!
Actually, oh god – our app was originally called “Higgins, Your Hotel Butler” but while presenting in a practice pitch to the MDs, I accidentally called it “Hitler”. HOLY shit hahaha how did that happen?! Because of it, I asked to rename the app to “Hobson” so I wouldn’t have a Freudian slip or something again. Despite possibly suggesting that I have an affinity for nefarious tyrants, the whole crowd seemed excited that I was a strategy/marketing kid with UX/front-end experience, which has been the niche I’ve been trying to play for a long time. It’s had mixed results (I can’t seem to wiggle my way into the Fjord/design agency work, no matter how many proposals I do for my career counselor, who is the gateway into Fjord work), but then I’ll do stuff like this and be the only designer in the room and am suddenly the most popular kid on the bus.
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The hackathon was held at this really awesome warehouse-type thing on the Hudson River. Being that far out was obnoxious, but I love warehouses. When can I live in one?!?!?! #BKwannabe Also, pulling that all-nighter was exponentially more painful than I recall them ever being in college; I also went for a run afterwards because the weather was actually running weather and I couldn’t pass that up. I was running on an empty stomach, no sleep, and nothing to eat except for a can of Java Monster, but I don’t regret it at all. By the way, this condition was why I was so tripped out on Monday morning (see the top of the post about Subway Spirituality).
As far as lessons learned from the hackathon – I was torn for a while between deciding if I wanted to be a “doer” as a designer (do the wireframes, the design, etc) or do the strategy/thinking. I hate when business folks come in and are all like, “Business, haha!” and can’t do any of the tactics. But I’m increasingly aware that designers get pushed around and so little say in what they do. I can see how that would drain my love of it, and I don’t want that. Scarcity drives value, for sure. I’m also trying to balance it with being exposed to talent. I can offer a lot of value being a designer in a business space when there is no other voice, but I’m also very aware that I can’t learn as quickly if I’m not being crushed and surrounded by superior talent. /shrug shrug/ I dunno. I feel like there is so much opportunity out there. Makes me so excited.
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Last night, I got off work at 10pm but still managed to catch up with Harvey, who was in NY interviewing. It looks like there are good prospects that he might come here!!!!! Very excited to potentially be able to hang out with my oldest friend in the city. His best friend lives in Williamsburg so I got to enjoy his company in the presence of overpriced brussel sprouts. I was so burnt out from work that I almost went for the alcohol but present Jenny is very happy that past Jenny got brussel sprouts instead. I also learned that carbs apparently facilitate cancer growth. Wao.
So, tomorrow’s my last day at the Tower I believe. I’m being hit up for new projects but it’s still hard for me to imagine what I’m going to be up to a few days or weeks from now. I’m going to miss this view though.
Wow, this was a monster-long post. It took me 2 hours to write, but I guess this was the last 2 months of my life. As I stop having to work 14 hours a day, hopefully I’ll get to post more. (And also take better photos!!!)
Filed under: Big Kid, Work Tagged: board games, Brooklyn fetish, brunch, chinese art, cold weather, contemporary art, design thinking, FiDi, friends, hackathons, high school friends, jazz, loitering with friends, metropolitan museum of art, shake shack, sitcom of my life, snow days, snowboarding, spoken word, street evangelism, street scholars, subway performers, subways, untoolish networking, view from the tower, weird poetic moment Image may be NSFW.
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