Lists

Lists, Random Internet Thing

Like most adults who work the traditional office 9-5, I spend my days working hard, and sending tons of links to my friends and coworkers via Gchat, messenger, or Skype. It’s almost like we speak in links. This is a roundup of my faves from the week.

Intimate photojournalism of life in the Bayview 

Do you like cartoons like Adventure Time and My Neighbor Totoro? Do you have an iDevice? You’ll love YummyPocket

Speaking of Etsy shops, shoutout to these two soap shops: Hart + Hawthorn and Hello Soap. I’m really happy with my soap purchases from them. All this homemade soap has got me itching to make soap myself,but to tell you the truth I’m a little scared I’ll hurt myself. I mean, come on, Fight Club.

Is Soylent the end of food?

Bad tattoos. HAHAHAHHA

Everyone’s boyfriend Ryan Gosling is in SAN FRANCISCO. Eating at State Bird Provisions, no less!

My current go to recipe: Farro Salad with Roasted Mushrooms + Parmesan. It’s healthy, easy, light and keeps for days. And if you want a bit of history about Farro….

Informative and well designed gifs about how to survive in NYC, but the tips apply to any big city. Basically it’s all STAY OUT OF THE DAMN WAY

Heartbreaking footage of a sherpa’s final moments at Mount Everest. I couldn’t watch it the whole way through. Kept tearing up. The whole affair is incredibly sad.

Monica Lewinsky comes out of the woodwork after a decade of silence to speak to Vanity Fair about her affair with President Clinton. I’m interested in reading the full article, but mostly I’m incredulous. For real? Let it go, girl!

Stumbled onto this bag obsessed site while I was reading up on backpack reviews, and I’m hooked, although I’m not sure I like the male slant to the site.

People of color in medieval art 

James Beard award winners were announced! Check out the list and see if there are any top restaurants near you. Gotta say, I was surprised by The Slanted Door. It’s not ALL THAT.

Social media rock star makes 28,000 a year. It’s funny because it’s true.

Which rapper has the largest vocabulary? Hint: It’s not DMX.

David Bowie narrates Peter and the Wolf

 

Kevin Spacey sings Talk Dirty

 

Happy early weekend!

Lists, Random Internet Thing

Like most adults who work the traditional office 9-5, I spend my days working hard, and sending tons of links to my friends and coworkers via Gchat, messenger, or Skype. It’s almost like we speak in links. This is a roundup of my faves from the week.

  • I love being alone, whether I’m traveling solo, walking around my neighborhood, or just working on a project alone in my room. Not everybody enjoys time spent alone. This RookieMag article is a great starter guide to the art of being alone.
  • New York (and soon SF) may have Cat Cafes, but Japan has  Moomin Cafe. This looks like a lot of fun, actually. Oh, they also have a Penguin Bars, which really just seems like a bad idea, but I’d still go.
  • Michelle sent me a link to the BBC 1 Live covers, and here are a few of my faves:


  • The last This American Life did an excellent segment on death, by basically camping out and interviewing people working and living at a hospice. A few years ago I was interested in volunteering in hospice, but chickened out. After listening to this segment I’m pretty sure I made the right choice. I don’t know how they have the strength.

Lists, Random Internet Thing

Like most adults who work the traditional office 9-5, I spend my days working hard, and sending tons of links to my friends and coworkers via Gchat, messenger, or Skype. It’s almost like we speak in links. This is a roundup of my faves.

  • A couple of months ago my friend Michelle wrote a blog post about our friendship, and I forgot to mention it. Oops, bad friend! Go read it. It’s a nice meditation on making friends as an adult, and it makes me look good.
  • I love my three Alite backpacks, and I love the company even more because they do cool things like loan out gear for free! Their camping gear lending library in San Francisco is back, and I want to try to rent some gear for our next trip. Angel Island would be nice, but damn I want a site with a swimming hole.
  • I opened my copy of Outside Magazine this month and was surprised to see this article. The hot owner of my favorite sushi restaurant in New Haven! Turns out that he’s something of a food celeb now, with a James Beard nomination and a stint on Chopped. What???????!
  • I was invited to a new knitting group in my neighborhood, and saw a really great Doge intarsia. It was a thing of beauty, but then I looked at the back and remember why I don’t do colorwork very often. It’s a bitch carrying all those colors.
  • I’m rewatching all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I kind of lost it when I saw this scene from the Robin Hood episode.

  • I finally discovered what the song they always play at Baobab is. The video is nothing special, basically what the latest JLo video is making fun of (yacht with objectified ladies), but the intro is hilarious.

Life, Lists

2012/2013, the Return of Saturn, and the List of Lists

Saturn

 The Return of Saturn

It is an alleged phenomenon which is described as influencing a person’s life development at 27 to 29 or 30-year intervals. These intervals or “returns” coincide with the approximate time it takes the planet Saturn to make one orbit around the sun, i.e. 29.4 years. It is believed by astrologers that, as Saturn “returns” to the degree in its orbit occupied at the time of birth, a person crosses over a major threshold and enters the next stage of life. With the first Saturn return, a person leaves youth behind and enters adulthood. With the second return, maturity. And with the third and usually final return, a person enters wise old age.-Wikipedia

I don’t believe in astrology at all, but without a doubt 2012 was my “Return of Saturn.” It wasn’t so much “entering adulthood” as “hold on, everything in your life will be rocked to the very core.”  WHEE!

So, yeah, you name it- it all got shook up in 2012. This felt in some ways similar to 2006, the year my dad died. Everything was up for grabs, and yet there was still a whole lotta love, travel, and intense feeling throughout the entire year. While it was a crazy time, one of the best things about this past year was that through sheer will and practice I developed a much stronger sense of empathy. I also became better at dealing with stressful emotions and thought patterns. I know it sounds crunchy, but it’s AWESOME, like some emotional superpower. Anyways, I enjoyed developing my empathic skills so I decided to investigate becoming a therapist. That wasn’t the right career path for me, but I found a great volunteer opportunity at the IOA, and so far I’m still working toward being a phone counselor there. Who woulda guessed?

So now that the dust has mostly settled, I can turn my attention toward 2013. My resolutions list is about a week late, but I wanted to make sure that I was committed before I made them public. Here we go:

The Easier to Implement

  • Start a positive early morning routine that allows me to slow down: including 5 minutes of meditation, a little stretching and some coffee. I’m not a morning person, so it would be nice to have pleasant things to look forward to when I wake up.
  • Switch to washing my face with jojoba oil instead of soap (random, but I’m already seeing results)
  • 30 days of veganism concurrent with 8 wks of the I Quit Sugar Program  just to see how my body feels (will be doing blog updates on this one)
  • Finally get my wisdom teeth out. 🙁

A Little Vague, A Lot More Tricky, And a Lot More Hippie

  • Work on getting out of my head more. This sounds so vague but I think that it can be accomplished with continuing my volunteer work, reading more, and continuing to make time for travel.
  • Helping my mom out with her restaurant, from revamping her menu to getting her set up online.
  • Simplify- I already love purging, but since I moved into a 6″x10″ room I’ve felt more inspired to take it to the next level. Beyond stuff, this includes cutting out people and habits that aren’t working for me anymore. Goodbye Twitter, goodbye friends who only want to talk about themselves.
  • Hold onto moments of happiness and don’t feel guilty or rush through them when they happen.
  • Probably the trickiest but most exciting goal: Write something. Will it be short stories? Will it be a blog? Will it be a novella? I don’t know, but I’d like to be able to publish it as an e-book by the end of the year. It will probably be about either 2006 or 2012. Surprise, surprise.

I feel a bit freaked out by these goals, so I guess that’s a good thing.

Lists, Work

Hustle, or: Jobs, A History

I’m rereading Tiny Beautiful Things, which is a collection of Dear Sugar advice columns. Most of the columns in the book can be found on the Rumpus website, but I’m a bit of a Sugar fanatic, so of course I had to own the e-book. Yeah, I’m a freak. And yeah, I said I’m rereading it.

Anyways, there’s this one column where a letter writer is complaining that student loan debt is holding him/her back from a big and adventurous life, and Sugar sets the writer straight by talking about what she learned from her endless stream of unimpressive and horrible jobs. While reading her list of horrible jobs I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for my own checkered job history. My high school reunion was a week ago, which means that I’ve officially been working for 10+ years now. Of course I also waited tables at my family’s restaurant ever since I was 7 or 8, but if I count since then, well that is just too crazy.

Things have certainly been busy since I got back from Asia. The last time I had this many things going on was back in 2003 when I had five jobs at once. Of course back then I was young, stupid, romantic and optimistic, so it was okay having five jobs. I needed the money then, and I need it now for sure, but jobs were more casual and fun then, and I never got my identity too wrapped up in whatever I was doing. I miss that.

I thought it might be fun to list out all the jobs I’ve ever had, and in the spirit of gratitude, for all the past positions I’ll try to quickly come up with at least one thing that I learned from the experience.  🙂 Anyways, here’s everything from present from past, although I might have forgotten a few. The ones in bold are what I’m up to now.

  1. Review Writer
  2. Apartment Property Manager aka AirBNB hustler
  3. Research Contractor
  4. Website Usability Tester 
  5. Marketing Intern (unpaid)
  6. Elderly Suicide Hotline Counselor (Still training, and obviously unpaid)
  7. Market Research Focus Groupie (Random one offs)
  8. Convention Staff – When you go to any kind of event, be kind to the staff. Seriously. They get paid peanuts to be abused, and have no real worker’s rights.
  9. Social Media/SEO Research Analyst- Creating and maintaining friendships at work can be wonderful and will make you more productive.
  10. Social Media Research Analyst- For a while, everybody is making it up as they go along. This could be depressing, but I think it’s obviously an opportunity.
  11. Media Research Associate-You never know what a job is or will become until you start.
  12. Marketing Intern at a web company (unpaid)- It’s important to believe in what your company does/sells.
  13. Lab Tech at a blood bank, working weird hours and dreaming I was a vampire- It’s never worth it to risk your personal health for a job. I’ve had a few close calls.
  14. Human Guinea Pig – There’s no such thing as easy money.
  15. Yarn Shop Sales Associate- Sometimes a job is right because it comes along at the right time. Also, if you want a job, just ask.
  16. Recycler- I enjoy jobs with variety and autonomy.
  17. Poster Board Monitor/Cleaner- Working outside can be refreshing.
  18. Biology Laboratory Assistant-Playing a supportive role can still be a lot of fun, especially when your team is winning and has big money.
  19. Dogwalker-I love dogs.
  20. Library Aide- This was when I first learned to love podcasts, audiobooks and short stories.
  21. Administrative Assistant at a music conservatory- Sometimes you just have to get the hell out of a job, sooner rather than later.
  22. Campus Sales Rep for an art store- Sales is an art.
  23. Clothing Shop Sales Clerk- Screenprinting!
  24. Dishwasher- Humility.
  25. Public Health/Pediatrics Research Assistant- Connections and curiosity matter. People want to help you succeed. Being published is kind of awesome.
  26. Waitress/Cashier-I really struggled with this one. I guess all I can say is that you can learn a lot from staying in the same place for a long time. A community can be a lot of different things, even a dinky Chinese restaurant. A smile will help smooth most problems over. It’s best never to work for your family.

Have you ever listed out your total job history? Did it depress you, amuse you, surprise you?