I can't say that this second mandatory business related training trip was that much more useful than the first but developing rapport with my mostly equally-bewildered colleagues counted for something.
I have also gotten advice from two good friends that one key to living in Los Angeles can be summed up thusly:
Don't drink the water.
More to the point, don't drink the tap water. Ever. Bottled water. I know there are environmental worries that bottled water is so Amerian and irresponsible. Los Angeles tap water sucks. You can drink glass after glass and it might never slake your thirst.
On the other hand, I'm starting to wonder if that's a sign of me having blood sugar problems rather than Los Angeles tap water being awful. It doesn't have to be a strict either/or here, though.
I didn't get nearly as much reading as I had planned on getting done over the week. The whole slowly building rapport with co-workers couldn't be ignored even by me and I have to admit I don't tend to care about mingling or building rapport with people in general in a lot of ways. But I did manage to finally read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Perhaps I can blog about that later but right now I don't feel like I have a ton to blog about it. It IS 3am after all.
I suppose reading a book about death has gotten me thinking about mortality. Diabetes runs on both sides of my family and both grandmothers died of complications related to diabetes if I recall correctly.
I shouldn't be finding myself so unable to concentrate, learn, and remember things lately but that's where I'm at. My best guess is that it's a blood-sugar issue and a potentially serious one. I discovered that having beef jerky to get some protein in my system was initially successful but disastrous a couple hours after I had the food. By contrast, having yogurt helped keep me moderately alert for hours before I had any other food. So chalk that up to being a gimme that the salt content must have dehydrated me or something so that the initial protein boost benefit was decimated by salt. The more water I drink the more clearly I'm able to keep focused but it presents the problem of having to go pee that liter of water I had earlier in the day.
To me blogging is not an inherently personal enterprise or it shouldn't be because broadcasting your personal experiences shouldn't be anyone's business (except perhaps by sending emails that are not necessarily that secure). But here I am, anyway, blogging about something I normally don't like to blog about, anything particularly "personal".
Why do I find the idea of divulging personal information in a blog so distasteful? Well, I feel it's needless to explain. Still, I guess I'd have to chalk this up to the belief that the internet should be a resource for information that may interest or help people and I don't see how divulging information of a purely personal nature in something like the blogosphere usually does that. I can't say I've got better things to do with my time than read the blogs of friends or family even though it's true that I hardly ever read blogs by friends or family. It's not meant as a personal slight against them--they just have my phone number and email address already so I don't see much reason to convey personal things on a blog I could convey to them.
But since I've not been blogging because of business related travels and because I've made discoveries about my health as side effects of dealing with what I'd have to call the corporate culture's approach to food I find myself writing about this stuff even though I hadn't planned to. Some corporate cultures have some bad legacies in terms of food, at least for me. The carbos and caffeine approach of "continental breakfast" is a major pain in the ass. After seven years in this company setting with not nearly enough exercise it seems to have exacted a frustrating toll on my brain. It's reminding me the hard way that advice to avoid caloric drinks and exercise consistently is advice I should have taken from a doctor five years ago. I did, sort of, but not enough and not consistently enough. But I'm still relatively young (33) so it's not as though I don't have some time to get cracking on this.
The first business trip was awful not just because the training was mostly worthless to me but also because that first trip I felt like my brain was dead weight until MAYBE 5pm, right when the training was over. I began to discover patterns that were signs of sleep apnea but also of things that suggest my blood sugar is screwed up. This last trip has just wrapped up and I felt better this week because I began to deliberately avoid carbohydrates in favor of vegetables and protein. This has had some pretty dramatic results in my ability to remember and learn things this week ... or at least it would if the training this week wasn't just as semi-useless as the other training period before it. I have, to use an analogy, been inducted into the beauties of a phone book that has addresses and phone numbers but no names. There are also some late-breaking discoveries that have my colleagues justifiably freaking out that a vendor is planning to set up a huge project based on what the vendor understands to be the needs of the client and not on the actual needs of the client.
I could wax at a small length about how and why this has happened but I really don't want to since it's all proprietary stuff anyway and because I just got home. I didn't pick up Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, and Spiderman 2.1 last weekend to come home THIS weekend and write a whole ton about a business trip I didn't really like. Then again, this wouldn't be blogging if everything I blogged reflected on things I was carefully thinking about.
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