Oh October!

I don't know where October went. I do know that it snowed in October, the scariest thing about this Halloween. My mom left in the middle of October, the teacher's strike started the next day, and the subsequent eleven work days were..something else. We returned to regular work on a Friday, and it was disorienting to say the least. I think the weekend helped in resetting. It's been busy, good busy, but still busy. I still haven't figured out the complete trick to getting my mind to quiet down completely so I have a million thoughts flitting at any given moment. That's a stressful mind space, it does make me feel that in addition to whatever I am worrying about, there are things I am forgetting to worry about.  

Everyday Bag(gage?): What I Carry With Me

Current Handbag: Seville Tote and Shell by Lo and Sons

Ever since I can remember, I've been called some version of a Bag Lady and it's a pretty appropriate moniker. To be fair, I used to travel from Noida to college in North Campus, and then to work in Gurgaon. College had no clean water and toilets that didn't work. Work had long days (I'm talking 9 pm). So... it made sense I had so many bags. Of course, the weight took a toll on my back and shoulders and every once in a while, my back would seize up. Also, I start out organized but I am not the best at staying organized and so my handbag would become a black hole of sorts. If I needed one thing, six would have to come out first. As I turned thirty, I started to care more -- about the weight of things on me, about the look of things on me, and the ease of finding things. And lo and behold, there was Lo and Sons (see what I did there ha). A colleague introduced me to the brand and did a demo with her bag, where she was able to pull out both an orange and a pair of pumps and I was hooked. It's definitely a cult phenomenon, and if you are used to buying bags from TJ Maxx or Target, on the pricier side. I think it's worth the investment -- I was lucky that I got my first bag (The O.G.) at a Crossroads consignment shelf. Earlier this year I was ready to upgrade to a sleeker exterior, and I bought The Seville on a sale. I could go on and on about how structured and intuitive the inside pockets of Lo and Sons' bags are -- they are made for people who travel for work (so.. most of us). 

I'm also very curious about what other women carry in their handbags and purses, and confounded by those who are able to travel only with a crossbody (it's a mixture of admiration and envy, and not judgement). I'm a sucker for all the articles about what's in your bag types of articles and videos. I've been wanting to unpack mine for a minute -- both actually and in words as well. Today happened to be a holiday, and I had both the wish and energy to do this aka the Venn diagram space where life outside work happens. If you are still here for the ride, here we go :)

Phase I: Dumping It All Out

Alright so what you are seeing here is what happens when I randomly clutch things from the bag and dump them on the floor. The inside of the bag was not this chaotic (I think). Still it's a lot and I try to keep my stuff in categories but that clearly was not what happened here.

Teatro ZinZanni

 As my mom's trip winds up, I was looking for a play or performance that I could take her to, as a fun, one last thing to do at the end of the trip. None of the current plays appealed very much to me, and so I decided to look for something more magic or musical-like. For the record, I strongly dislike musicals and prefer my dialogues spoken and not sung. But this wasn't for me. I found something called 'Teatro ZinZanni' or as it's described 'Kit Kat Club on Acid'. Coincidentally we had been watching the season five finale of Schitt's Creek and this felt intriguing. So I did a little research, looked for discounted tickets and took the plunge -- the tickets were a pretty penny, this whole venture cost me two hundred plus. I am trying to shift my discretionary spending away from shopping and towards experiences so...

It wasn't the best day to head downtown because the Chicago Marathon was taking place and we had to walk a couple of blocks in the truly windy city. Once we reached the venue, there was an actual red carpet towards the elevator. We headed upstairs, there was coat check and a photo booth and a boutique store to buy things and a bar. I've been trying to be more fiscally wise and I was pretty determined to not buy random things (and tbh as much as I love my booze, noon on a Sunday was a bit early for me). We got 'upgraded', which was the obvious result of the show not being sold out but hey, I am not complaining. 

(Non)Fiction

I've been to the Athenaeum theater only once before for a play titled 'The Dark at the Top of the Stairs' (a play by William Inge) -- the interesting plot was surpassed by stellar acting. On a whim we decided to see a play on Saturday - (Non)Fiction, booking the tickets on Saturday afternoon -- I've rarely seen the smaller theaters packed to the brim in the way you see at the Goodmans and Steppenwolfs of the city.

Spoiler alert if you are planning to watch the play! 

Taste of Chicago 2019

I went to the Taste of Chicago after..four years. I went there my first month in Chicago and it was an experience, but I hardly knew my food preferences the way I do now. Back then, I just ate to live, now in addition to that, I eat for flavor and texture and more than sustenance. We (bf and I) went on Saturday, day 3 of the four day festival. There were pop ups each day as well, that's not something I remember from my visit but imagine has been around for a minute. We pretty much loved everything we ate and so now have new restaurants to frequent soon (since we don't spend enough money on eating out already lol).  

In terms of buying tickets, they should have had stanchion I think. Although I also think it shouldn't be that hard to have self-service kiosks for ticket purchases or the option to have tickets on your phone that the vendors can scan it. Maybe by 2020.

Kimcheese Fries

Let's start with the chicken noodles from Ukai -- straight up delicious. We also tried jerk chicken from a place whose name I marked on our flier and then promptly lost in the post-trip exhaustion. It was almost 90 degrees so there was a lot of sweating, and there were a lot of people. Next up were amazing pierogis from Kasia's (a name that haunts me because of the Rabbit Girls story, rather real life experience). Then some tamales and it was time to take a break because it rained suddenly. I'm a classy lady and I promptly wore my poncho, which in retrospect looks like it could be a garbage bag. This picture of me eating kimcheese fries (yes, you read that right) wrapped in my fashionable poncho, sums up 2019 well so far.

Summer, where are you?

Random art spotted

Summer simply won't come to Chicago. There are a few days here and there, but no certainty that if you missed one of those days, there will be another one. It will be okay, it is not a serious problem, but after a long winter, summers help my mood. Summers this time around at least are also encouraging me to be more active and exercise more. I feel better for sure and it gives me a sense of control. Whenever I can now, I try and attend multiple classes. There is always something that comes up on certain days and so I'd rather do as much as I can when I have the time.

Mornings

Preach

Someone left this in the sink at work and I'd like to find them and be friends with them. My mornings are anything but magical. They have gotten better over the years and I usually leave the house put-together but still. I love waking up and then going back to sleep, it feels so luxurious. But that's really not great for if you truly need to be up and out of the house. I have a medium-sized clock on the wall, in addition to the alarm. Also what's nice about my current apartment is that there is natural light. Ideally, I'd want bigger windows and more light but compared to my last room (one window directly facing another building), I'd take this any day. TL;DR mornings are tough but have gotten better over the years and I'll take that. 

Stacey Abrams: Leading from the Outside

On Saturday, I attended a talk organized as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The talk was with Stacey Abrams, whose nomination and work for the post of governor in Georgia, as she rightly said, was stolen from her through gerrymandering, voter suppression and suchlike. I found about the event through a whimsical google search for things to do in Chicago and I am so glad I did. It was a mess of a day, with a freak winterstorm breaking the streak of good weather we had. That is not surprising to be honest; it's one of those things I have to come to expect from the midwest, don't pack away your snow gear until it's June.  The auditorium filled up and the demographic was largely older. What was unexpected was that Stacey's introduction would be done by Lori Lightfoot, mayor-elect. 

An Almost Decade of Work

In June of 2019, I will have spent a decade of my life working (with a two year gap for graduate school in the middle). I started work as a callow 20 year old; my first job was as a copy-editor for a firm that provided editorial services. In retrospect, I can only marvel at my reasoning in accepting this job, it was a little bit of a non-sequitur after completing an Economics degree. My next significant role was working in Corporate Citizenship for a consulting firm; it is this job (and the people) that was the most formative experience for me as a young professional in my early career.

Over the course of this almost decade at work, I’ve attended several orientations, worked with people in and from different countries, gone from being a newbie and absolutely terrified of being wrong to understanding that mistakes are inevitable. I’ve worked in three countries and multiple cities; I’ve worked a domestic job that had a big international component and I work an international job that is as domestic and local as it gets. Last year, I spent some time talking to a career coach and this prompted me to scribble a list of sorts, about what I have learned during all this time – not technical or job-specific things but transferable skills and approaches that have and will continue to help me. I’m sharing this list here as a reminder to myself and in the hopes that it is relevant to others.

1. Make notes of what you work on:
I am not talking about your resume (although keep updating that regularly as well, instead of waiting till when you don’t have a choice or the time). I’m talking about all the projects and events and big and little tasks and research and articles, which may be significant in the immediate moment but are easy to forget as you change roles and jobs. This is hardly original advice but I find that even a couple of quick lines every few weeks about what I got done is a great memory jogging tool. It doesn’t just help with resumes, but also with interviews and other professional conversations, applications for fellowships and pro bono work, for side hustles and more and at the end of the day, to remind yourself.

2. Know what organizational tools work for you:
At this moment in 2019, the options to get and stay organized feel infinite. They range from the Getting Things Done methodology to Marie Kondo-ing your life; from Trello to Smartsheets; from Google Calendars to Bullet Journaling and everything in between. All of these don’t work for all of us. Some of these will last and others will fall by the wayside. But what is unlikely to change is your natural organizational personality (if you think you don’t have one or haven’t identified it that is a conversation for a different day). I’ve learned that I must write things down, otherwise they don’t stick on my memory. I’ve also learned that putting events in physical notebooks will only lead me to double-booking myself. I’ve learned that a simple list in Google Keep can be an effective tool to work with another person; while a project plan in Smartsheet, while detailed can often seem daunting to folks. Some people just make notes on their phone. The sooner you figure this out, the more it will help you.

Not Lucky but Favored

Two weekends ago, I had what I can only call a lucky weekend. In a span of 24 hours, I dropped my cellphone in an Uber and honestly I had no idea what to do. I kept trying to use the Uber platform to report a lost item but as has been my experience, it was frustrating and pointless. I kept going outside in the hope that perhaps the phone had fallen somewhere and I would spot it. While that did not happen, what did happen is that the Uber driver who came back with my phone, simply because of the goodness of his heart. Of course I gave him money (the largest bill I had) to thank him; nobody should be expected to perform this for free. I know all the possible outcomes and the fact that this one happened was very, very sobering and heartening.

The next day I was throwing out some trash (for context, there are eight giant dumpsters outside the building). The first few were full and I went to the ones at the end. On my way back, I looked left and saw an overturned earring that reminded me of one of my favorite earrings. I picked it up and it was exactly like my earring. I brought it back with me and of course, it was mine. How I managed to throw it out is not something I know but what I do know is that it was incredibly lucky. I was telling one of my closest friends about this and she said, you are not lucky, you are favored. It was such a lovely sentiment, it will likely stay with me all my life.

An Exercise in Itself

I don't think I set foot in a gym before I was 26 years old. As far as I can remember, I've always felt awkward in the space (it's less now but it depends on how familiar I am with the space). I didn't exercise a lot and if I did, it took other forms: like the time I joined karate lessons or my walk-jogs in the park. I only started going when I started my graduate program, not from a place of wanting to exercise but rather knowing that it was both good and necessary for my health, physical and mental. It was a giant gym, a monument to the sports culture of the university. I mostly stuck to the treadmill and yoga classes but there was the one time I tried running on the indoor track and the other where we went swimming (and managed to somehow lock ourselves out of the swimming area).

What do we do when the internet fails us

My favorite is the one above

So the internet at work is down. Two hours into the work day, it stopped. Four hours later we learned it wasn’t going to come back on for the rest of the working day. Still, no one told us we could leave, so here were most people, hanging out, catching up, taking walks outside, where spring has started showing the promise of summer. I could complain about the day I lost but I’d rather think of it as a day I got unexpectedly. It is (and is not in some ways) surprising how crippling it is to not have internet access. It’s been slim pickings for writing. I don’t have coherent long-form thoughts around any one topic. Instead my mind flits from mental space to physical space and back and forth and so we go on. Life is busy, busy enough I would say, but not the pace of busy I am used to. This is interesting; I had some idea about how “on” I always was but until recently I hadn’t been able to quantify the hours it consumed. On a lighter day, I did so many things I was appalled, because I seem to be deeply invested in doing, much more so than I had thought.

ThredUp: My Experience

I think I first heard about ThredUp through the Call Your Girlfriend podcast. Ever since I can remember, beautiful clothes have fascinated me. Do you remember paper cutout dolls? Cutting out dresses for them and coloring them was one of the my favorite things to do as a tween. For a few years in my life I thought I was going to be a fashion designer; I drew dresses and dresses anywhere I could. But eventually I chose Economics and I am glad for that -- I don't think I would have made it in the fashion industry; numerous as they were, my sketches weren't particularly precise.

Rest, Rinse, Repeat

One of the attributes I aspired to most in my twenties was the need for less rest. To be completely honest, I still envy people who need less sleep to function during the day. It just gives them more time to do more -- now doing more was an absolute ideal in my twenties but now.. now I question what makes the 'more' better. I thought of myself as an insomniac during undergraduate years but I now realize that it was more likely a combination of being a natural night owl and living in a household where the only guaranteed peace was between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am.

Unfortunately, the regular world as I know it favors the early birds over night owls even though those hours are not the most productive for everyone. While the only research I look for around sleep is how to become a morning person (and believe me I have trawled the internet far and wide for this), I did come across a podcast conversation about sleep and chronotypes and honestly all I could think was how long would it take for this to intersect with the world of work (longer than I would like let's be real). This is just one of the many pieces about the different sleep chronotypes and understanding how they work best.

In my twenties, I could and would power through days that followed nights of poor and inadequate sleep. In my thirties, that is harder and it impacts my ability to spend my day in a meaningful and engaged manner. I often think about how much happened in the last decade and how little I can remember if I did not make a point to note it somewhere. Of course, a lot has shifted since then, mostly for the better. One of those shifts is a deep need to be present in the here and now. One of the lines that resonate most with me (unattributed because I have no idea who to attribute it to): If not now, then when; if not here, then where. Part of being present for me is having the energy to engage in the moment and with the person in front of me. Apparently, no amount of caffeine can substitute for sleep. Still, there is always the lingering thought in my head about what else should I be doing. I occasionally have deep anxiety about what am I forgetting to be anxious about.

Theater Week: Fulfillment Center and The Realistic Joneses

Chicago Theater Week is coming up and it is probably one of the most interesting weeks of the year for me. Of course, it's never just a week and plays start before the week and continue on afterwards.


In my first year I went to four plays in a week. That was an overkill and in years since, I have used a different approach.What I value most from TW is that it introduces me to theaters that I absolutely did not know about. The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Chicago Theater etc are good but the theater there isn't always what I enjoy. In recent months, the plays that I see on there are also not plays I want to watch -- either the description feels too vague or the plot is just not for me. I know that I like my plays to be at least somewhat solid -- I need a beginning, a story and some sort of an end. Metaphors and all are fine in small doses, but if everything is a metaphor for something or a tangent, then the play is not for me.  Note, I am not calling them bad plays. They have their place and they have their people. I am just not one of them.

In the last two weeks, we went for two plays and honestly I was pleasantly surprised (we've seen some that felt real shitty and a few months ago, walked out of one at Steppenwolf). I must say they were both at small theaters, one with a very bare bones set. Both have fairly tight seating, no coat checks and both these plays had no intermissions. If you are like me and have to pee pretty regularly, that is not a great thing. Also, if like me you have at least two bags post the work day, plus a giant coat, it is cramped. But I recognize that this is the price of watching quality theater put on by people/groups that do not have access to large amounts of donations and grants in the same way I imagine the Goodmans and Steppenwolfs do.