Emchap's Shit from the Internet 10/30/19 🍠
I am now back from Mexico, where I was for an eventful offsite. (Am I sad not to be writing this from a resort room's balcony? Not no.) It was a lovely work offsite, and we both had useful meetings and recalibrated on our understanding of how tall everyone is. (When people ask me what the most unusual thing is about remote work, it's genuinely that. Everyone is several inches taller or shorter than I think, and some folks who I don't have video meetings with have accents that I forget about, and it feels a little bit like chat room summer camp.)
The retreat was, as I mentioned last week, held at a resort called Secrets, and that will be funny to me approximately until I am dead, topped only by the fact that the nightclub on premises was named Desires. (Truly you have not lived until you've broken into the husk of Desires with your coworkers for a URG meetup where everyone is drunk, no one is sitting correctly in their chairs, and the disco balls are all sitting still.) The conference rooms didn't have projectors, because of course they didn't.
The resort had access to the Atlantic, and I was reminded once again that the gender distribution of tech being what it is means I am often physically unable to go as far out into the ocean as my half-a-foot-taller-than-me coworkers when we are in the same space, which has come up more than once and is funny to me every time. (I work with kind people and they're usually good about staying closer to shore for my benefit, and I was only mildly teased about getting my hair wet.)
I love my life in LA so much, and I miss so many of my coworkers, and so much of adulthood for me is realizing that by living in multiple cities and working entirely online I am condemning myself to never having everyone I love close at hand, which isn't unusual but always makes me a little sad. (The upside is that I have so many cities where I can go and be greeted by friends, which is not nothing. I can take a train up the whole west coast with people I love at every stop, which would have been unimaginable for so much of human history!) I will see them in six months, and some of them sooner, and I am looking forward to it.
Until then, I'll just have to treasure the memory of making my teammate tell me about how he used to be a racecar mechanic at a Guy Fieri's Flavortown in the Cancun Airport, As One Does.
Shit to read
Man it's gonna suck when new media finishes its collapse because of venture capital. This made me laugh.
A perfect restaurant review.
This entire article is a bummer. (The Columbia mattress performance artist pulled a Laci Green.)
r/relationships is the best/worst place on the internet.
The wine pairing content we need.
Nextdoor users are nightmares.
Shit to eat
Skip lunch because you are on a video chat with friends you have missed.
Realize this only when it is 4pm and you are half out the door on the way to therapy.
After navigating a transfer during rush hour, speed off to the bakery by your therapist's office, and inhale a seasonal sugar bread and a ridiculous coffee.
Send a photo to someone you're trying to impress.
Receive a threat of bread theft.
As you eat the sugar bread and drink the coffee that you will take with you to therapy, wonder if your therapist thinks of you as the fancy iced coffee girl.
Dust off the accumulated sugar crumbs, take your remaining half a coffee, and toddle off to discuss why your response to joy is anxiety. Decide that the therapist probably does not think of you as iced coffee girl.
Shit to listen to
Shit to buy
My new winter shoe of choice. Yes I live in SoCal.