career – Life Off Headset

Weekly Recap + What We Ate: Bye Week

Lincoln with Washington in the background.

It was a week off work, so I spent much of the week back in the swim of school carpool (and this week, missed buses and forgotten backpacks) and internet errands – paying bills, making purchases, etc. The weather has been so erratic. Cold, gloomy, and wet one day and then the next, clear and sunny. It’s that clear and sunny that I expect in the Spring. But it is, in fact January. Where is the snow and chill? I absolutely blame it on the fact that I bought a sled in October. And snowpants for the oldest. If I had not prepared for snow, I’m sure we would have been knee deep by now. Or maybe not, given the state of the environment. Alarmingly, I saw some hyacinths poking their blooms out in the front yard today.

So last weekend was the one and only performance of our show. Actually two performances in one night – a 7pm and a 9pm. Everything went relatively smoothly. Some glitches as were to be expected when we didn’t really get to rehearse things a lot. But I did go in early to run scene shifts with the crew, and I was pleasantly surprised that the props crew asked to run the shifts an extra time. Often the crew doesn’t want to do it more than once when things are simple. But we hadn’t really had a chance to run things at the dress rehearsal – I had to pretty much coach them through it over the headset then. So the crew took it upon themselves to want to get it right, even if it was only for two performances.

I was in my nice backstage clothes, so I didn’t run on my dinner break, but I did get a walk in and reveled in how beautiful DC looks in the evening.

Sunday was Lunar New Year. We went to Taiwanese Breakfast in the morning. We always show up right when they open. My dad was with us and the waitstaff was really excited to see him for some reason. We usually order the same thing every time we go – sweet soy milk, savory soy milk, you tiao (fried dough sticks), soy bean and mustard green salad, egg pancakes, scallion pancakes, dumplings, and dan dan noodles. This time, we ordered some new to us dishes, and there was one pork noodle dish that might make it into our regular rotation.

Clockwise from the bottom: My plate (with cucumber salad, seaweed salad, bean curd noodles), bowl of savory soy milk with you tiao, seaweed salad, bean curd salad, dan bing (egg pancake), cucumber salad, you taio, cold dish of mustard greens, bamboo shoots, and edamame, sweet soy milke.

Other moments of the week:

-Finding a Christmas Tree. The Husband likes having old Christmas trees for backyard projects, but usually the Christmas trees I see on the curb are too big for me to handle myself. So when I saw a little tree in front of a house near the school bus stop, I dragged it into the trunk of my car. I texted him this picture (along with a note that said, “Don’t say that I don’t love you.”)

-Our second child turned six this week. What?!?

He did actually have a present to open- no evening Taki run for him. The Husband had ordered him two Transformers for Christmas, but then in the deluge of holiday packages we couldn’t find one of them when we were wrapping presents, only to have the missing Transformer reappear after Christmas. Which was probably for the best because two Transformers at Christmas might have been too many to get properly played with.

Anyhow, he has a Chuck E. Cheese party scheduled for later on, so he actual birthday was a small family affair. My father was in town and got him a bomber jacket from the Air and Space Museum, which looks super cool. I made his requested dinner – Ama’s chicken wings and Broccoli. Ama is the Taiwanese form of Grandmother – the wings are my mother’s recipe. And by recipe, this is literally what she sent me:

Obviously my mother does not believe in measurements.

I also made him a chocolate bundt cake, and then we couldn’t find the candles, so he ended up with a “3”, “1” “1” and a single candle on his cake. As long as the math works out, right?

He’s Six. Not Three hundred and eleven. In case you were wondering.

-Another fun thing this week is that we got to dog sit for our friends. We had this little guy at our house for the week:

He’s a really sweet dog. Except if there are other dogs nearby. Also he’s a little stubborn and always wanted to go in a certain direction on our walks, but it was in the direction of the big busy street so I tried to avoid it. But he just wouldn’t move and proved very implacable for such a tiny dog. I had to pick him up and carry him several times on our walks. Who was walking whom here?

But indoors, he is super affectionate, almost cat-like. I had many lovely moments relaxing with a book with the little guy curled up against me, a living heating pad.

Outside a book, a dog is a man’s best friend…

-It was also quite a social week. One night the Husband and I went out to dinner with a friend, and another night another friend came to our house for dinner. When I looked at the plans for this week. For the dinner out, we went into DC and had dinner at a tapas restaurant on Capitol Hill. It was funny being down there and seeing how much that area had changed in the past fifteen years since we left DC for the suburbs. One of the first things I noticed was that there was a Little Gym and a Mathnasium there now when it used to be mostly restaurants and bars. The Husband says, it’s a sure sign of permanent change when the new business coming in are geared towards kids. We don’t go into DC very often these days, but it always strikes me how different it is from when we lived there. Also nothing makes me feel my suburban mom-ness more than a swanky city restaurant.

-I also got out my watercolours and made some art this week. One of my friends from college has a birthday coming up and I wanted to make her a birthday card. I’m super happy with how it turned out. I thought about just leaving it with the watercolour flower bursts (on left), but I went back and added the detail with the pen. I’m on the fence as to which I prefer – on the one hand I love how you can see all the nuances and shades or colour without the pen, but I also love how articulate the version with the pen detail is, and how it made the flowers really pop. Which version do you prefer?

Read of the Week: This essay in The Cut about Monterey Park, where there was a(nother) mass shooting on Lunar New Year. Monterey Park is a predominantly Asisan suburb, a couple cities over from where I grew up, but it was very much part of the fabric of my teen years as the child of immigrant parents. My uncle’s medical practice is in Monterey Park, and is, in fact, only a few blocks from the shooting. This article beautifully articulates the importance of these immigrant enclaves. I have no words for the state of gun violence in America, just a lot of sadness for victims and, yes, for perpetrators.

Podcast Listen of the Week: I listened to this episode of the Happiness Lab entitled “Stop Looking for the Perfect Job” while out on my walk one morning. It coincidentally came the day after I had a conversation with someone at work about next season. Long and short of it was, they said they were contemplating offering me a large show to stage manage, and I told them that I didn’t feel like I was at a place right now where I wanted to stage manage something of that size and potential complexity. I would be happy to assist on the show, but I didn’t want to be the one calling it. Afterwards, I got off the phone, I sort of wrestled with whether or not that was the right thing to have said. I don’t want to come across as being unwilling to accept challenging work or peg myself as someone who only wants to do easy shows. I actually love working on a big new production with a huge cast. But at the same time, I know that taking on something that I’m not 100% sure I can handle will certainly make me stressed out and miserable. And lord knows, if I want to be stressed out and miserable, I can certainly do it for more money that I’m making right now. I wouldn’t say I’m unambitious, and I know there is a saying to “Do what scares you” – even still, I think “what scares you” should also be “what excites you.” I think in a few years I’ll be happy to take on such a project as I was offered, but I want to climb that ladder slowly.

Which is all to say – the above episode of The Happiness Lab came at a perfect time for me because I was seriously questioning the merits of being unambitious professionally. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about work ambition this past year, lots of feelings of jealousy when I see people with sky rocketing careers. This episode reminded me that work doesn’t have to be my defining aspiration. In the podcast they quote Esther Perel as saying, “Too many of us bring the best of ourselves to work, and bring the leftovers home.” I’ve definitely been guilty of this, and I want to mindfully avoid it as much as possible.

Mysterious Question of the Week: Where do all the hair ties go? Both the girls have long hair. I also have ponytail length hair these days too. Usually I keep my hair short with a pixie or a bob, but I find myself less motivated to cut my hair when I’m not working. Anyhow… that makes three ponytail wearing people in the house. I feel as if I’m constantly buying hair ties. Where do they all go?!?!?! In the morning, the girls go off to school with hair in ponytails. When they come home, there may or may not still be a ponytail. But inevitably, the next morning when it’s ponytail time … I can’t find any hair ties. I feel like I’m buying hair ties at least once a month. Also … the three year old will only wear thick colourful hair ties, despite her having the thinnest wispiest baby hair. At this rate, I feel like I should just hit the Amazon Subscribe and Save for hair ties.

Grateful For This Week:
-That my dad was able to visit for two weeks. He went home this week and I’m always a little sad when he leaves. He tends to visit while I’m working so I never feel like I have enough time with him. Even though there is something about me that from time to time resorts to being a moody teenager when I’m with my parents, I am always grateful that they come and are active and involved and self-sufficient.
-Good coaches. I’m really grateful for Coach Rob, who volunteers as the coach for the 11 year old’s rec basketball team. Every game, I see him really encouraging the players and making sure they have fun. I’m just really glad that there are people encouraging my kid to do well. On that note, received news this week that the summer swim team coach at our pool will not be returning. This news hit me harder than I thought it would. He had been such a positive coach last summer – encouraging the swimmers to be good swimmers and good teammates. I’m so super bummed that he won’t be back. Good coaches are hard to come by and I’m grateful for those who have the knowledge and the skill.
-Running Lights. I had mentioned in my Christmas post that the Husband bought be a plethora of lights to clip to myself when running in the dark. I don’t really have any intention of running after sundown, but I love the gesture. (I did wear one of the wrist bands when running the hour before sundown, though.) Anyhow, sometimes if we have time between dinner and bedtime, and the 11 year old is at basketball, I’ll take the two little kids on an evening walk. This time of year, though, it is dark by then so we’ll go on a flashlight walk. This week, I had the brilliant idea to give each kid a running light for our walk, and they loved it! Even the dog got one. It make the walk much more fun.

Looking Forward To:
– Lunch plans mid-week with moms from my mom group.
– Another bye week from work. I have grand plans to work on some house decluttering. I think I’m going to pick one area to work on each day: 1) the ~~pile~~ mountain of outgrown clothes in the guestroom, 2) my sewing corner in the guestroom, 3) the collection of random boxes in my bedroom, 4) the linen closet, 5) label the spice cabinet. Now that I’ve typed it out, it seems awfully ambitious.
-Turning the calendar page to February. Whoa, the end of the month has really snuck up on me. But here we are, a few days from February. Another chance to plot and plan and think of how to bring my best self home.

What We Ate:

Saturday: I worked, and packed leftovers. The rest of the family had pizza and wings and it was someone’s movie night, but I’m not sure what they watched. Oh wait – they watched Avatar. The first one.

Sunday: Lunar New Year. I made a rice cake stir fry and dumplings. The dumplings were bought frozen from our favorite dumpling place. The rice cake stir fry in black bean sauce recipe was from Vegetarian Chinese Soul Food. Rice cakes are a traditional New Year dish because the word for rice cake sounds like the words for “high year” so it’s auspicious. Truth to tell, I’m the only one in the family who likes rice cakes. But yay, more for me!

Monday: Ama’s chicken wings, broccoli stir fried with garlic and chocolate bundt cake. For the birthday boy.

Tuesday: Meatballs and pasta (in the InstantPot) for the kids and my dad while the Husband and I went out to dinner with a friend.

Wednesday: Pav Baji – Meera’s Sodha’s recipe from Fresh India. I describe this as Indian Sloppy Joes. It’s eggplant, onions, potatoes and cauliflower cooked in a tomatoe gravy, eaten on a buttered roll. Vegan, for those that chose not to butter their rolls. (I used coconut oil to cook the veggies) I also made this really tasty cucumber and peanut salad on this side.

Thursday: Cheesy Beans from The Weekday Vegetarian. My friend came over for dinner, and she brought a Greek Salad.

Friday: Asparagus and parsnip frittata and roasted russet and sweet potatoes. Another very satisfying clean out the fridge meal.

On finishing work

I am definitely a “last minute” kind of person – I tend to procrastinate and then finish projects just in time. I think it comes being a Questioner (of Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies). I like to keep asking questions, wanting to have to have all the information in place perfectly before I can start a project. I used to wait until we had staged every scene in an opera to start my show running paperwork, thinking that I wanted the complete picture of the show before starting. I’ve come to realize, though, that I don’t need to have everything in place to start my paperwork- I can start my paperwork with what I know and – gasp!- adjust when things change in rehearsal.

Two things I read recently have shifted my thinking of waiting til the last minute to finish things.

The first was a recent post by Seth Godin. I really love how Godin can distill ideas down to their essence, and one of his recent posts really was an “Aha moment” me:

The second was on a blog Headset Chatter, written by a stage manager Karen Parlato. In their FAQ they answer a question about dealing with deadlines:

I like to do things right away. Stage management is all about juggling many balls. I like to get the ball out of my hands as quickly as possible so it’s over and done and I can move on to others without losing track of anything.

These two ideas really shifted my framing about workload and deadlines. I didn’t used to see the value of finishing things early, wanting my work to be as accurate and finessed as possible before distributing it. And even when I did start projects with plenty of time to spare, I found myself still working up til the deadline because I wanted to fuss and adjust and re-phrase. The work was done, but I was not done with it.

For example paperwork for backstage – all the information for the stage crew will be in the paperwork, but I continue to make slight adjustments in fits of self doubt – maybe if I adjust this margin, the crew notes will be clearer to read. Maybe if I write Stage Left rather than just SL it will be less confusing. Maybe if I put this picture just this way or that it will be clearer how the tea try is to be laid out of for the singer. The possibilities are infinite.

But my time is not infinite.

Godin’s and Parlato’s posts, helped me realize that finishing something early is not an excuse to keep futzing with it – the value of finishing something early is that that it gets it off my plate and pushes it to other people so that they can start to do their jobs. Holding on to something does not diminish my to do list. Getting things done just in the nick of time is not necessarily a virtue.

I really like Godin’s idea that those last sixty seconds can be a moment of peace before submitting something, time to savor and enjoy completing a task. It goes hand in hand with the idea that “Finished is better than perfect.” Sometimes as I endlessly change margins and adjust image sizes, I just need to tell myself to stop, and just be done so that I can celebrate having planned an executed something well.

Weekly recap + what we ate: Prep Week

Post It Box organized and ready for rehearsal!

This week was prep week for a new show. Prep week is always a more relaxed because I can pretty much set my own hours as long as I get my work done – I’m not bound by a daily rehearsal schedule. Ironically, though, this week didn’t get a lot of my “me” tasks check off because I used a lot of my work flexibility to take care of kid stuff – there were a few school bus pick ups that I took for the Husband, an appointment for one kid, and the baby had an Open House at her daycare.

This all meant leaving the office early, but also meant I worked through lunch a lot so that I could leave early, and lunch is usually when I take my daily walk. I’m still trying to track my 1000 hours outside and this week I think I had two hours total. It’s a little ironic that when my day is dictated by the rehearsal schedule, I seem to have more time to slot in things like my daily walk and exercise. When my work life is more flexible, I feel like I have to fit in more family/ life admin stuff since that stuff is harder to fit in around my rehearsal schedule.

Some thoughts from this week:

– We had some fans installed this week – a bathroom fan (finally no steamy bathrooms post shower. Also good for the walls), a bedroom fan (just in time for 50 degree nights. hah!) and a wall fan in the kid’s room (because a ceiling fan was a bad idea given the bunk beds). One night this week, we left the kids home with my mom who is visiting and the Husband and I went to Lowe’s to look at ceiling fans at 9pm. Date night, I guess. I was a little taken aback when I walked into Lowe’s and saw:

I’m not even ready for Hallowe’en yet!

– Out of the blue an old friend/work colleague reached out to me. We had done summer stock together twenty years ago when we were both fresh out of college, and then taken a couple of those road trips one does when one finishes a gig and is twenty and unemployed and has nothing better to do than see how far you can get on a tank of gas. Our professional paths crossed fortuitously in the years that followed, but then he got a teaching job at a University and I stopped travelling as much so we fell out of each other’s orbits. Anyhow, it was lovely to talk to him and catch up and see where we’ve each landed. It’s funny, when you’re twenty and starting out in opera and have thoughts of all the big companies and big ideas you want to work for, and then what you find you wants when you’re forty is a spouse and a home and to come home and cook dinner for them.

– Speaking of which… Listening to this Squiggly Careers podcast episode about how to take control of your career.

This has somewhat been on my mind lately – there have been lots of changes at work and it’s not so much that I am questioning if I want to be where I am, but it’s more that I’m wondering if there is anything wrong with wanting to want to be where I am. That’s to say, I think personally I am in a place right now where I don’t want to travel and gig and where I want to be able to take my kids to the school bus and snuggle with the Husband on the couch at night; to do that, perhaps I am giving up some career ambitions. And I’m okay with that mostly, but when I work with people who are doing the constant gig and hustle, I do think about how different my life is from that. I am definitely a little jealous of those stage managers who get to to take a show to Europe, but those opportunities don’t happen overnight – they come out of cultivating relationships long terms, and while pre-kids – pre-marriage, really- I might have been able to invest myself in developing relationships that might grow into an international career, it’s not something I can come to as easily now. I think there is taking control from a point of making career things happen, and taking control in terms of being happy where one is. And I’m in the latter. I know there’s a world of new technologies and ideas in companies across the world, and it’s been really fascinating these past few weeks learning about how different people work. In a way, the changes at my company mean that new ideas come to me rather than than I go to them. Is it a complacent place to be? Maybe. I think that’s okay for now, though. The podcast hosts did have one self-reflective exercise in the podcast that I liked – Take five minutes and finish this sentence in as many ways as possible: “Wouldn’t my career be amazing if….” That might be a good exercise for me to ponder.

-A shout out to Kae’s post “If you See Something Say Something” on taking time to express gratitude to others. I was inspired to write to my daughter’s swim team coach from this summer. The guy was just did so much to build skills and team spirit with the swim team kids this past summer, and I had been meaning to write him since August, but never did. So prompted by Kaelyn’s post, I did. It reminds me of the unit in the Happiness Course (aka Yale’s class called The Science of Well Being) that talks about gratitude, and one of the assignments was to write a gratitude letter – something I think I can think about and execute more regularly, I think.

On the aspiration docket this rainy rainy weekend – We were going to go apple picking, but the weather does not look ideal for that. It’s my last two day weekend in a while, so my weekend aspirations are trying to maximize family time and also life admin items:
– skating lessons for the five year old. Swim clinic for the ten year old
– Attic clean out
-Ten year old’s Halloween costume. Manageable chunk – maybe we will design and get supplies.
– going to a play then dinner out as a family.
– Supertitle work for my next titles gig.
– Seasonal sort and cycle the kids clothes. The weather’s getting cooler so I need to make sure we are set for long sleeve shirts, sweaters, and pants.
-meal plan and grocery shop for next week.
– try to squeeze in some outdoor time between bouts of rain.
– maybe an afternoon of hanging out and watching a movie on the couch.

What We Ate:
Saturday: This was the three year old’s birthday dinner at a local Mexican restuarant.

Sunday: Kitchen sink ramen. Ramen with whatever veggies I needed to use up thrown in.

Monday: Butternut squash flatbread from Milk Street’s Tuesday Night Mediterranean. I pre-made the filling and chopped some cucumbers to eat on the side so the Husband just had to fill the tortillas and pan fry them when he got home. This was quite tasty. Vegan, with optional cheese. I did grill the leftover halloumi to go with it – I’ve never done that before, and it was quite tasty.

Tuesday: White bean and tomato stew from Bare Minimum Dinners. This meal was kind of brilliantly simple – cannellini beans, garlic, tomato paste, water, ditilani pasta. On the Husband’s suggestion I made a double batch and the ten year old took it for lunch in her thermos all week. Vegan, except some people added cheese.

Wednesday: Mushroom and Grape Tartines from Milk Street Tuesday Night Mediterranean, with a quick panzella salad on the side. I was originally going to make a greek salad, but part of the tartine recipe called for hollowing out the baguettes so I decided to make a panzella salad with the bread pulled from the baguettes. That felt like a really frugal food decision!

Thursday: My mother made chicken wings and stir fry. Thank goodness because Thursday night was pretty activity heavy.

Friday: Pizza and Movie – we watched Thirteen Lives, a movie from this year about the Thai cave rescue. Overall a really gripping movie – the story is so tense, even though I knew the outcome. I do wish the movie had devoted more time to the story of the boys in the cave and how they managed, though I imagine twelve boys surviving by meditation sessions led by their coach might not make for gripping drama the way cave diving does. I also didn’t love the kind of “white savior” aspect of a bunch of white men saving a group of Thai boys, but in truth when one looks at any kind of high risk elite activity like cave diving, then the socio-economic truths of it is that it is indeed a white man’s game. For a podcast version of the story, we really loved the first season of the podcast Against the Odds which looked at the story over six episodes. The kids were captivated by this podcast.