universal conspiracy

Last night I was supposed to attend an alumni event at a ping pong bar called Ace because I'm trying to be more social and network and all that shit that normal people do without trying. My friend and I got there and we didn't see any people who looked like alumni so we decided to go somewhere else. As we were leaving Ace we noticed a group of about 5 men in their 60s wearing name tags standing in a darkened area on the enclosed patio. Guess that was the alumni event. 

We went to Beast + Bottle, which is a very cool restaurant, and we split a flat bread pizza thing. We sat at the bar and the bartender mixed all the drinks right in front of us and kept spilling stuff on my hands. Finally he dropped an ice cube almost in my glass of wine and I picked it up and started explaining the limited science I know about ice cubes. Suddenly he decided to go mix his drinks somewhere else and my friend was like "why don't you put the ice cube down now that you've managed to scare every guy in this place away".

Well, my attempts at being social aren't always well received.

Then today I was walking home from getting my hair done and I decided to take a route I've never taken before. I ran into a guy I see all the time on my walks, except that he was at his home, in the front yard, washing his dog.

We've always just said hi to each other but this time he introduced me to his dog (Meathead) and then told me his name, Errol. He complimented my pink hair and then asked if I wanted to come to an art gathering he's having at his house in a few weeks. He's an artist, though he shows in Arizona because he said the art market in Denver doesn't allow an artist to have a good living. He lives in a really cool building so I was like "of course I'll come!" because I want to see the inside of the place. He's having a gathering of up and coming new artists in Denver.

Should be fun. And another chance to meet people in the neighborhood...

if you love animals, recycle your toilet paper tubes

One of my neighbors has decided to start hosting dinners so people who live on our block can meet each other and hang out. The first neighborhood dinner was Tuesday. A couple who just moved into a house a few doors down from me came (unfortunately a few other neighbors who were invited couldn't make it).

The couple, Mike and B, have just moved to denver after living overseas for 2 years in new zealand and asia. It was interesting to hear about their experiences since I've not been to most of the places where they lived. They are self described urban hippies, and at some point the conversation turned to vegetarianism (my neighbor made a dinner that was mostly meat). Mike and B hardly eat any meat, and B was commenting how most people have no idea where meat comes from and how meat gets wasted in the US.

So I mentioned something about eating squirrels since I hate them and want the squirrels in my backyard to die. Mike agreed with me but B got upset and said I shouldn't kill animals even if they are annoying squirrels. My neighbor agreed with B and then recounted the following story which I found hilarious.

My neighbor was watering his front yard when he noticed a squirrel running around with a toilet paper tube stuck on its head. Being an animal lover and all that shit, he tried to coax the squirrel over to him so he could pull the toilet paper tube off its head.

Unfortunately he startled the squirrel right as it got close enough for him to remove the tube, and the squirrel went darting into the street and was almost immediately run over by a car.

I guess it's true that no good deed goes unpunished...

buddhist thinking - it works?!?!?!

On Monday I implemented my new Buddhist thinking plan at work to see if I could change things with my micro managing boss. My experience with Buddhism consists of an hour and a half documentary I watched, and an email from my brother Steve:

If you really would like to understand the Buddhist mind, you should find a teacher who teaches Transcendental Meditation (http://www.tm.org/).  You may want to read Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s book, but it’s really quite bad and full of nonsense statements.  A better book of meditations is Dr. Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts Change Your Life.

 

But you have a fundamental misunderstanding.  The practical Buddhist is one that can, “Let those things that truly do not matter slide,” as described by Tyler Durden.  

 (side note: I wonder if he was joking about the transcendental meditation thing, he's a republican)

So, not actually knowing how to officially Buddhistically implement a plan I decided to take Steve's "let things slide" idea and mash it with the "relieve human suffering" idea and then I created a plan:

1. start every interaction with my new boss in the most positive way possible by complimenting something about him
2. ignore the negative things he says (let things slide, he's negative because he's suffering), and when he says negative things...
3. conjure an image of him sitting in a restaurant surrounded by good food with soothing music playing in the background (his favorite thing to do is go to nice restaurants and eat good food) and project this image at his brain (basically make him think my thoughts are his own thoughts)
4. if more negative comments continue add a water feature in the restaurant, then a fish tank, and maybe more food since I'm not sure the food dishes I put on the table at the beginning of my meditation thing are food dishes he likes
5. if that doesn't work, imagine a giant lobster serenading him with Frank Sinatra standards- I know for a fact he loves to eat lobster

While all this meditation does make it hard sometimes to follow the conversation, I've found, since Monday, that my plan works! In Monday's interaction I had to go to step 5. Tuesday, I only got to step 4, water feature. And I found that when I get to the water feature now he might be negative but he also is at least listening to me.

In fact today I had a goal review meeting with him, which I was dreading, and it went really well (confession: I went straight to the singing lobster because I had to pay close attention in that meeting). He even said he wants to schedule more meetings with me since I'm his only remote (not in california) person. And I made some suggestions to improve (i.e. make less dictatorial) some administrative processes he's put in place and he not only agreed with me but even sent out an email updating the processes after my call with him.

So, I'm pretty much all about the Buddhist thing now. Except that when I was talking to my mom she said something about Buddhists being vegetarians. Which would mean no more pepperoni pizza or bacon for me. I'm going to have to meditate on that.

cook central

For some odd reason people keep inviting me places...

Last night a friend invited me over for dinner. It turned out everyone at the dinner was in the restaurant business. John, who trained at the CIA in NYC and cooks at a well known japanese restaurant, made the dinner, and was kind enough to let me sit in the kitchen and watch what he did. He also answered all of my questions, even the ones unrelated to dinner (e.g. how to make bone marrow soup, what brains taste like).

John made this meat thing that's like filet mignon but a cheaper cut (can't remember what it was called, I should have written it down). He said that it's cheaper because people don't like the way it looks (it looked like a just born puppy still in the birth sack until he cut it up). He also made au gratin potatoes and broccoli rabe. Everything was excellent.

There was also in attendance M who's been John's best friend since he was 4, a guy who is opening a ramen place near my house, and another guy, K, who invests in restaurants among other things. Ramen guy invited me to the soft launch of his restaurant and was lamenting the fact that there are "so many fucking foodies" in my 'hood. John and K discussed what it would take for John to open his own restaurant. When the shop talk got too technical I talked to M who used to be a marine.

The conversation kept turning (and not because of me, I swear) to offal and eating things like squirrels and snakes. Apparently with offal you should cook it down and wash it a lot (John said for 10 lbs of raw offal you should end up with 2 lbs when it's done cooking and that it should be washed 5 times, else you are eating, as he eloquently put it, "some animal's poop"). Then K and ramen guy tried to convince me that they could cook a squirrel in such a way that I would think it was the best thing I'd ever eaten. John said he was sure he could get me to eat liver. I was like "why can't you guys make me a pizza instead?"

They also talked about some cooking contest thing that had just gone on. John and ramen guy were talking about the prize, the big green egg. Both John and ramen guy are obsessed with it and want a big green egg (ramen's wife won't let him buy one until he gets rid of other kitchen stuff, and John doesn't have room for one at the moment). Ramen said the contest is kind of bullshit because if the winner already has a big green egg (at this point in the evening there was a lot of drinking going on, I was told that's what people in the restaurant business do, so some of the stories were a little unclear) they don't get to take the big green egg as a prize, they just win the contest. John said "I think that's the same fucking big green egg from 10 years ago".

Around 8:45 I decided it was time to head home. My friend called me 10 minutes later to say I broke up the party and then asked if I had any extra dish soap.

No shock my contribution to the dinner party was a cleaning product...

eastern thinking

I have a new boss at work and at least at the present time I can safely say he's the worst boss I've ever had. I've had bosses who were assholes but never a boss who is an asshole and a micro manager. Without going into details, he has also said a number of humiliating things to me in meetings in front of my colleagues (I suspect, among other issues, he doesn't respect technical women, or maybe women at all). I would also mention that other colleagues are having, or have had, the same experience that I'm having.

So I will freely admit I've devised a number of ways to subtly torture him. He's asian and has a hard time pronouncing some words, so I ask questions which he has to answer using the hard to pronounce words, and then I ask him to repeat himself, saying that I can't understand him. Someone even suggested I change my name to "lobster claws".

I also send purposely complex emails to him because he has a tendency to cc everyone on the planet and make derogatory comments about what ever topic I've emailed him on in an attempt to make me look like an idiot. Unfortunately for him, his reading skills aren't great, so what ever he responds with is usually unrelated to what I've emailed him about (it can take up to an hour for me to craft these emails, putting in key trigger words that I know he wants to rant about but that turn out to be unrelated to the email topic). He's stopped ccing everyone or attacking me via email because people were responding to him "what are you talking about" or "I'm not sure why I was cced on this because it's not related to my work". Haha.

But then Friday night I was watching a PBS documentary about Buddha (my friend Jess was like "you are the only person I know who watches free public tv via a dvd you paid for from netflix"). I'd never really understood buddhism before but the documentary did a good job explaining it. The whole point, from what I could gather, is that you can't eliminate human suffering but you can decide how to respond to suffering (that's where meditation comes in). And I started to think about my boss and how maybe I need to have a better response instead of torturing him the way he tortures me. I'm going to try it starting Monday and see how it works out.

In the meantime, I was shoveling snow yesterday and my neighbor came out to talk to me and I told her about the Buddha documentary and she said "you should go to the buddha center because I think you'd make a great buddhist". So, maybe I will go and check it out. Should result in an adventure or two I think.

sharks and scenes at the yard house

On Thursday night I met up with my friend John. We used to work together in DC back in the 90s and got back in touch after a long time last year.

I decided to walk to the restaurant where we were meeting because it's only a little over a mile from my house. By the time I got there I was nearly frozen because it was 0 degrees outside. The restaurant was packed so I texted John:

me: where are you
J: I'm standing almost right in front of you
me: I can't see, my eyeballs are frozen

While we waited for our table we stood at the bar (seriously, my ass was so cold I couldn't bend at the hips to sit down) and talked family and work. When we were seated we got into the fun subjects. John read my book and is replicating many of the adventures I had (he recently jumped out of a plane and is going to go on a great white shark trip next year).

We had a tuna sashimi appetizer and it was so good I ordered the tuna sashimi salad for dinner which the waitress said was "weird". Then John and I started talking about recent great white shark research and shark week. He's been traveling so much in other countries that he still hasn't seen any of the shows he recorded. I told him about my favorites (I got a DVD with the 6 great white episodes at target of all places - I didn't actually watch shark week on a tv) and he kept saying "don't spoil them!" (as if I was revealing a huge plot twist on downton abbey instead of a research finding about great white predation).

The tables at the restaurant were very close to each other, and John and I were seated between two couples. At some point I realized that both of the couples were staring at John and I. We were both like "what?????" and one of the guys was like "what are you talking about?" and I was like "sharks" and then the waiter came up and we all had a brief but interesting conversation about great whites and the waiter got in trouble because he was late bringing another table their drinks.

Luckily John drove me home because by the time we left the restaurant the side walks (and roads) were really treacherous.

And I didn't want John to have the only bragging rights for adventures so I signed up for a surf camp in Costa Rica when I got home. It's staffed with professional surfers and you get 4 days of coaching. I was hoping to go over the holidays this year but their first opening was at the end of January so I'm going then. I've been doing some training on my balance board the past few weeks, Monday is kick off for pilates. Surf's up soon!