a stick in the eye

When I was a kid, my family went on a trip from the Twin Cities of Minnesota to the Black Hills of South Dakota. When we got there, we stopped in Deadwood, at the saloon where Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead. They told us he never sat with his back to the door. Until. That. Day.

So I’m currently working in a modern-day saloon, aka a startup with an open-office layout. I had never worked in an open office before, and from a distance it looked really social and energetic. And it is… but it also feels dangerous.

Here’s my office setup: I sit in a tiny room with two other people, facing a wall, with my back exposed both to them, and to anyone who walks in. The good: I really like my two officemates, who are both kind, smart, hilarious people. The bad: I feel vulnerable all the time, because while I’m facing the wall, something in my brain keeps warning me that anyone could sneak up behind me at any moment. Over-and-over-and-over.

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There are plenty of articles out there about how the open-office layout phenomenon, which is supposed to be great for collaboration and cost-savings, is actually pretty terrible for concentration and feelings of well-being. 

I understand why my office is currently set up the way it is, and I’m sure things will change over time as the company grows. I’m not writing just to vent about it. I’m writing this because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the physicality of the fight-or-flight feeling I have while trying to work in this situation. It’s definitely more in my body than in my mind.

The weird thing is feeling like this even though coworkers rarely come up behind me. Obviously they aren’t trying to jump out and scare me. I just can’t shake the physical fear that they MIGHT. I can feel it across my back and in my shoulders, like my body is constantly warning me that I am incorrectly positioned in the room and need to turn around.

I’ve had conversations with other coworkers about this, and I’ve been surprised by how strongly we feel the same sensation. I understand the protective biological origin, but I really wish I could turn it off somehow! If you work in an open office, or you sit facing a wall, do you feel it too? How do you deal with it, other than trying to find other places to sit?

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the idea of writing about just one thing, so instead I’m going to list 5 things I’ve been thinking about this week.

1. Flan. I know how to make Brazilian flan, which is called pudim.

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But the way I learned is not as thick and creamy as I want it to be. I tried a new recipe (4 eggs instead of 3) last Sunday, that I didn’t like. And as I type this, I have my next experiment (3 eggs + 1 egg yolk) in the oven. The #1 reason to make flan? The caramel sauce. Did you know that if you dump a cup of sugar into a hot pan and stir, it will liquify? So fun.

I want to try making Vietnamese flan next, because whatever they’re doing over at Le Viet is killer. Recipes, anyone?

[update: burned the hell out of it. Onto flan #3!]

2. Catalina Estrada. I first found out about the Colombian designer Catalina Estrada from one of those Paulo Coelho planners that are all over the place. I love her use of bright colors, flowers, leaves, and animals.

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It’s like grown-up Lisa Frank. She designed one of Shakira’s perfume bottles (major points in my book). But the big news this week is that I was looking for a new comforter and found out that Catalina Estrada now designs bedding. OMGGG. But I can’t figure out where to buy it.

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Somebody help me. I actually don’t own one single Catalina Estrada dress, either. What am I even doing with my life.

3. Mindy Kaling on entitlement. My voracious-reader friend Alexis lent me Mindy Kaling’s second book after carefully removing the dust jacket per the Alexis Lending Library Rules. The best part is at the very end, where Mindy says that confidence is entitlement. And entitlement isn’t actually a bad thing, it’s “simply the belief that you deserve something.” And then she follows that up “how do you know you deserve something?” The answer is hard work, which is pretty much always the answer to everything. I like this because it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word “entitlement” coupled with the idea of the person actually deserving the thing they feel entitled to.

4. Sweet dumpling squash. Is not at Whole Foods. And I am sad. Does anybody know where to find some?

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I used to sell it at Gardens of Eagan in Minnesota, together with the very lovely delicata variety. If you want to read a lush and epic farm story, check out Turn Here Sweet Corn by Atina Diffley, who taught me everything I know about selling squash (and thumping watermelons, and feeling for worms in corn instead of ripping the husk off like a total barbarian).

5. Agates. Yesterday I was walking around John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge with my friends Lauren and Bergs, and we saw some really cool mushrooms, egrets on egrets on egrets, and a turtle chasing another turtle underwater. As we walked, I found myself constantly scanning the gravel trail for agates, which is something I used to do as a kid in Minnesota. Raw agates look like this:

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But if you polish them up, they look like this:

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I used to find them and bust them open with a hammer to see what pretty crystals I might find inside. I still get excited just thinking about it. Hammers + potential surprises = fun times.

That’s my list. Things that got scrapped: Anjelica Huston’s wild and crazy life story, the Uber driver that told me all about his blackout motorcycle trip to Alaska (he knows it happened, though, because he has pictures), and this really beautiful song.

Just yesterday, a few hours into spending time with a new friend, she stopped me mid-sentence with a big smile and said: “did you just say BAYG?! Are you from the Midwest?”

It still takes me off guard when people notice my accent because it took me so long to figure out that I had one.

When I was in kindergarten in Minnesota, I got in my first argument with a teacher over that very same word. We were learning how to sound out words, and this involved figuring out the difference between “short a” and “long a”.

Short a
“Sad Sam ate some bad ham”

Long a
“Kay and Jay wait to buy bait.”

I had this down. Could totally hear the difference, no problem. Except when the teacher came around to check my work, she informed me that I misidentified the following words as long a sounds, when they were really short a:

bag
rag
wag

I’m sure I made an epic face at the teacher when she tried to tell me I was wrong. Could this woman not hear the same thing I heard? I was like “listen: BAAAYYYYYG. It’s a long a.” And she was like “no, it’s “baaaahhhg” pronouncing the word in a funny, snooty-sounding way that I’d never heard before. She sounded like a jerk.

I was so frustrated I almost cried. I knew I wasn’t wrong. Why was she pretending not to hear what we were all saying?

The feeling of defiance faded, and I gave up, figuring it was something I personally would just never understand. I don’t remember asking any other kids, or my parents, if they heard the same thing. I figured it was just a problem with me. Which, even though this is a silly example, is a little bit profound at the same time. An authority figure told me something that didn’t resonate with my own truth, and I got mad about it. But then I accepted it, because I wanted approval.

I totally forgot about this kindergarten frustration until I moved to Massachusetts for college and people started repeating the word after I said it, like “BAYG?! that’s so cute! hahaha.” Suddenly it all came together: Oh. It’s an accent. I have a Minnesota accent. That’s a thing. So accents don’t just belong to people from Texas or Paris or India or Jamaica. Mind = blown. I had the same experience when someone told me about the blog Stuff White People Like. Like oh wait, this experience I grew up thinking was universal/default is actually reflective of a group identity.

There’s a whole lot more to say about all of this. Like privilege in accents (I certainly don’t face workplace discrimination for mine) and white identity, and other things I did in kindergarten. I’m sure I’ll get into it more in other posts. But for now, this is it.

I named this blog “a stick in the eye” because there’s a common saying in the Midwest (I’m from Minnesota) that goes “it’s better than a stick in the eye.” Example: “I got my tax refund and it was way lower than I expected. Oh well, it’s better than a stick in the eye.” In other words, it’s not great. But it definitely could be worse!

That said, I care about a lot of different social justice issues, and I would never in a million years say “well, it could always be worse” to someone fighting injustice. Or to someone in a bad relationship, a bad job, etc. We have to have standards, and always be fighting for better. But, since I struggle with perfectionism in writing, for now the goal is to just remember that a stick in my eye (or yours) would definitely be worse than this.