Emchap's Shit from the Internet 10/25/17 🍠
A week ago today I did a very scary and frankly pretty sad thing and I quit my job of nearly three years. I start a new job in a month or so, and finish this one next week, and I have written enough about it that I am sick of myself, but it is a Thing that's happening and I'm very excited and scared and sad all at once.
I love and respect the vast majority of the people I work with so, so much. I hope I will stay in touch with them and I mostly think that I will, but it is always hard to leave a group and especially hard when half your company is remote and so you won't, like, run into them at bars.
I've been at this job nearly as long as I was in college, and it's very weird to me that we have a cultural script for leaving your college friends and the idea that they're lifelong friendships etc. etc. (when like frankly many of them are just proximity friendships welded together with dining hall food and sadness) but very little of that with work. I spent a just bonkers amount of time with these folks, whether physical or digital, and I absolutely have more in common as an adult with any random person at that company than I would have with folks at my college.
I'm still sorting through my feelings on everything, and I hope I don't sound like an awful lying sap to the chunk of folks who've read variously-targeted versions of this like four or five times now, but I do mean it. I am so lucky to have worked with everyone, and without the mentorship I've gotten from my vast web of kindly individual contributors I wouldn't be where I am.
Shit to read
My friend sent me this amazing look at Neopets and girl culture and it is so amazingly my shit. I learned the tech skills that got me my first full-time job making fan pages for my zafara and it is such a cultural touchstone for women of my age that it is unbelievable.
Ask Polly is sometimes amazing and sometimes a weird meandering nightmare show and this one on obsessing over finding love is the former. I very much want to wind up in a long-term partnership as an adult and it feels so embarrassing to admit that! Which is bizarre, that's a very reasonable human need, and to love and be loved in return is not in and of itself embarrassing, but New York has made me feel like a horrible needy lump of a person for identifying that.
The AMNH Gems and Minerals Hall is being redone and this is a beautiful piece about it.
Fuck yeah I'm into the millennial mortician content. (During my break between jobs I want to read her book; I've been following her stuff for years and there was a time where I considered going to mortuary science school post-college.)
Please read this bonkers article about frog farming in the 1930s thanks.
Shit to eat
Find a bar with a taxidermy coyote and a $4 beer happy hour behind your gym.
Make an appointment with a friend you've fallen out of touch with to get a drink there.
Halfway through your second beer, realize that what you really want is dinner, not Left Hand's (excellent) milk stout.
Wander over to the dumpling place two blocks down while gossiping about the births of various children and assorted sundry engagements.
Order a 21 and an 18.
Wait.
Wait some more.
Eventually move your vigil to the counter so that you can grab your food the moment it comes out.
When it does, eat a slightly tepid egg/chive dumpling/empanada while your friend tells you how her boyfriend fucked up his limbs.
Unwrap the tuna salad on a fried sesame pancake, which is still warm from the oil, which is why your meal took so long.
Eat the entire sandwich and, when done, catch the B.
Shit to listen to
Fuck yeah I have engineer in my job title and "faithful as a chow" is hilarious because they're mean dogs.
Shit to buy
I wore these leggings to class tonight and I looked like a fantastic #gymbabe which I hella am not, so I recommend them entirely.
I just ordered this book and am excited.
It's winter; order a new filter for your humidifier.