MAN UP!

I worked out at the gym this morning with my trainer who told me about one of his male clients who cried - cried! - at the end of their session yesterday.

Said client's been lazy with the cardio which K makes all his clients do on their own after the 1-hr session.  I don't think 20 minutes is much to ask post-session, even though I skip it sometimes when I've got a pile of work waiting for me at home.  Back to sissy-boy though - K cut their regular session short by 15 minutes and walked him over to the treadmill for some cardio and sissy-boy came up with every excuse in the book, finally resorting to tears.  TEARS!  Seriously?!?

I'd get mad first before I cried at the gym, but that's just me.

Kitchen Chinese

I picked up Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese over the long weekend and read it in a day - mostly on my balcony yesterday while I was giving my pasty legs some sun.

It was an easy read with a main character that, in hindsight, I completely identified with because she was so very insecure about herself when it came to her professional life.  The romantic ending was a bit of a stretch for me but it was nevertheless good.

I read the interview with the author at the end of the book, and that's when I learned that Ann Mah is the daughter of Adeline Yen Mah, who's autobiography, Falling Leaves, I first read in university.  Her story, along with Wild Swans by Jung Chang, which I read for a History class, was what got me hooked into non/fiction about the Chinese experience. On the one hand, I want to learn about my cultural history, but on the other, I really appreciate reading stories about characters that I can relate to and even identify with on a very personal level.  A quick check of my bookcase for Falling Leaves reminds me that I lent it out to I don't remember who, who never returned it!  Grrr!  Same thing happened with Accidental Asian, which I lent to my friend WL, who had it forever, and possibly gave it to SA who was waiting to read it, and that's when I lost track of it. So annoying!  

From the back cover:
Isabelle Lee thinks she knows everything about Chinese cuisine.  After all, during her Chinese-American childhood, she ate it every day.  Isabelle ma speak only "kitchen Chinese" - the familial chatter learned at her mother's knee - but she understands the language of food.  Now, in the wake of a career-ending catastrophe, she's ready for a change - so she takes off for Beijing to stay with her older sister, Claire, whom she's never really known, and finds a job writing restaurant reviews for an expat magazine.  In the midst of her extreme culture shock, and the more she comes to learn about her sister's own secrets, Isabelle can't help but wonder whether coming to China was a mistake...or an extraordinary chance to find out who she really is.

PUNCTUATE!!!

I have a profile on an online dating site which I do nothing about. I get messages from guys that I'm not particularly interested in. I suppose I should be more proactive about it and take it more seriously but I find dating tedious. All this to say that I received this opening salvo tonight and I'm irked:

wow i think we would get along great do u like to laugh...do u like to cuddle im a part time magician as in abracadabra lol fulltime <insert profession> but u will have to be able to laugh together .......at me.....at u......and each other i sure hope to hear from you would love to talk more do u have msn aswel xxxxxxx@hotmail.com we could talk there too hope u are interested in having fun cant waiT

It was written by a 35 year old man(!!!) who is obviously seriously challenged when it comes to written communication. My grammar is by no means perfect - I still don't know when to use "whom" in a sentence - but I do my best to ensure proper punctuation. I simply can not take anyone seriously who isn't friends with a period, let alone a comma and doesn't capitalize. It offends me, it truly does.

This is one part-time magician - as in abracadabra, LOL - that won't be hearing from me.

That's all.

Grrr.

I went out for a Winterlicious dinner last night before the Raptors game at a (supposedly) finer restaurant that shall remain unnamed and was quite annoyed by the condescension and chauvinism of our server.

I happened to be dining with a guy friend and while I was clearly in the driver's seat in choosing the wine he offered it to my friend to taste. And later, our server tried to clear the table, ignoring the fact that I wasn't finished my meal, apparently because my friend was. Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive, or my expectations are too high, but I'd expect that at a restaurant where they charge a fair price for dinner they train their servers to observe silent signals...my flatware was placed at 4 and 8 o'clock on my plate, meaning I'm still working on it so leave me be until they're both placed at 4. If he hadn't irked me with the wine tasting earlier, I probably wouldn't have been so annoyed...but his immediate deferrence to the guy just soured the experience for me.

Buggy Simcoe Day

I went for a hike on this lovely Simcoe Day with a few mandarin classmates and their families at Glen Major Forest and Walker Woods in Uxbridge and was eaten alive by mosquitoes - at one point, all I could hear was the constant buzzing around my head....which in hindsight, makes me wonder if it's the hairspray my stylist put in my hair to hold the curls she gave me for the wedding. I hadn't yet washed my hair and that explains a lot because I have 5 bites and they're all above my shoulders!

On the plus side, to avoid the bugs, I picked up the pace in the middle of our 3 hour hike and got quite the cardio work-out.


Plus, we snacked on wild raspberries we happened upon along the trail and crossed paths with teeny-tiny frogs.

The Hero and the Outlaw

I finally finished reading Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson's The Hero and the Outlaw, which my cousin, the budding Jungian analyst, had recommended to me a few years back. Prior to launching her own strategic consulting firm, Mark was an EVP at Young & Rubicam. Pearon is a pioneer in the field of applied Jungian psychology and is the President of the Center for Archetypal Studies and Applications.

The book is a dense read which lays out 12 archetypes including the Innocent, the Explorer, the Sage, the Hero, the Outlaw, the Magician, the Regular Guy/Gal, the Lover, the Jester, the Caregiver, the Creator and the Ruler that can be leveraged to create brands that resonate with consumers. Later chapters apply the archetypes to organizations and illustrate how disconnects between the organizatonal archetype and the employee make-up could lead to employee dissatisfaction.

The one example that totally resonated with me was the discussion of the re-incarnated Volkswagon Beetle:

Jay Mays, the creator of the new Beetle...likes to say that the car's design concept is as simple as three concentric circles, invoking, but reinterpreting, the spirit of its earlier incarnation. But looking at the design through the archetypal lens, we see that the "face" of the new Beetle is virtually identical to the face of an infant - with big eyes and a high, smooth forehead...Now that face, the face of the Innocent, has found expression in a unique and charming automotive design...we look at the reincarnated Beetle and want to smile. We may not know why, but we feel that it would be really great to drive one, to own one. For some inexplicable reason, we would want to own one in a primary colour. What we intuit as consumers, but cannot express, is our delight that the Innocent has been resurrected in such a clever new way.


The emphasis above is mine: When I see a Beetle, without fail, I smile...even the thought of one makes me smile. There is a part of me that wants to own one in the cheery green above but I would never actually go out and buy one because it's too cute a car and I don't feel that I am a cute person, yet the thought of it gives me pleasure...My attraction to the lovable Bug was inexplicable to me before, but now I understand. The Beetle appeals to the Innocent in me.

Oh, and MAJOR pet peeve? The poor copy-editing! So awful and distracting! I had the same problem reading The Interpretation of Murder. Mark was referred to variously by her first name and her last name, which got to be rather confusing because her last name could be a first name, and I found misplaced articles and misspelt words. Why the sloppy copy-editing??! So unnecessary and very disappointing.

Grrr!

I'd made an appointment for 8pm with a guy named Dino to come over and take a look at my vintage dressers. I wanted an estimate for how much it'd cost to repair the scratches and damaged veneer and then paint it white.

I rushed back from another appointment only to be stood up. An hour later and he still has not shown. I am not impressed.

On the more reliable front, I did get a call back from Michael today - a man I spoke with yesterday who was following up with me about the availabilty and cost of a Saarinen-esque pedestal table...yes...I am considering getting a copy if only to save myself a couple thousand dollars, which is not an insignificant amount! Anyway, he left me a voicemail to say that there isn't one in stock in their international network so a custom one would have to be made for me in Italy, hence an 8-9 week lag from order to delivery, which suits me just fine. I'm now It in this game of phone tag.

Smacks of insecurity

You wanna know what irks me?  People who include their educational and professional credentials in their email signatures at work - it's one thing if it's a generally accepted practice in the organization, but when it's not, then it just reeks of insecurity.

The perfect example is this manager who recently joined our organization who I had to train to do a quarterly report.  The instructions and links in the binder are clearly identified and cross-indexed because it's reviewed by our auditors yet the guy had to book a meeting with me to ask me a question that could have easily been answered if he had just flipped the page.  And this guy is a manager?  Where's the initiative here?

He sent me an email request about something else and that's when I noticed he signed his email "D@&!% M#^?@, MBA, CMA."  He makes me embarassed to be a CMA myself.

My mailbox brimeth over...

I spent part of my snowbound Saturday afternoon organizing and reviewing back issues of my magazines and wondering to myself when the new lot would arrive...well, I need wonder no more because lookee what was waiting for me at home today:

I received the first issues of my subscriptions to Wish and Canadian House & Home and for some reason, for the latter, I received both March and April's at once, which is ironic a la Alanis Morisette, because I had already purchased March at the newsstand. Grrr.

Too much information

Rather than spending the day out with the masses bargain hunting on this Boxing Day, I opted to spend the day in cleaning and organizing - chores that are long overdue considering that I had clean, folded laundry on the loveseat in my bedroom for 3 weeks, a bathroom that is icky, dustbunnies threatening to take over and a dresser top that I hadn't seen in what seems like forever because it's been covered by bills and assorted other ephemera.

In the process of balancing my accounts on Quicken (I'm a geek, yes I am) I realized that I had double-paid my last Visa statement so I called to have the payment reversed. Mary Beth, the friendly agent who helped me, asked me how my Christmas was, and then proceeded to tell me that her boyfriend of 2 weeks met her family for the first time - on his insistence - and wanted her to ask her family what they thought of him. I wasn't prepared for that much information - never mind the fact that the sound on her headset was really loud and it felt like she was yelling at me on the receiving end. I was a little uncomfortable because I felt like I had to engage in the conversation she had started or seem rude.

All I wanted was to have my payment reversed and to wait in silence while she worked her magic - is that too much to ask? It seemed rather unprofessional too - to talk to a client on the phone about your personal life. So it makes me wonder whether she was chatty like that with everyone. Or did she see from my account information that I was in her peer group so felt like she could share with me like a girlfriend? It's not like we had an established relationship like, say a hair stylist and a client. In this instance, I'm totally game to carry on a personal conversation, but a one-off with an agent over the phone? A little weird.

All this to say that I'm a dope for over-paying my Visa and if you're a customer service agent, I don't want or need to know about your personal life please and thank you.

Split-runs

I received an offer in the mail awhile back for an annual subscription to Time Canada. The discount off the news stand price was pretty deep, so I thought, why not? I got my first issue last week and I'm really disappointed because the only thing Canadian about it is the ads - not even a nominal article on Canadian news, which reminded me of a paper I wrote for a university international economics class on the the US-Canada trade war over "split-run" magazines.

I feel a bit cheated...and I wish now I'd subscribed to Maclean's instead for a true Canadian news magazine. That's all.