Saturday, July 3, 2010

Chess and food and work

Well, it seems that I am not very good at these once-a-month updates. I think I have been keeping on track with once every three months, though. Maybe as I develop more as a writer, and get a little more discipline, I will be able to keep up with the pace.

The other email updates I wrote were fixed around one subject. This one on the other hand is going to be more pockets of different things I am learning and experiencing.

Chess.

Hello, my name is Eric Bridges and I am a chess addict. There’s something about the way my brain works that falls into sync with playing chess. There’s the logic and strategy, the challenge of the game, the healthy competition, and the little social skills you need to play well. But even more so I love the things that chess cultivates in me, things that I don’t have in spades, such as critical thinking skills, foresight, patience and observation. Whenever I’m helping someone learn chess for the first time I tell them that chess is a game of patience and observation. It’s only after you’ve studied, and studied, and studied, and played, and played, and played, that you can play chess both well and quickly.

I don’t have a chess park anywhere near my house, and I don’t have any roommates that really enjoy playing chess (although I do have roommates that will play chess with me every once in a while, but that’s more to be with me, and not because they love playing), so I usually end up playing online. This is convenient because I can get my fix each week without devoting a large amount of time to it. I do need to note that my girlfriend is very good about the whole thing and puts up with, and even often pretends to be interested in, my rants about some exciting (a relative word, I know) sequence of moves that happened in one of my recent games. I think what I need is more friends that love chess (or friends that are geekier), that way I can give her a break from it all. Until then, I’ll take my chess books, and my online community, and my chess tattoo (okay, not really) and be happy with it.

Food.

Let’s get some simple truths out of the way. A lot of food is tasty. Everyone eats food. I love food.

In college we had to take this odd, but somewhat helpful test called the Strengths Test. It asked you a bunch of situational and personal questions and then spit out your top five strengths. One of mine was connectedness (so don’t worry, I can assure you this is going somewhere). Connectedness is basically the strength of being able to see connections (hence the name) between things that people do not normally relate to one another, whether that be academic disciplines, cultural practices, relationships (human and otherwise) or, in this case, food and life. Since I have graduated from college, I have grown out of some of my strengths (and probably acquired others), but connectedness is not something I have left behind. And learning about food makes my little connected brain very happy.

That’s because food connects our world – food connects the world. To learn about what people are eating and whom they are eating with is to learn a lot about who these people are. Even in the Western world, a place that is growing increasingly disconnected from the food it eats and the places and people that food comes from, to understand someone’s food culture is to understand a lot of the pieces that make up their life. Food ties people to one another, eateries are places of social gatherings, cultures are explored and shared, time is blurred as the past and present are brought together in a meal shared by one generation to another. And for a white boy who grew up in the suburbs, a life often void of real disciplined work and links to bigger things that help us understand who we are and connect us deeper with the human experience, participating in something that can be a part of such rich tradition is exhilarating.

And so food has become an active part of my life. A lot of my reading has been supplemented with cook books and food books and food articles (I actually have a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated – a perfect magazine for my personality and passion, no ads, lots of practical tips, a few indulgences). I make it a point to go to the farmer’s market one or two times a week. Almost everything that I love about food converges at the farmer’s market – fresh, quality, local food and the people that grow it. Wonderful. And, of course, I eat a lot. I’m constantly searching out local restaurants and markets and bakeries. I’m always trying to expand my taste buds, push myself to be a more adventurous eater. If I were to travel, landmarks and sightseeing would catch little of my interest -- local menus and markets would be my roadmap. You can ask any of my friends; I eat religiously (and I’m not even getting into the theology of food). So, if you ever want someone to share a meal with, or go to the market with, or even someone with whom to cook with, you know, I’m probably two bites ahead of you. And if you are ever standing awkwardly next to me at a party and don’t know what to talk about, talk about food – because I’ll jabber on excitedly about the global implications of it, or about Michael Pollan’s latest book, or about the four hundred different varieties of chilies, or maybe if that’s all too much, I’ll just make comments about the cheese laid out for appetizers, but in any case, at least one of us won’t be awkward anymore, and my connected little brain will be happy for a bit.

Assistant Manager.

This isn’t really a topic to expand on, just more of a short announcement. As of August, I will be the assistant manager at the Habitat ReStore. Ryan, the current assistant manager, will be leaving in August to pursue a Masters Degree at Eastern University in Philadelphia. Having seniority over the other wet-eared associates, my manager decided that he wanted me to take the position. I’ll enjoy the increase in responsibility. I think I’ll function better in a position where I won’t be so worried about over-stepping my boundaries (and, yeah, I won’t mind the pay increase either).

New Address.

I moved from my La Vita address. I’m now living at this one:

1201 S. Eleanor St.
Pomona, CA 91766

So, if you ask me for my address or don’t know I moved, I’m going to know you didn’t read this far – incriminating!

That’s all for now. I have a busy life, but not one of wide variety, so I have to save some stuff for the next email. I’ll leave you all with this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0901469/

I can’t make all my sign offs serious, and I’m excited about this one.

With love and hope,

Eric

Sunday, March 14, 2010

I'm borderline obsessed with this game

I tried to embed it, but it's not working, so here is the link:

http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Covering the last couple months

Hello everyone!

Not surprisingly I have missed my monthly quota of updates. I’ll just have to make this three times as long (or three times as good, whatever comes first).

The last update I gave was the story of how I got my job, so, naturally, this email is going to be focused on how my job is going (since, by far, that is the question I get asked the most). The short of it: my job is going well (really well, in fact). For a long time now I’ve wanted to work at a non-profit of some sort. And, as many of you know, Habitat is just that.

There’s a certain peace of mind that comes, for me at least, with working at a non-profit. Although I am liking my job a lot, there are plenty of hours of mundane, monotonous, seemingly pointless work that I take part in. But, at least with a non-profit I can have the satisfaction of knowing that all of that seemingly wasted energy is moving along a project that is doing something worthwhile. I understand (well, to some degree) that doing pointless, mundane work is a part of life, and that sometimes, in order to feed our families, or pay the bills, we have to work for a company that we might not necessarily agree with or suffer a job that we don’t necessarily like. But for now, while I don’t have a family to feed or a mortgage to pay, let me live in the naivety that I can somehow escape that and work in the non-profit sector with shabby paychecks for the rest of my life.

Lately, I’ve come to the surprising realization that people often have to work for and with people that they don’t like. I’ve had the luck of never (yep, never) having to work with someone I didn’t like. There might have been people at the company or in the wider spectrum of co-workers, but no one that I had to deal with directly on a regular basis (customers is another story altogether). I have always had friendly, caring, and competent bosses and co-workers. Actually, I’m still friends with (or at least in contact with) at least someone from every job I’ve ever worked (and I’m not taking the easy road, that’s excluding anyone I knew before I worked there with them). So, inevitably it seems (I’m going to jinx myself with all this pompous talk), Habitat continued the tradition. Actually, one of the things that I like the most about my job is the people that I get to work with. By coincidence or otherwise, there is an unusually high concentration of quality people at Habitat. My manager, Bill, is someone that I honestly respect, which I think pretty much says it all. He is always working, and always working hard. He pushes me to stretch my own meager work habits. He has taught me a lot about what it means to be a good manager, striking a balance between being interested, invested, and caring in our relationship, but also not afraid to crack the whip and to not let me be confused that although we are friends that business is our first, and necessarily our most prioritized relationship. I feel like my time and effort there is appreciated and that I am a valued part of the company. I especially like that I am not micromanaged. I am able to do my own thing and make a lot of management-type decisions (like how the store is run and how everything is set up and displayed). This makes me feel like I am trusted there, which is a good thing to feel at work. My co-workers Ryan and Erik are both great people. We are all relatively new to Habitat, and it has been a pleasure to work and get to know them. I feel like I could have been friends with both of them outside of work even if Habitat had never happened. We have a new driver that just came in, and it seems like he’s going to be a good fit here too. I think Bill is pretty scrupulous when it comes to hiring new hands, paying special attention to personality, and it has paid off when it comes to building relationships in the workplace.

Besides the people there are a couple of other things that file under the good category when it comes to working at Habitat.

First, I really like working with my hands, much more than I thought I would. Not that I thought I wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t think I would enjoy it. I thought I would be rather indifferent about it. I did work on a ranch for a long time, and you think this realization would have come during that period of time in my life. But for some reason it didn’t. I suppose it’s because more of that job was working with animals and moving cages, and not the kind of manual labor that makes the world go round (to clarify, animals and cages do, to some degree, make the world go round, but petting zoos and pony rides do not). And maybe as a strapping young lad I didn’t have the kind foresight to appreciate what I was doing, something I’m barely tapping into now and the ripe old age of twenty-three. Anyways, I’m digressing. There is some sort of primitive satisfaction that comes with moving stuff around all day. But more than that it’s great to be learning so much about the products, materials, and procedures that has built so much of the modern world. I’m even able to do little fix-it things around the house now! My grandfather was a mechanic (I think) and my dad knows a whole lot about how to fix things, make things, and how to make things do things so that they work as if they were fixed, but sadly I didn’t seem to inherit any of that, and this job has been a good first step to being a full-fledged do-it-yourselfer (now if I can just get my dad to teach me how to work on cars).

Second, it feels good to connect with the working class. As a middle-class kid raised in the suburbs, spending time with the working class wasn’t exactly something I scheduled in. At Habitat, every once in a while we do get in the wealthy person looking to save a couple bucks (not that there’s anything wrong with those people), but mostly our customer base is good ol’ blue collar workers. At this point in my life there is just something refreshing about being around the people that work all those jobs that I so often (and very much still) overlook and take advantage of. Consequently, having a working class customer base it creates a really down to earth and low-key environment to work in.

Third, it’s great to have my work constantly changing. As I said before, and as with almost all jobs, there are moments and even days of monotonous tasks to be taken care of. But, for the most part, my job is filled with a changing list of things to do, well, in a sense anyway. Because our inventory is all from donations, what we are bringing in, and what we are having to do to pick stuff up, in constantly changing. With each different item we have to figure out how much it is, what condition it is in, how we can get it on the floor, how to keep the store organized and presentable, etc. This means that the store is constantly in flux, always adjusting to whatever new products we have at the time. This means there is plenty of opportunity to continue to exercise my analyzing, problem solving, and critical thinking skills, which means, being a person that needs to be challenged and pushed to feel content, I am a happy camper.

Lastly, and possibly not least, I get paid. And for a straight-out-of-college job in this economic climate, I get paid pretty well. A full time job with full benefits is not something to laugh at. But one were I get paid more than minimum wage in a non-profit sector job where I am developing real skills and not just something that looks good on paper is something to be celebrated. And so here I am, telling all of you, that I thank God for this job. And, also importantly, that I am more than happy working here, and working here for a while, at least until grad school, or something else big comes up, but I guess that will have to wait until another email. This one is long enough.

And here’s that unrelated end-of-the-email whatever that I said I would tack onto every email:

I found this commercial startling and moving (in a makes me uncomfortable, moves me to action kind of way)

With love and hope,

Eric