Sendai

I've watched a lot of news since the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Japan on Friday. Sendai was the closest large city. It's insane to be reading and watching all this news coverage on Sendai, a city that most people outside of Japan have never heard of.

Incidentally, Sendai is my birthplace. My parents moved from Korea to Sendai about a year before I was born because my dad was doing a PhD at Tohoku University there. We lived there until I was about 5 and a half after which we moved to Madison, Wisconsin.

What is sort of interesting about this fact is that Japan and Korea has had a long, often contentious history, given that Korea was occupied by Japan for 35 years from 1910 to 1945. There is a lot of bad history there, with everything from the Korean queen was assassinated by the Japanese to Korean women being kidnapped to be "comfort women" to Japanese soldiers and a lot more stuff in between.

While I don't think that younger Koreans of my generation feel this contention, there are those of my parents and definitely of my grandparents generation that still hold the pain and anger from Japanese occupation. While the relationship has gotten better over time, back when when my family moved to Japan it was still sort of a surprising thing. Thus, I am glad to see on Korean news outlets the level of aid and support that the Korean government and NGOs are sending over to Japan.

I was talking to my mom over the weekend and she said that while we were living in Sendai, there was a 6.2 earthquake. She clearly remembers how terrified she was from "just" a 6.2 and can't imagine what a 8.9 would be like. She remembers running to my preschool/day care center from work to make sure I was ok. I don't remember this earthquake specifically but I do remember doing earthquake practice drills in my preschool.

My mom and I also talked about watching the coverage of the survivors on TV and we both remarked about the extreme politeness and sense of order of the Japanese people. News outlets have talked about how looting would never really happen in Japan, even in an incredible crisis of this sort.

You see these long orderly lines for food and water. Heck, if it was South Korea or China, people would be shoving and yelling and doing whatever they could do survive. But not the Japanese. It just isn't their way. They have an incredible sense of dignity... politeness... order. Its really quite remarkable.

Anyways, I had always thought that I would go back to visit Sendai one day. And I still hold that hope. But it's really sad to know that I will never be able see Sendai as it was when my family lived there.

While I am definitely "more Korean", Japanese is the first language I ever spoke and Japanese culture (especially the food) was always strongly ingrained in my family. And while I only lived in Sendai until I was 5 years old, its hard not to feel an attachment to Sendai.

Some images from the many news stories that touched me. Notes from those looking for family members at a information center in Sendai. This reminds me so much of what I saw in NYC post 9/11.

This one absolutely broke my heart because the caption said: "Parents looked at the body of their daughter, whom they found in the vehicle of a driving school in Yamamoto, Miyagi Prefecture".

All I can say is thoughts and prayers. I know that Japan is a relatively developed and prosperous country. But I hope that people and countries recognize the scale of this disaster and still help.

Still working!

This is the end of my second week here in Maryland. I am definitely back next week, and there is a chance that I may be back here for 3 weeks after next week as well. We'll see. I wouldn't mind going back to my routine of waking up late and lounging around in yoga pants all day...

So in the time I've been here, I've been working closely with the employees here to try to understand their processes that we have to document and improve. Its always a funny thing coming into an organization as a consultant. I was in one meeting this week where a topic was being discussed, and someone said:

"I've been saying this for months now, but they don't listen to me. But I'm sure they will listen to you because you are the consultants and we are paying you a lot of money to tell us what we already know"

Lol. My peripheral job search does continue though. Though mainly it is continuing through the efforts and movements of higher level consultants I have worked with. My coach/mentor is interviewing today and tomorrow with a firm that asked whether she had any other consultants she could bring with her. I've mentioned this firm before, this is the one that would probably require relocation. And turns out their office locations would be Boston, DC, Seattle, or San Diego. Mmmm

Another partner's last day with my firm is tomorrow and she is making a switch to another large national firm. She would be a good person to bring me into her new firm, a firm that would probably allow me to live wherever I wanted.

While the thought of moving and trying to sell my condo gives me a headache, I don't know... maybe its time to leave Chicago. I've been there almost 8 years now. Maybe its time to move.

Working again!

I arrived in Baltimore yesterday and will be here until tomorrow night. I will be back here all week next week as well. It's strange going back to not only working again, but back to the standard consultant habit of working at night when you get back to the hotel room or getting up at 6 am to work.

So when I got here yesterday, one of the project leads pulled me into a meeting that was already going on so that I could meet some people. This included the system CFO and a couple of other directors of this huge health system. The CFO was on the phone via conference, and while this project lead was introducing me to him, he said something like "she is much better looking than I am so you'll enjoy working with her".

Um? Can I just say WTF and completely inappropriate? I was kind of embarrassed but more embarrassed for him because I think the other people in the room were thinking "huh?" as well.

The interesting thing about consulting is that you get put on a wide variety of projects with a wide variety of project directors and principals. It's an opportunity to see a wide variety of facilitation, leadership, and communication styles, both good and bad. You get to see how you should or should not run things in 5-10 years time.

I've been with several meetings now with the other project lead (not the one from yesterday), and while she is incredibly brilliant and has a wealth of information in this space, she is not very good at listening to the client. She also is not great at asking clear and direct questions. Her questions run 5 minutes where she adds in all this side information so you've forgotten what her original question even was.

So what have I learned so far? Don't comment on colleagues physical appearances, how not to communicate with clients, and that this area has good sushi. Good lessons, eh?

What day is it again?

Geez, its been a while since I posted here. When you're not working, every day kinda bleeds into the next and without even realizing it, a week passes by. Most of the time I am unsure what day of the week it is, since every day is the same.

I did find out earlier this week that I will probably be sent to Maryland a bit over the next couple of weeks for a small project. The thought of having to actually work all day and wake up early... wow do I even remember how to do that? :p

Some insightful, thought provoking, and funny quotes that I came across that each speak to me and my life right now in some way or another.

And this last one just cracks me up:

Still hanging around

So I am still not laid off. Crazy. Seriously if the leadership here really knew what the heck they were doing, we should have gone two weeks ago. I actually heard from my coach/mentor yesterday that the new person we report to even wants to do some sort of strategy session here in Chicago in the next few weeks.

Does this change anything? Not really. Just means we may have even longer to look for other jobs. I'm still trying to decide what the heck I want to do next. There is this one consulting firm that seems to have taken a interest in my coach as well as myself. They're a much smaller firm, with only like 100 healthcare consultants. The only drawback is that they would require relocation to either Boston, DC, or Seattle.

If I could pick a city just on the city itself, I would probably pick Seattle. But I'm really torn with how much further that is from my parents in North Carolina. I don't know. Also I think Seattle is much more expensive real estate wise than Chicago. I doubt I could afford the same type of condo I have now. Though perhaps salaries there would account for the higher cost of living.

Anyways, an eerie pic from after the blizzard last week. A bunch of cars ended up getting stuck and abandoned on Lake Shore Drive. Talk about the apocalypse part of snowpocalypse!