Tag: new york (page 1 of 1)

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January 27, 2019 / 0 Comments

Experience Dedication

“We see Y’all. I’m with Y’all.”

— Talib Kweli

  • I woke up right on time yesterday.

  • It was the first night of my New York trip that I had gotten a decent night’s sleep

  • My back wasn’t stiff

  • Everything fit in my suitcase without much trouble

  • My flight was still on time despite the previous day’s airport drama.

  • The front desk lady’s New York accent and banter

  • The bite in the cold morning air

  • The relative quiet of the 7 am Saturday morning streets in NoMad

  • The smile of my Lyft driver

  • The lightning charger in the back of his car

  • The ease of the ride to JFK

  • The ease of the TSA pre-check line

  • The pleasantness, consideration, and care of every black Airport worker I encountered including the one who informed me my coat had escaped from its tie to my backpack

  • The short line at Shake Shack

  • The bacon, egg, and cheese from Shake Shack

  • The Shake Shack employee who showed up right on time with the fresh bottled water

  • The baby’s face that lit up when she saw mine

  • The free wifi in JFK

  • The chance to complete my Saturday Morning music rituals

  • This week’s Release Radar playlist

  • The ease of getting on the plane

  • The smile of the first flight attendant that greeted us on the plane

  • The possibility that the middle seat might be open next to me

  • The actuality that it remained so

  • The kindness of strangers helping each other get their bags into the bins

  • My wife’s excitement conveyed in a text that I was on my way home

  • The fruit and cheese plate

  • T-mobile’s complimentary hour of in-flight wi-fi

  • Staying focused long enough to finish Feel Free finally

  • appletree and why you cannot touch my hair in Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches

  • Catching large parts of Mission Impossible: Fallout on other passengers’ screens during the flight

  • Gaining about 40 degrees in my travels from NYC to LA

  • The sun

  • The smile and accent of my Lyft driver home

  • Welcome home hugs and kisses

  • An extremely clean house

  • Fried wontons

  • Conversations about nothing and everything unencumbered by the distractions of devices

  • Making it to the gym despite an utter lack of motivation

  • The Jay-Z and Britney Spears dominant soundtrack to my Aaptiv arms day workout

  • The swell of my arms afterward

  • The fourth quarter of the Warriors-Celtics game

  • Leslie Jones Upper East Side rap on SNL

  • James McAvoy losing it during the N’awlins skit on SNL

  • Not remembering when I fell asleep but knowing it was likely in mid-conversation with Tiffany, our hands or feet touching for the first time in a week

The last essay in Zadie Smith’s Feel Free is titled, Joy. In Joy, Smith considers the difference between Joy and pleasure. She finds happiness in many things throughout the day but only sees a few moments in her life as ones of pure joy. It was a timely read as I prepared to write this response to Tiffany’s Twitter question:

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It’s like this. The only expectations I have for most days is that I will be the best person I can be within its confines. I find pleasure in many things big and small (many, many little things) throughout every day starting with the small delight that I awoke once again. I have an extremely short memory for frustrations, challenges, and setbacks. I rarely recognize, let alone acknowledge, aggression as it happens which, I imagine, naturally deflates most of those situations. I assume just about everyone I meet has a harder day than I do. I’m comfortable with change and prone to adaptation. Things that could be better that I can influence, I do. Things I know that are beyond me at that moment don’t get dwelled upon.

I enjoy this life.

This isn’t all gravy. Throughout the many conversations I’ve had with others who’ve taken the FiveThirtyEight personality quiz, I’ve come to realize that my relationship with anger (or lack thereof) has created a big gap in my ability to empathize effectively with those who do experience frustration or anger more easily. It is a struggle for me to connect with something in myself that feels similar. I can appreciate why someone else is angry. I’ve learned to accept the idea that anger is a valid response to a situation but, it’s foreign to me.

I love to argue over ideas and ways of being. I share this trait with my mother. We also both have a propensity for being passionate in our position without realizing that passion can be seen as an attack until it’s too late. That we don’t take a heated debate as personal doesn’t mean others operate in the same fashion.

My forgetfulness for “bad things” makes it hard for me to be a good critic or judge of particulars. I take what I need and leave the rest. This can be annoying for those who want a more technical accounting of my feedback. I’m sorry, though, I have no similar mental checklist for this as I do for those pleasures and pleasantries noted above.

In the end, though, I operate from a place of realistic optimism. I know bad things happen. I’m aware of how much a struggle being on this mortal plane can be but, every day, it’s just as likely things go right as the other way. Nothing’s a certainty, but, hey, we may overcome.


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And that’s enough to put a smile on my face, a flutter in my heart, a sparkle in my eyes, a dip in my dimples, and a dance in my step.

Happiness.

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August 12, 2018 / 0 Comments

Smile (Living My Best Life)

“If you’re breathing, you’re achieving.”

— Snoop Dogg

An accounting of good things from the last three weeks:

  • Ridiculous slack conversations at work about Chantel Jeffries, why she’s famous, why she is able to put out music, and who Vory is, exactly
  • We got a new stove, and it’s the fanciest kitchen appliance I’ve ever used
  • Surviving a Lyft ride that included unexpected debris on the freeway and getting a check-in from the company, a rebate, and credit for some free trips in the future // I didn’t even complain, the driver did a good thing and informed Lyft of what happened
  • Watching my intern flourish during presentations this past week
  • Having a pretty exceptional work dinner at Norah turn into an endurance challenge as the food just. Kept. Coming.
  • Making it home from NYC despite 7 hours of delays due to weather
  • The Bibimbap lunch special at Epicé Cafe
  • Finally making my way to the Tenement Museum for a tour and getting to eavesdrop on white folks (domestic and from abroad) reckon with the realities of immigration and poverty throughout history
  • Spending a few brief minutes with Catherine in a different city
  • If a random restaurant name generator were to spit out three words that would definitely pique my interest, they would be Turntable Chicken Jazz

WNBA All-Star 2018 was so spectacular it deserves its own section

Loews Minneapolis is a lovely hotel, and while the WNBA players didn’t stay there, AC Milan did. It shares space with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx practice facility, so we saw many a basketball player throughout our stay. The lobby bar was great for people watching and drinking and eating throughout the day.

In the newly renovated Target Center, there is a gym. It is the most beautiful gym I have ever been in, and I suspect nicer than 99% of the gyms in Southern California. They have a juice bar and a real bar. At the gym. Their standard locker rooms are more luxurious than the executive locker rooms at most LA gyms I’ve been in. I loved that place. The only thing they didn’t have was the kind of elliptical machine I like but, seriously, if they had hotel beds, I’d just stay there my next visit to Minny.

We found the official hotel of WNBA All-Star a couple blocks away from us and spent way too much time in their lobby restaurant gawking at and interacting with players, coaches, officials, and other fans. Tiffany got pictures with nearly every player in town at one point. We had a brief interaction with Sparks All-Star and current fave, Chelsea Gray, and she found us during the open practice the next day and gave us a tee. During the same event, we also got called out by Coach Cheryl Reeve for being the lone Sparks fans in the building (we weren’t, but we were definitely the loudest), got a pair of free tix from the Sparks for making the trip, and got accosted with an abundance of Minnesota Nice from county fair award-winning jam maker. She gave us a sample of her jam and her hand-picked wild rice. It was so weird and so delightful.

We had excellent seats at both the open practice and the actual game courtesy of Erica Mauter. It is always a delight to see her. My only other time in Minnesota was for her wedding 8 years prior. She, her wife, and her sister are some of the best people we know, and it was exceptional to spend some quality time with them. Beyond Tiffany and Erica making NBA security a little nervous when they ran up on some players in the lobby of the hotel, I most enjoyed our dinner at Hai Hai. The food was excellent, and the drinks were five bucks cheaper than any fancy cocktail here at home. We’ll just ignore the dude in the MAGA hat who walked past us as we were waiting to be seated.

That he was such an anomaly during these last few weeks in which I spent most of my time with people and in experiences that represent the world I believe is the most ideal and optimal is a reminder that despite the onslaught of terrible news and uncertainty and anxiety and the on-going reminders that we live in a society that has throughout its history rewarded awful men, that is not the only reality.

This, all of this, is real too. And we’ve been living our best life.

I’ve got my grin on.

April 16, 2018 / 0 Comments

Something to Remember


“They say that happiness cannot be measured.”— Dynasty
Meditation: Find Beauty Everywhere, three minutes
My style of leadership and communication is heavily rooted in steadfastness and compliance. I rarely seek to accomplish things by focusing on influence or dominance. At least this is what a leadership training session centered around the DISC personality test told me. You can take a free version of the test here. Once the traits were explained to me in detail, I found them accurate.
I was in a group of over 40 people, most of whom I did not know or didn’t know very well—though I was there because that will change soon—and we had broken into clusters based on our primary trait. One of the Ds (Dominance) asked: “How can I get you [the Ss (Steadfast)] to give feedback?”

What an interesting question.

I took time to ponder it—as my style is want to do—and realized that this is true. I am not prone to give feedback when asked both personally and professionally. At least not immediately. I like being asked about my day or my weekend or how I’m doing, but I’m not likely to say much beyond surface thoughts. At work, I’ll give feedback in a structured situation—I love formal goal setting and reviews—but otherwise, I tend to be more circumspect.

I know feedback has consequence. I like to know why I’m being asked something and how you’re going to use the information I give you. I want to be confident my thoughts will be clear and received as intended. I don’t like to burden others with whatever I’m feeling at the moment.

I hadn’t considered this about myself before. I imagine that awareness will be useful to me going forward. I’ll be more likely to ask some why questions and for additional time rather than be non-communicative or feel pressured to respond immediately.

40-something and I’m still learning about me. Who’d a thunk?

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If you’re in NYC over the next two weeks, you should head uptown and see Detained. It’s timely and compelling and well done.

This is coming out late tonight because I was distracted by Beyoncé’s Coachella performance this morning. It was on a whole other level. Please to send me your best explainers and deep dives into all the elements that went into making that magic happen. You can keep your think pieces though.

Right before I sat down to write this, Cardi B was performing on the ‘Chella livestream. Who is more delightful in pop culture right now?

On the plane ride to NYC, I read Annihilation and listened to the soundtracks for the movie adaptation as well as Westworld, The Cloverfield Paradox, and Arrival. They all go well together. The book is good but the film—which I saw first—did a better job of screwing with my head.

On the return flight, I watched The Shape of Water and the first Kingsman movie. I expected to like The Shape of Water and did. It’s impeccable film-making though I think Get Out will be the 2017 release that most people will still talk about years from now. Kingsman was a surprise. Outside of an off-putting turn towards the end that was out of left field and felt incongruous with the rest of the flick, it was quite fun for that kind of hyper-violent comic book adaptation.

Shana’s dictionary.

California is the future.

Dapper Dan is still the man.

And these are the things for which I’m grateful.

That includes you.

Yes, you.