Baby We Were Born to Run

I haven't written in a few weeks, but I have an excuse: all of that adult-type crap that absolutely no one likes doing that I've put off for months and finally figured I should get done. You know what I'm talking about. The things that drive us to drink, which is the only really awesome thing you can do as an adult. That and hookers. Those are fun things. The things I've been doing? Not fun things. 

Here's the short list:

1. Bills

They keep coming. Every month. Bills are worse than periods. Chocolate cures one. HANDING OVER ALL OF YOUR MONEY cures the other. 

2. Federal Taxes

Apparently the 4 months I spent contract-teaching for KSU counted as a second job, so being a productive young person RAPED MY WALLET. 

3. State Taxes

No, I didn't film a motion picture in the state of Ohio. But there is a YouTube video of me dancing on a table at a bar. Can I have a deduction anyway?

4. Local Taxes

Which I totally didn't completely forget about and do in a 20 minute frenzy on the bus on the way to work...

5. DMV - Driver's License

Is it legal to smoke in a car with a child in it if the windows are down?  Because obviously, knowing the answer to this question will prevent someone from splattering my brains all over the freeway. 

6. DMV - Registration

Part #2. Because the first time I went, I assumed that me being me and having my passport was enough. But apparently I need to have my own signature notarized. Right...

7. DMV - SMOG Testing

CA equivalent of E-check. Inexplicably, the shop I went to raised turtles in a plastic tub in the hallway. 

8. Auto Insurance

"Can you send us your college transcript so we can verify a minimum 3.0 GPA while you were in school?"

9. Picking a Doctor

And yes, I think I found the only practitioner in the state of California that did residency at the Cleveland Clinic.

10. Stock

I got in contact with my brokerage firm and asked a couple questions about my plan, vesting, etc. I was, in turn sent a 60 page book about my stock. I don't understand any of this crap. 

11. 401K

Apparently, it's unheard of for a young person to be interested in designing their own investment strategy and I should just click a little box and let that box click manage my money. After the hours of this, I drank wine. I guess I should save my money now for when I'm too old to have any cool interests (I tease, I know there are plenty of interesting seniors). 



And essentially, throughout that mix, things stayed the same. I worked 5 days a week, I worked out a lot. I had two visits: one briefly from a family friend (it felt strangely comforting to have a dad around, even if it wasn't my own dad), and one weekend visit from a friend that was spending the week in LA. 

I did have a few adventures. I went olive oil tasting up near Sonoma...

And checking out some of the local shops...

Visiting a really great local bar with weird fresh sausages for a friend's birthday...

And taking a pretty delightful self-portrait with his dog...

Followed by a visit to the local whacky donut shop...

And I tried all kinds of fresh lychee, which is the closest thing possible to eating an eyeball...

And my most recent adventure was a trip to Half Moon Bay...

 

Where we stumbled upon a shipwreck...

And looted pure irony from the wreckage...

But in general, things are falling into patterns. I don't need to use a GPS to get to my office, my favorite bar, or Rachel/Dave's apartment anymore. And I have a small handful of people that want to do things with me on weekend that (and here's the shocker) I think are good humans!

Here's a picture of two of my girl-pals from our bike ride this evening. We're a Jew, a black chick, and an Asian girl, so when we hang out it looks like a Benetton ad. 

Well, that's all for now. Sunsets here are beautiful, I caught this one from the bus ride home. 

A Day In The Life

A lot of people have been asking me, 'What's a normal day like for you now?'. I get it. New place. New job. There's a lot of curiosity about all things Googley. 

So here's the basic rundown. 

7:00AM - The alarm goes off. I hate the world. 

7:03AM - I really have to get up? Are you kidding me?

7:05AM - FINE!! I get up, turn off the alarm, make the bed, wash up, and get dressed. I've had an interesting history with company dress codes. They've gotten progressively more relaxed. 

Cleveland Clinic: Close toed shoes, no jeans, business casual, sometimes I wore tights
Strong Memorial: Lab gear
Explorys: If you can get served at a 7/11 in it, you can wear it to work
Google: Wear Something.

Certain areas are higher-security on campus, and I've heard rumors that it's not because they're designing something cool or super-secret. It's because they don't wear clothes on those floors. I've personally considered things like dress up Friday (so I have an excuse to wear heels or business attire), dress down Friday (yoga pants and PJs), or costume Wednesdays (if you work somewhere where no one will consider it inappropriate to wear a banana suit to work, at one point, you kind of want to take advantage). 

7:55AM - Make a cup of coffee in a to-go mug, grab my backpack, keys, ID badge, and walk across the street to wait for the bus. 

8:02-8:40AM - Ride the bus to work! The buses are comfy and cup-holdered and WiFi connected, so I can start being productive on the ride in. I know a few people on my bus route that I can sit with and count on for decent conversation, my favorite being Tommy, the 6'6" 300 lb Norwegian programmer/board-game fanatic. I met him and his wife for lunch once and learned that his coworkers call him Viking. Rad. 

8:40-8:50AM - Breakfast! Although a traditional California breakfast is comprised of an avocado and a glass of red, I've been sticking with things like fruit, yogurt, and rolled-oats oatmeal (all available in the kitchen in my building). There are 2 places near my building that serve full breakfast, both have steel-cut oatmeal and bagels & lox... one is more continental style, and then one has more experimental breakfast items (bok choy omelets and red-pepper quinoa salad weren't previous breakfast options I've explored). All good. 

The cherry blossoms have started to bloom around campus, it's gorgeous.

8:50AM-12PM - Be productive! Meetings, tools, and work. 

The buildings each have a different theme. My building is winery themed, and the entrance is cool as hell. 

12-1PM - MWF are lunch times with teammates or friends on campus at one of Google's 27 varying cafes (They have Latin-themed, gluten-free, Japanese, NY deli-style... pretty much everything. TR lunchtime is spent at a Yoga class followed by Pho or salad to-go. 

1-3PM - More productivity!

3PM - Coffee and snack break! Usually I raid the fridge for weird fruits (pictured: kumquats, baby kiwi and strawberries). The barista in my building is very cool, and she likes to make me latte-art. I've gotten several pretty rad lessons on fancy-coffee making. So if anyone wants to visit, I can make you one hell of a latte.

To get around on campus, we take some silly-looking bikes. Because my building doesn't have a gym or a cafeteria in it, I bike about to get wherever. 

These are the party bikes. On Fridays, sometime we race them. 

3-5/6pm - Yet even more productivity! Followed by gym time. I work out. 

M: Google boot-camp. An overly-energetic female barks orders at you. I learned I'm good at hand-stand push-ups.
T: Going for a run around campus (there's a lot of security, and the campus is near Shoreline park, which means a lot of beautiful mountains and beach in the background).
W: Bollywood class! Sandie comes with and we're really awkward together. I don't like it, but it's a great workout.
R: (on Thursdays, I get my free dinner take-out, and work out at my apartment complex.) Stair running! I don't care how much time you spend on exercise equipment, moving yourself up and down 10 flights of stairs beats the crap out of your treadmill. Stair-climbing strength-trains the biggest muscle groups in your body and gives you a great cardio boost.
F: Either kickboxing or Zumba with Laurin, Sandie, and Nikija. 

Then sometimes we go bowling while we wait for our favorite place to start serving dinner. 

6:30/7:30pm - Free dinner! Either it's with whomever I worked out with, sometimes I meet up with a friend, or I get dinner to-go and eat on the bus or at home. Food quality is great, all organic, usually local, and I typically have a lot of options for seafood, fish, proteins, veggies, and desserts. I learned pretty recently that you can put extra dessert in a to-go container and then have a fridge stocked with yummy things. 

7:30/8pm - Bus home!

Then I have the evening to do with as I please! I can do adult things (paying bills and organizing shit), I can practice, I can video-chat with friends, I can write, or I can go out and do things. Lately, I've been going out a lot with a guy that I met post-horrible-blind-date. The San Jose Film Festival is currently going on, so we've been spending a lot of time seeing awesome independent or foreign movies and getting coffee or drinks and walking around the city. 

Well, I'm off to volunteer to help save a local river from... I dunno. California hippie shit. Possibly followed by fro-yo.

Actually, definitely followed by fro-yo. If I add fruit and dark chocolate chips, it's a balanced dinner, right?

Try New Things, They Said. It Will Be Fun, They Said.

It's been a month since I left on my trip to move out here. The whole experience of moving to a state I've never been, starting a real-person job at a big-ass company... all new. And along the way, everyone kept telling me, "Have fun! Try new things!", as though trying new things would immediately lead me to the magical world of fun. Well ya know what? You all are a bunch of goddamn liars!!

For every new thing I've tried, not one of these activities inherently led me to have a good time. The people I'm with were sometimes pretty alright, but for the most part, really people? Try new things. I don't think so. 

New Activity #1: Make new friends with your coworkers!

My company has 10,000+ employees.  I figured it won't be too hard to meet someone I get along with. One day on the bus home, I was reading comics on my laptop and started to laugh. The guy sitting across from me asked, "What's funny?". I showed him the cartoon and we had a short and polite conversation about which department we work for, what building we work in, which neighborhood we live in, where we come from, etc. I learned that he moved to here pretty recently and he's eager to meet people and make new friends. Before getting off the bus, he asked me for my name and I obliged. That night, he looked up my work IM screen name, my work e-mail address, my work phone number, my internal work profile, my Facebook, my Google Plus, my personal e-mail, my Skype name, and (just a guess at this point) my blog. 

So if you're reading this, Carlos, here's a message: YOU SEEM LIKE A PERFECTLY NICE PERSON, BUT YOU ARE SERIOUSLY CREEPING ME OUT. 

So yeah, make new friends? Not fun. 


New Activity #2: Rock Climbing

Because I don't know too many folks, when 4 people I know decide to do something and invite me along, I say 'yes', and assume that the 'Try new things = have fun' rule applies. So when a few kids that I know and (kind of) like wanted to go rock climbing, I figure it couldn't have been too bad. 

We went here: 

Planet Granite in nearby Sunnyvale. The place is great! It's a huge gym with the capacity to have a lot of people climbing at once and a lot of activity. We first took a quick safety course, because forcing a person to take a 20-minute intro to tying knots means that you should be plenty safe if you put your life in their hands... right? I signed a liability waiver. I learned the fine art of belaying and after our (prep for the oxymoron) RIPPED & GINGER climbing instructor set us free, I figured I'd try climbing a wall. Here's the thing: you don't quite notice how high up you are until it's time to go down. And then you remember that the person you're counting on to safely lower you from 100+ feet down to the ground has only known how to do that for 30 minutes. NOT FUN. 

When I was finally down to the ground and done shaking, we decided to switch to climbing some of the smaller, non-roped walls, called boulders, that only go up around 15-20 feet. No longer paralyzed by the fear of plunging 100 feet to my death (at this point I could only break an arm or something)... I recognized something. No matter how much I hate this activity, after a year of aggressively attacking pull-ups and free weights, pulling my own weight up a wall isn't that much of a challenge. I'm pretty good at it. And it's not a bad thing to be good at! Consider the situation where you have to climb up a cliff. It's pretty imperative at that point that you can do it right. So in general, turns out I'm pretty good at something that I don't like doing and that made me sore for three straight days! (my arms are still in pain). 

Activity #3: The Santa Cruz Annual Clam Chowder Festival

This was another activity where the people were great, but the activity was just awful. The experience as a whole can be described in this image:

So we got down to Santa Cruz a little early to get tickets and find some brunch. 

First, we bought our soup-tasting kits. Each kit consisted of a little bowl and spoon, 5 tickets for samples of chowder, and two little ballots so that you can vote for your favorite chowder. Because nothing sounds more fun on a 70 degree day than eating lots and lots of thick, creamy, buttery soup in a large thick, buttery crowd. 

We decided to step off of the boardwalk for breakfast. This place included mimosas. Nice. 

So then we started to walk around the Santa Cruz boardwalk and festival 

Pretty soon, it was a super-packed festival of bad puns. 

There were easily some 40+ soup stands, and we made a lot of vagina puns. Decided that if I ever wanted to put a soup in this contest, everyone staffing the stand would wear giant, fake facial hair and call ourselves 'The Bearded Clam'. Gross, sorry. 

Some of the chowders were pretty tasty, some were novel (green chowder, chowder with Mexican flair...), and some were pretty bad. But it was really packed full of people that need to discover deodorant, I got kind of sick of chowder, and I wasn't into it.

Activity #4: Bollywood Dance Class

I should've known that this was a bad idea when I walked in and the front row of people were all brown. My equally awkward friend joined me, and we stood in the back, thinking that no one will notice if we observe a little more than participate. 

False. 

Because in walked the instructor, Mala. 90 pounds of pure terror who spent the hour screaming at us to 'GO HARD!!' no matter how obvious it was that I have no idea what I'm doing. 

I learned all of the Bollywood dance moves:

1). Jump up and down
2). Jump side to side
3). Flail your arms
4). Squat
5). Flail your arms while jumping up and down
6). Flail your arms while jumping side to side
7). Flail your arms while squatting
8). Jump while squatting while flailing your arms

I think I qualified as the definition of an awkward white person. It was a wonderful cardio workout. The music was loud and rhythmic. You get in a great workout when the tiny instructor is barking at you to pick your feet up higher, and you're willing to try as hard as you can muster just to stop feeling so damn awkward. In that class, I guess it doesn't matter what you do as long as you do it very aggressively.

Otherwise, things are all right. As predicted, I have remained far too lazy to move the giant pile of cardboard. My plants are still alive. I've started keeping things in my fridge, although I've nearly never had to cook for myself. 

I'll continue to try some new stuff while I try to find my way around this weird, weird place. Maybe I'll like something.