Location: Newport Beach, CA
Soundtrack:
KLoVE (Spanish soft rock station in LA: más romántica);
KoRn’s new single _Evolution_
[I retroactively added this embedded video on 2011-06-24 as part of my Background Noise project]
I spent the morning in Burbank again, catching up with a few people (Vesper, Diana, Luz…) who I didn’t manage to see yesterday. Then I drove all the way down to Newport to have lunch with Tyler (colleague from HealthSmart) at my favorite Peruvian restaurant, Inka Grill just across the line in Costa Mesa. I love their Chupe de pescado, it’s possibly the most delicious soup in the known universe, in my opinion: potatoes, egg, onion, fish, spices, something that makes it chowdery – I ate here often with Tyler and the rest of the HealthSmart crew during those long months now memorialized as the “battle of Lytec” (which we lost spectacularly to the enemy forces, which fought under the banner “poor project scoping and planning”).
We went back to the Newport Beach offices and I chatted briefly with some of the other folks there, and I had weird flashbacks of T-SQL code as I walked the aisles between the cubicles. Too many very late nights practicing slash-and-burn database programming, I guess. Visiting ARAMARK was better for my sense of accomplishment, and it stoked my ego to see the accomplishments of my era still percolating on the screens of the National Account Reps, but visiting HealthSmart’s IPM offices has served to remind me why I’ve decided to change careers and try something different: more people-oriented, perhaps less remunerative, but hopefully more spiritually fulfilling. Not that I’m particularly spiritual person, as many of you know, but I don’t know how else to express the idea I’m trying to get across.
Why do I listen to Spanish soft, romantic rock, when I abhor the same genre in English? It’s a nostalgia thing, I think. It was the soundtrack of too many hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Mexico, too many 2nd class bus rides. Not the same songs, 20 years ago, but the genre is full of songs that, 20 years on, can’t be differentiated from those older ones… it’s all a sort of weird slightly enchilada-flavored aural blur.
The smog in downtown LA was atrocious, driving down, I couldn’t even see downtown from the 5 as I went by – much worse than anything we saw in Mexico City last week. But this is smog season in Lalatopia, while this is precisely NOT smog season in Chilangolandia at the moment – which is why we went at this time, of course. Which is why I always go to Mexico DF at this time of year.
