It’s funny how interconnected we can be.  Lately I have come across many situations that make me shake my head at how small the world can be at times (or maybe it’s just LA).  The most prominent example is when I commented on a friend and coworker’s Facebook about a post he put up, then later saw that the next person to comment was one of the girls who used to live in my house!  The house that we have owned for about 10 years now…  At work the next day, I had to ask my coworker how he knew this girl and (dun dun dun…) she’s his cousin!  Wow.  Of all the coincidences in this universe, that is one I didn’t see coming.  So as it turns out, my coworker had been in my house before, many many years ago.

Other such situations include a trip to Wurstküche in downtown LA, where I got into line right behind a fellow 2008 UCLA orientation counselor!  Then, later on as I was eating, I looked up to find one of my pledge bros from AKPsi sitting at another table.  Imagine that.  And many months ago, one of the engineers at work and one of the operations girls were chatting because they found they had both lived in Michigan.  When the guy mentioned that he swam, she was interested because she had worked on the coaching staff or been an assistant.  Further probing revealed that she had actually been there working with the swim team that he was on during the time that he would have been on the team!  And then they both end up at the same (very small) company out in California?!

In addition, that same girl recently found out that her former roommate bartended with the girlfriend of one of our sales guys.  Of all the bars in LA and all the roommates and girlfriends these people could have had…  Seriously, what’s up with all this interconnectedness?  I guess even a large city like Los Angeles can quickly become small after a couple years of building relationships and connections.  Eventually you’re no more than a 2nd degree contact to anyone!

So many of my friends have a group from college, or even high school, that they still keep in touch with and hang out with.  A good portion of them also have some friends stemming from childhood as well.  I wonder what that’s like and if I’ll ever have lifelong friends.  The landscape of my life is so variable that dozens of friends have come and gone.  The people I spend much of my time with are only friends I’ve met in the past three years or so.  I’m so used to moving around and making new friends that it’s hard to imagine knowing someone for that long.

I’ve always hoped that each friendship would be one that would last forever, but as our lives changed, we would grow apart.  It also didn’t help that I moved a lot, so many friendships dwindled after not being able to hang out for a long period.  The internet has definitely helped to slow down the process of losing touch, but it still happens.  At this point, the only person in my life right now who I know will be around for decades is Panda.  He’s the best friend I’ve got and anyone else could very well be out of the picture in a few years.

I haven’t given up hope that I can maintain some long-lasting friendships though!  I think that business school will offer me a great chance to meet people who I can consider friends forever.  In addition, any and all future business partners will probably be great friends and a common interest in our business should keep us in contact for a long time to come.  I wish I had a group of close friends who all hung out with each other, but that’s just not the way my life developed.  Instead, I will continue to be a connector, bringing together my different sets of friends for gatherings and potentially facilitating some wonderful new bonds.

My friend Philosopher is back in town after almost two years! I can’t believe it was so long ago that he first came to visit, or that it went by so quickly. I really look forward to the day when I can visit him in his home country again, hopefully for London 2012.

I’ve taken the rest of the week off for a grand California adventure, spending time from Los Angeles to Sacramento, and many places in between. It was pretty exciting to only have a one day work week, but it’ll be even more exciting once start our trip exploring the towns of the West coast.

I can’t wait and I’m sure we will take plenty of pictures! This is going to be magnificent.

Well, the time has come.  For months, one of my coworkers has been preparing to go off to business school (in China) and today was his official last day.  We’ve gone out to lunches, dinners, and even had a little in-house party.  We presented him with a cake, a card, a goodie bag, and an iPad!  All in all a pretty good sendoff, I’d say.  By now all the loose ends are pretty much tied up and his replacement, a friend of his, has been all trained up and is ready to take over his role.  Tonight, eight of us joined him at his place for one final shindig to send him off.  I’m glad that we got a chance to hang out one more time, since I was getting kind of sad at the end of the work day.

So by this point, all that was left was to spend some quality time with him before he flies off to a faraway land where Facebook and Google don’t exist.  Thankfully, we’ve got some techy guys who can set him up with a VPN account so he won’t be completely cut off from the world.  After all, he just got a Google+ account and what a shame it would be to set it all up only to never use it!

This time when we left him, it felt right.  We’d spent as much time as we could together and got some good old bonding in outside of the office, all of us just friends.  It’s the kind of camaraderie I was hoping for when I mentioned potentially setting up happy hour sessions after work.  It’s great to get to know my coworkers in a relaxed setting with no time constraints and it’s a pity we don’t do it more often.  I hope that it doesn’t always take someone leaving to get us all together.  And I hope that we’ll be able to stay in touch as our friend embarks on a new chapter in his life!

Tonight I went out to dinner with a few coworkers and their friends.  Initially, it was supposed to be a happy hour sort of thing, but two of the guys got caught up with work, so we didn’t leave until about 6:30.  We were also going to celebrate one guy’s birthday and his pending departure to go to business school.  It turned out to be a great meal and it made me wish that our company organized some happy hours for coworkers to spend time together after work.

I have a friend who goes to happy hour with her coworkers nearly every week (or at least has the opportunity to) and I think that’d be a nice thing for my office too.  I mean, we do have lunches together pretty frequently, but there’s always a time constraint and people can’t really unwind like they could on a Friday after work.  Plus, people seem to bond better over alcohol and the whole nighttime scene makes things feel more intimate.  I mentioned this to one of the coworkers who was out with us and he thought it was a good idea as well.  Perhaps I’ll try to arrange something and start a new office tradition!

This weekend, a bunch of my friends graduated from UCLA.  It’s a reminder of how long it’s been since I first crossed paths with them and I find it almost inconceivable that we’ve finally reached this point.  When I first met this group of friends, they were all first years living in my building.  I was already a 4th year, with a year and a half left before graduating.  It seemed like so long before they would ever graduate themselves, but now the time has come!  Has it really been two and a half years since I graduated?  While so much has happened, it all seemed to go by really quickly.  In a blink of an eye, here I am, well into my life as a working professional.

I still remember the carefree nights we spent chatting into the wee hours, or the stressful nights we spent studying into the wee hours!  There were plenty of meals to unite us and random gatherings in the hallway.  Ah, the hallways that drew us all together.  I really enjoyed the people I encountered just by living where I did, and while we’ve drifted apart since the time we were neighbors, they will always have a fond place in my heart and hopefully we continue to find time to meet up when we can.  It’s hard to believe that everyone is moving on to work or grad school (or trying for one or the other).  I still feel like I’m 21 and they’re all 18.  It seems that I might feel that way forever, no matter how our lives change and mature.

Thinking about those relationships also reminds me of the ones I built while studying abroad in England.  One of my best friends from that time has had an opportunity to visit me here and now we’re planning his next visit!  Has it really been two years since we’ve seen each other?  It definitely flew by before I knew what happened.  I guess it was because I managed to get a job a few months after he left and that has kept me pretty busy ever since.  I’m already coming up on a year and a half at my company!  That one feels like longer, since so much has happened, yet it still feels fast, since I can remember so much of how I felt when I was just starting.

Let’s not even talk about high school anymore.  Freshman year was ending a decade ago!  Boy does that make me feel old.  It’s just baffling how fresh those memories feel, even when so much has happened and a lot of time has gone by.  Our perceptions of time were never really very accurate, were they?

Wow, I was in such a food coma last night that I totally collapsed on my bed and fell asleep soon after getting back from dinner.  Next thing I knew, I woke up sometime around 5 in the morning with the light still on!

I guess the Ethiopian food we had earlier in the night weighed pretty heavily on me.  Then again, it was a lot!  If you’ve never tried Ethiopian before (at least the Americanized version that is available in the states – who knows what real Ethiopian is out there), you should really give it a shot.  One of my friends who went last night – I’ll call her Duchess – had eaten it once before (like me) and we both enjoyed our experiences.  So there we were, many moons later, taking some others out for their first experience.

The place we went to was decided by a Tippr coupon that I bought a couple days ago, for a place called Little Ethiopia located in Little Ethiopia (hah!).  That’s a small strip out on Fairfax not too far from downtown LA.  It was a nice little place, though they had an entire room on the side that lay empty.  I guess when business was better they’d use both sides.  We ordered a veggie platter, tibs, and Little Ethiopian tibs.  The veggie platter had a variety of vegetables cooked in different sauces.  The tibs was chunks of beef and the Little Ethiopian tibs was those chunks of beef with potatoes and some other veggies mixed in.  Everything came out on a fantastically large tray lined with their special bread.

In the center is the Little Ethiopian tibs, the meat on either side is the tibs, and all those colorful splotches are part of the veggie platter!

The bread - spongy and slightly sour and very soft and supple!

Oh that bread!  When Duchess and I were trying to describe it on the drive over, the closest thing we could come up with was a sourdough pancake.  It’s a dense, spongy thing with a hint of sour and there’s something wonderful about it.  You use the bread to grab some of the veggies or meat and then eat it in a little morsel (at least we think that’s the right way to do it).  Oh yeah, the thing about Ethiopian food is that it’s eaten with your hands, much like Indian food is supposed to be.  And so we ate, getting basket after basket of bread until we were stuffed.  The waitress then came and offered us some second helpings for free, since they had a lot of excess in the kitchen.  We couldn’t resist and spent another half hour trying to finish it all.  By the time we left, I was so full I could hardly stand.

But our adventure wasn’t over!  We decided to go for dessert and ended up choosing Persian ice cream.  The first time I went, I got the orange blossom.  This time I was too full to get a serving myself, but I shared a white rose with Apprentice.  Yes, their ice cream flavors are very flower-oriented.  I feel like I’m eating a garden and it is the strangest sensation.  It turned out to be a nice complement to the food we had earlier and both were awesome cultural experiences for the newbies.  When I finally got home, it’s no wonder I lay on the bed to recover and ended up sleeping for the night.  Next time I want to deep sleep, I’ll make sure to get Ethiopian again.  :)

Ah, the beauty of human interaction.  It’s been awhile since I’ve gone out to hang out with friends as much as I used to in college and I didn’t realize how much I missed it!  College is sort of a non-stop rollercoaster of social interactions and chilling with friends.  You’re surrounded by peers almost the entire time you’re there, which is a stark contrast to the loneliness of work life.  Nowadays I come home from work and plop down in front of the computer for the night.  I talk to Panda on Skype and maybe talk to friends via IM, email, or Facebook.  I rarely go out to meet up with my friends!

However, things seem to be changing pace a bit recently.  I’ve started to get out more and make more plans.  It’s nice to have social events scattered throughout my schedule and it gives me something to look forward to!  Actually, let me clarify – it’s nice to have social events with friends.  After all, I’ve been going to a decent number of other events, like yoga, networking events, and massages/facials.  Those types of activities don’t satisfy my hanging out with friends quota though.  You just can’t beat chilling with people you’re familiar with, whether it’s over a meal or on a couch.

I’ve got a lot of scheduling to do and I’m really looking forward to it!  It also helps that part of my chilling with friends gets to be chilling with Panda, finally.  :)

Last Saturday was EPIC.  Legend, Apprentice, and I got together for dinner at Din Tai Fung followed by boba at cha for tea.  Sounds pretty normal, right?  I thought so too.

But along the way, our lively conversation led us meandering down a path I never could have anticipated.  We talked about everything from starting a fraternity to winning watches at basketball games to more food, food, and food!  And somewhere in all that talk I decided to start making a list of all those things we had said “hey, we should do that” to.  The list?  Well, to find out, you’re going to have to follow the chronicles of our adventures on a new blog I’m creating.  (More to come when it’s ready.)

Here’s what you should know: we will follow a few simple principles in the pursuit of greatness.  We’ll make each activity a little bit more exciting because everything we do, we do it big!  We’ll live by the motto: “go BIG or go home” and we’ll set the bar high everywhere we go.  It starts with our attitude and shows in our wardrobe.  We’ll dress to impress, even if it’s to grab some fast food.  When you’re the best-dressed in a room, you’ll get noticed.  When there’s three of you having a blast as the best-dressed in the room, well – that should raise your bar, too.

Don’t be fooled, most of the things we do may not sound that amazing to you initially, but we’ll bring the flair and set the standard everywhere we go.  By the end of it all, you’ll be jealous you weren’t there with us.  I’m really excited for our plans and all the fun we’ll have.  Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to chronicle it all for you.  Then who knows, maybe you’ll be inspired to go out and have some fun of your own!

In honor of Doin’ It Big and the conversation about starting a fraternity, we have dubbed ourselves Delta Iota Beta and I am proud to be a brand new DIB.  Let the adventures begin!

My friend had a SuperSac he wasn’t using, so he offered it to me and this is the best I could do to get it in my trunk. LoveSacs are so huge!

Believe it or not, that's only about a third of it you're seeing.