Sigh

There's this Facebook app that surveys your friends for the purpose of comparing them... Here's my latest results.

STRENGTHS:

most loyal
kindest
person with the best taste in music

Aww, how nice!

WEAKNESSES:

coolest

Sigh...

Panerablog and Bubble Tea

Just hanging out and becoming quite a regular at Paneras. And to think, I don't really prefer their food! I oftentimes get dinner somewhere else and then head out here for the wireless. So I've tried a bunch of their stuff just to make myself "legit." Right now I'm sipping on an Iced Chai Tea Latte, which has brewed black tea with honey, vanilla, cardimom, cinnamon, ginger, and milk, over ice. I don't even know what cardimom is. It actually tastes like what Juicy Fruit gum juice would taste like. I order it because it most closely represents my all time favorite drink, Bubble Tea (or Pearl Ice Tea). It's basically tea, milk, and tapioca pearls all sipped through an oversized straw. This ICTL is missing the pearls (and has a touch too much ginger, and maybe cardimom if I knew what that was).

This reminds me of a story... Bubble Tea is VERY Asian, so Asian that the good stuff is only available in California or college campuses with good science programs. The chewy tapioca pearls are my absolute favorite, but if you take a survey it's almost always split along ethnic lines... Asian = love it, non-Asian = hate it. So one day at work, I run into future-scrubman Eric, and he's sipping on an oversized straw and chewing on tapioca pearls. Eric isn't exactly the first person who pops in your mind when you think "Asian" so I was throughly shocked on many levels:

1. I didn't know Cincinnati had a place that sold Bubble Tea! Where did he get it?
2. Why the heck is Eric drinking it?

I pointed to what he was drinking and said "what the?" He said, "Oh, it's bubble tea..." I was like yes, I know what it is... why are YOU drinking it and where did you get it? Apparently there was a British tea place that opened that had it. Too bad it closed down after a few months.

The Sixth Strength: AKA, a planner's nightmare

So the sixth strength of mine is Arranger. According to the book, Arranger is:

You are a conductor. When faced with a complex situation involving many factors, you enjoy managing all the variables, aligning them and realigning them until you are sure you have arranged them in the most productive configuration possible... But others, lacking this theme, will be in awe of your ability. "How can you keep so many things in your head at once?" they will ask. "How can you stay so flexible, so willing to shelve well-laid plans in favor of some brand-new configuration that has just occurred to you?" You are at your best in dynamic situations. Confronted with the unexpected, some complain that plans devised with such care cannot be changed, while others take refuge in the existing rules or procedures... Instead, you jump into the confusion, devising new options, hunting for new paths of least resistance, and figuring out new partnerships - because, after all, there might just be a better way.

This one also hits home! The one insight this shows is that people who like to plan get stressed out by my tendency to want to keep flexible. At work I've been told I stress out our planners. We had this light hearted exchange once:

Planner: You know, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Me: Well, there's also the saying "Plan early, plan twice."

I think the thing is, I'm very balanced in terms of right and left brains. I just Googled a right vs left brain test, and it came out like this:

I basically responded as a right brained person to 9 questions, and left brained to 9 questions. For me, planning too early, or planning in more detail than the information you have, is painful to me. I think it's because my right brain is much better at solving problems when it's early or ambiguous and using the left brain in this case feels very wasteful. Unfortunately, P&G is an extremely left brained company.

The exercising of Discovering my Strengths is really cool for me... I have the dreamer type strengths, i.e. Ideation and Futuristic, but I also have the practical, get things done type strengths, i.e. Strategic, Arranger. I think that's a neat combination! In a few words, I'm a bridge to a lot of things. I actually would say I'm a surfactant, but I would hafta do too much explaining to non-chemical nerds (among other things, a surfactant allows oil and water to mix because it has both characteristics in its structure). Is this my knack for weird analogies kicking in? I tend to jump back and forth between left and right brain, being a Gen Yer or a GenXer, being American and being Chinese, being able to appreciate a beautiful sunset, and knowing that it's beautiful because of all the light refracting in the atmosphere and creating all that color.

Saturday Night Badinage

It's another Saturday night... well, it's actually kinda nice to not have anything scheduled. Gave me a chance to finish up some long overdue laundry. I also implemented my standard black socks and standard white socks today. My sock drawer is full of the all the same white socks and all the same black socks, so I no longer hafta match them after I wash them. I told my office mate this idea and laughed hysterically... saying this is something only a bachelor would dream up.

I also find myself reading up blogs for a year ago just for the heck of it. I can spend hours reading old blogs. It's just so neat to see your life story, and reminds me of how my life story is still being written as we speak. Time is such a neat concept...

I recently took the "Discover Your Strengths" quiz again through work (the Asian American group I'm involved with is doing this as a whole to help each other leverage our strengths). The neat thing is 4 out of 5 of my strengths were the same... I'll hafta talk more about this in another blog!

Eric (aka the Scrub man) told me one day that I had the knack of being able to come up with the most far reaching analogies... I can't put my finger on which strength that is, but it's being able to see things on different levels, which allows me find similarities on some level. I don't remember the context of the conversation, but I remember it was after I said "It's like trying to teach Brett Favre how to throw correctly." On a related note, I was recently nominated by my function to attend a training called "Innovation By Analogy." I'm really looking forward to seeing what that's all about!

Nerd city - Baseball edition

Winston and I had this IM conversation this weekend. I was watching the Brewers play, and we have a closer named Eric Gagne.

Me: Brewers bringing in Gagne?

Winston: gagner in French means "to win"

Me: really, that's cool! He is French

Winston: well he better win then

Me: Go gagne

Me: ya Brewers gagnge… Gagne gagne

Winston: yeah, I forget how to conjugate it:

je gagne

tu gagnes

il / elle gagne

Me: Brewers gagne

Winston: Gagne gagne is right though

Me: so who "gagne"? Gagne gagne?

Winston: he wins. Gagne wins. Brewers Gagnent

Me: nice

Winston: man, I know so little French

considering I took it for 7 years