#365Gratitude Day 91: Old and new

Today I'm at some software training, learning a new tool.  I've never been to this particular training facility, but it's much like ones I've both taught at, and been a student at before.  There's a big room with a whiteboard, a projector, and a warm, engaging instructor.

The instructor is part stand-up comedian, and part teacher.  She's got a "patter" of jokes, funny examples, and ways she rouses the class to get them interested in the material, and engaged with her. 

This is very familiar.  I used to be a technical instructor a while back, and I recognize all the techniques.  I have used them, and continue to use them myself.  Sometimes I'm amused when I realize I do some of these same things on the Big Little Podcast.  (For example, first you tell someone what you're going to tell them, then you tell it to them, then you tell them that you just told them.  It helps people who learn at different paces, and with different styles to be able to connect with what you're saying.  Some people need a second pass over the same stuff to get it from short term to long term memory.) 

I was super pleased to find out when we broke for lunch that there was this italian restaurant I love, Vapiano in the neighborhood.  I used to work near the Vapiano in Chinatown, and I would go there for this one particular salad, with double-shrimp on it, at least once a week.  It's been over a year since I worked there, three jobs ago, and I miss that salad.  

​So I got it today.  I've never been to this particular location, which is subtly different from, yet also similar to the one I went to all the time.  I find the weird pattern repetition of mixing old and new kind of endearing, and somewhat meaningful.  

Things do always change.  But even in the midst of new experiences, we have the memories of our old ones to compare them to, and use.  I love that this sort of training, and this sort of salad, are old friends and new companions too. 

#365Gratitude Day 90: Phaux

One thing Missy, MB, and I all love is a Vietnamese noodle soup called pho. 

 Missy had the very awesome idea to learn to make it at home.  She used all the ingredients the recipe called for, except one which she couldn't find, and was a bit repulsed by, fish sauce. 

Her homemade pho, or maybe "phaux" (because no fish sauce), is pictured below. 

It was fantastic.  We ate it out of noodle bowls from Japan, which Missy had bought for us a while back.  (They happen to be Ingress event themed bowls, which she got from a fellow Ingress agent from Japan.  That's nerd cred right there.)  We ate the pho using chopsticks from Japan, too, that MB brought back from her recent trip there.

I love my family so much! 

#365Gratitude Day 88: it's not me, it's you

I've always enjoyed the feeling of being part of something bigger than myself, one of the team, part of the group.   

That idea is really driven home for me when I see the inner workings of other people's lives out in the open. I get this sort of voyeuristic contact high from it.  

Case in point. Missy and I were out running errands and saw this.  

Now I don't know Laurie. I don't know the person who wants to be her prom date, either.  

But I love that somewhere nearby, maybe a bit before I saw that, or maybe soon after, Laurie would see and be surprised by this sweet, romantic gesture.  

In a way neither of them will ever know, I got to be part of their little adventure. For just this brief moment my life intersected with theirs.  

If you pay attention you can see this same sort of thing happening to you countless times every day.  That guy next to you on the elevator might be going home to practice his guitar solo in his heavy metal band. The woman in front of you buying toothpase might be buying it for her trip to Brazil.  

The same thing is true about you. Your own unique, wonderful life adds to the richness and variety of all the lives around you. 

It's like we're each a tile in this vast and beautiful mosaic. I love that feeling.  

#365Gratitude Day 87: Having history

So, not to be a downer, but I've got some trauma in my past.  My dad wasn't a good guy, and did some pretty crappy things to me and my family.  He was absentee for a lot of my early childhood.  In later years, I found out he'd done some atrocious things to me and my family, including among other things, pretending to have leukemia when he never did, committing infidelity to my mother on an unprecedented scale, and financially compromising everyone in the family through lies and deceit, including me.

Cheery, huh?

 All these awful things came to light for me at a cataclysmic time, and sort of destroyed the childhood I thought I had.  One terrible net effect of this was that for a long time, I felt like I was sort of artificially new.  Like, I had just had the shrink wrap off, or arrived here, as an adult, from a mystical land that wasn't real.  It was a surreal feeling.  I felt like I had no history I could reliably speak of.

I've come to realize that that's just not true anymore.  Like, by a long shot.  I was looking back through old photos in the giant digital graveyard that's my iPhoto library, and I have over a decade worth of history to comb through.

That's a picture of me driving my old convertible through downtown Silver Spring, about nine years ago.  Missy took the picture, and it's been a favorite of hers (and mine) for a long time.  We were out and about driving on a warm, sunny day.  It's a great memory.

I don't have that car anymore.  I don't have those sunglasses anymore.  I haven't lived in Maryland for years.  (I still do have the skull and crossbones bandana though.)

What I do have is history.  Which just goes to show you, that while bad things do happen, they can't dictate to you the entirety of your being.  Every day you get a little older, and each thing that's come before stays a part of you, but a progressively smaller one.