Hello, there:
My name is Ed Romero and this is the Out of Office Chat where I talk about life outside the office.
Today I want to talk about:
- What’s been going on in terms of film and television and what I’ve been consuming. And that’ll take us down the road of House of the Dragon and a slight detour with a movie I’ve watched called 65.
- We’ll be talking about this stack of books. Now, I won’t be debriefing you all on each individual one, but I want to definitely talk about my process and finding the right book for you.
- Carving out my family tree, what that’s been like for me.
And, before I delve into that, I’m just going to give you an update on what’s been going on in my life in terms of career and personal life.
Yeah?
All right, so let’s kick it off here.
An update on my career and personal life
Like I mentioned, before diving into film, television, books, and a family tree, just a quick touch base on what’s been going on for my career and my personal life, just because they’re so intertwined. So this past summer has been… busy.
It’s been a busy summer:
I was fortunate enough to get a couple of projects come my way this summer, and I’ve been fortunate to build really good relationships, go to a couple of events… and they’ve been really, really great.
I’m not going to lie.
I’m so blessed to have that happen in my life. But what that’s done is… I feel it’s taken away from my personal brand, building out my, I guess, my persona, which as a part of this, includes the podcast.
And it was okay.
I was expecting it to alleviate a little bit towards the end of summer, but you know what? Unfortunately (and I mentioned this in episode, I think 10), someone in my family actually broke their leg. My older brother broke his leg. And no one in my family has ever broken a thing. So it was a first for all of us.
We were all kind of freaking out. I mean, rightfully so, it’s a broken leg. And we all kind of scattered to make sure that he was okay, he was getting the proper accommodations, he’s being well taken care of…
And thankfully he’s doing pretty good.
I think the first couple of weeks were really, really rough for him. I think it happened in the beginning of August, so I was expecting things (in terms of workload) to get a little bit easier in terms of my bandwidth.
And that happened.
And so, what that really did was, it moved resources, and time, and energy, to making sure that he’s well taken care of. And it’s not just me:
It’s like my parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephew. So it was a group effort.
And then I think that’s one of the reasons I feel like I am pretty blessed to live, and be a part of, a big family. Because when stuff like that happens, family is the best. Family is the best to have, your village.
But conversely, what ended up happening was that I didn’t really anticipate it taking so much away from me building upon my personal brand.
I talked to my wife about this.
I still have a client, and don’t get me wrong, I do 110% as much as I can for my client and still try to engage in new business, or at least retention with some projects I’ve had on the side…
But it’s been tough.
It’s been to that point where you want to have that drive; you want to talk about, do these new ideas that have come up; you want to do X, Y, and Z.; you want to build out this, you want to build out that; you want to build relationships, and all that good stuff. And I found myself towards the middle. and end of on Cobra.
I even told my wife:
“I’m just feeling very lethargic. I’m tired. I’m very tired. I don’t want to do anything in terms of building out my personal brand”.
Don’t get me wrong. SEO is my bread and butter. I enjoy it. It’s phenomenal. But I find myself being really burned out… and she even said:
“Well you’re split across two careers. You split across two careers on top of that. You’ve shifted the dynamic in the family”.
These two careers, it gets difficult. But the benefit, or the upside to that is, as an independent consultant, it does afford me the opportunity to go ahead and take care of my family.
So let’s say I’m recording this on a Friday and I hope to get it out to you all before the end of the day, so you can enjoy it over the weekend. But today, I’m caught up with all my work, so I can go ahead and take the afternoon off, become my son from his sitters and enjoy it.
And sometimes it’s not like that.
Or conversely, when my brother initially broke his leg, I could have just gone ahead and just go straight to their house, and just take care of them from there…
He’s a little bit better now. I think immobility is what was hard to grasp, to grapple with. And I think that’s what he’s facing.
On top of that, he was expecting going on vacation, which didn’t happen. But he’s got a lot of love and support from a lot of folks. He’s in a good spot. And even my mom was a little bit beat up about it.
But one thing I’ve told both of them: thank goodness we have our village, we have our family. And yes, he broke his leg, but he will heal and he’ll have his health before you know it.
So, like I mentioned, my careers are intertwined with my personal life and it just intertwines and affects the other. So that’s all I want to talk about in that end.
So, what I do want to talk about is how I’ve been trying to de-stress. What I’ve been trying to do to kind of have a good time. And it always is around film, TV, books, or what have you. And in this case, in this episode, we’ll talk about… Family tree! And I’m actually pretty darn excited to talk about that.
Before I do I’m actually gonna take a sip of my, not I was gonna say wine… it’s not wine, it is… tea, chamomile tea.
It’s… Oh! So good!
And I made it at home, so that’s nothing too nuts.
Sorry, I just got a text.
Boring Films, and an awesome TV series
Alrighty, alright, let’s kick it off, guys. Whew! Film and TV.
Now, this might be a short segment, I’ll be honest. It’s gonna be probably pretty darn short. Film and TV… I haven’t been really watching a lot. I’ve been going to bed around 9:00, 9:30.
I’ve been… actually you can see the books. This is what I’ve been consuming my time with, these books here. Not all of them, I won’t deep dive into all of them.
But just really quickly in terms of TV:
This summer, I think the best thing I watched over the last month or so is House of Dragon. House of Dragon? House of Dragons?
Whatever.
The Game of Thrones spin-off, House of [the] Dragon.
And wow!!
It is actually pretty darn good.!I really do, I really did enjoy it. I finished up last week, so I’m all caught up. I don’t know when the second season is coming up. My concern was going into it. I heard it was good, but my concern was:
Is it gonna be just too similar to Game of Thrones?
You know, if you haven’t watched Game of Thrones, it was a solid six, good six seasons. I would say six, seven seasons. And the last season and a half was just horrible! I’m not gonna even lie, Game of Thrones, it ended on such a low note… it was so disappointing.
How disappointing was it?
Well, it was so bad the last season, that I tell people there was one night after I watched the (I forget which it was), season eight, season nine, after I’d finished, I got up to use the washroom at four o’clock in the morning and I was just there in the bathroom, so angry, grumpy. I was like, how the heck can they finish that like that? I was so upset. Granted, I just think I was still really tired, but still… still.
In any case, I was worried it wasn’t gonna be as good as the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones, but you know what? House of Dragon did a really phenomenal job. I mean, the folks that created it, or written it, or whatever, did a phenomenal job.
Now, I’m not even gonna talk about any kind of production or behind the scenes. I know they do have, after each episode, they have a behind the scenes. I didn’t really do that because I just wanted to get caught up with it.
I started off first and my wife caught up to me, not only did she catch up to me, but she blew right past me. She caught up in a couple of days. So, I really wanted to catch up, so we can have something to talk about. And I did. I did catch up. It was a really good show. Really well written.
Now, if you haven’t watched it, it actually takes place about a century and a half, maybe two centuries prior to the events of Game of Thrones. And I’ve seen that kind of…
Let me apologize because there’s like someone outside there mowing their lawn or whatever. So you might hear that.
I’ve seen, I guess, movies where it’s kind of a spin-off, but it isn’t tied to a vast amount of time, meaning it doesn’t take place a millennia prior. And a good example would be Star Wars.
In Star Wars, all of that happened in A New Hope, right?
And then they have the prequel trilogy and then the sequel trilogy. And both take place, I would say approximately 30 to 40 years before and after, right? It’s not bad. And it gives you a lot of cool, I guess, a new take on the lore. But I always was interested, especially with Star Wars, to go back several millennia. Just because there’s so much history, just some really, really great storylines that take place within Star Wars.
And I know with Game of Thrones is kind of similar to that, in that the timeline is pretty darn massive. It’s not maybe like a millennia or two. It’s got to be at least like three centuries, three or four centuries.
This is how big the timeline of Game of Thrones is.
So when I heard of House of Dragon coming out and finding out that it was taking place about a century and a half (or something like that) prior to Game of Thrones events, and I was like, how much of it can actually take place? Because they’re not super closely tied together, but you can see that things start to trickle down into Game of Thrones.
And I wanted to see the Targaryens and the Valyrian, which are like the fair skinned, blonded civilization that goes into Game of Thrones, the Targaryens. They’re basically descendants of the Valyrians.
And it starts with Old Valyria and another… in another country, in another civilization. That’s what I was hoping to see, right? That’s what I was eager to see because, apparently, Old Belaria existed for like 5,000 years. I was like, that is a ton, that is so much to go off of. But they didn’t do that. Like I mentioned, they focus in on about a century and a half prior to the events of Game of Thrones. But they do it in such a way where it’s almost vastly different from what’s taking place in Game of Thrones.
“…there’s isn’t just right and wrong, black and white. And there’s a whole bunch of in between”.
There are references to families that play crucial roles within Game of Thrones, like the Starks, the Lannisters, and there’s some other families I kind of forgot. But you can see some familiar names come up, the Targaryens being one, and all of it centered around the Targaryens. I really liked it. They speed up, spoilers, spoilers, folks, so, beef.
Forewarned, it does skip several years at a time. I was a little shocked by it because I’m not used to that. You get so used to a specific actor or actress, certain events… and then just skip it by several years. It’s a, I don’t know, I was like… I don’t know how I feel about this. But you know what? The writers did it in such a way where it’s a smooth transition.
These gaps, these leap years (I’m not sure if that’s the right word), it wasn’t bad. I felt like it was a pretty darn evenly paced.
Now, the ending of the season, I’m not going to spoil that much, but, it was just, it was pretty darn good. And it reminded me so much of why I liked Game of Thrones. It’s just so complex. There’s a lot of rich relationships, interplay between characters.
It’s really well written. I think what they wanted to do in Game of Thrones, (I forget the guy’s name, J.R.R. Martin or something like that. I think that’s his name). Well, what he wanted to do…
What?
You might hear hammering, my landlord is fixing some stuff in the apartment.
My landlord hammering
Well, what he wanted to do is:
He wanted to depict those characters as individuals with personalities.
They are just way more complex than… there’s isn’t just right and wrong, black and white. And there’s a whole bunch of in between. And that’s exactly. I think that’s kind of the sense I’m getting from House of Dragon as well.
I really liked it. I mean, I don’t watch a lot of shows. I don’t watch a lot of TV. For one, I don’t. I can’t commit. I just cannot commit. I don’t have the time. I’d rather focus on a movie, where it’s slated to run about two hours or so, than a TV show where it can run anywhere from like one hour per episode for lord knows how many episodes or seasons.
But in this case, I feel like I made a really good call choosing House of Dragon as a TV show to watch.
Where I made a bad call is watching the movie 65...
65: the movie
I’m going to transition over to 65.
65 is a movie with the one Adam Driver, who happens to play Kylo Ren from the sequels of Star Wars.
I apologize.
So just so you all know, our neighbor from downstairs moved away. And our landlord, who’s a super nice guy (our landlords are phenomenal). They’re using the opportunity to fix up downstairs.
And you know, I haven’t recorded in a while and I just completely forgot that he was downstairs… So you might hear a couple of knocks.
Landlord continues hammering
But 65 was with Adam Driver and it was… It wasn’t great, you know, it wasn’t great at all.
I…
The movie, the premise is basically this man who lives on a different planet. Adam Driver’s character (I forget his name, the character’s name). He lives on an Earth-like planet, so who knows where.
And he is basically a voyager.
He goes on these expeditions. It seems like he’s almost a courier. Is that what they call him? The person that’s in charge of taking one thing. I think that’s what it’s called, courier. Taking a package and delivering it from one place to another. So he is actually in charge of taking human bodies. Not in a raw, like a horror way, but they’re cryogenically frozen and delivering them to a new planet.
And so, in this case, he was slated for what? Three, two year mission or whatever. But he comes across his asteroid and his ship, and it gets all knocked out. It crashes on planet Earth and… get this: Sixty five million years ago, 65 million years ago.
“The cool thing about the movie is that, for one, it ended”.
And when I first heard about it, I’m like: “oh, that is so cool. Like, that is awesome. I don’t know how this guy ends up on planet Earth with the dragons, with the dinosaurs, but that’s cool”.
I thought it was gonna be like a time travel movie or like something about the predecessors of humanity coming to Chicago, not Chicago, to planet earth and seeing the planet with humanity. No, it was a guy who crashed land on the planet. He lost his entire, I guess, his crew, his flight, except a young woman, a girl.
So basically the movie is about them surviving on a planet riddled with dinosaurs and it spansfor like two or three days.
The dialogue is not great. It’s all a little cliché. He speaks English. He’s from another planet. He speaks perfect English. The young one, she speaks in… I think a native language from the planet they’re from. And I just thought that was weird. I really thought that was weird.
Because we speak English now, you would imagine that the dialogue would have been much, much more different. They might have picked a… They could have picked a different dialect or another like made up language. I have no idea.
In any case, the movie goes on where he’s trying to basically run around… You see, he’s so enthused about the movie. It wasn’t great. It was just not a great movie. They escape.
Oh, you know what? One thing, the cool thing about the movie is that, for one, it ended.
That’s probably the best part of it.
The tomatometer agrees with me
And the reason I say that is because an asteroid went ahead and crashed, the asteroid that killed off all the dinosaurs… It happened to coincide with this guy crash landing on the planet as well. It went down and smacked the Earth and they got out in the nick of time and they were rescued. But the dinosaurs (and we all know where that would happen, no spoilers there), they went extinct and for whatever freaking reason.
Basically, the movie ends with a still of the T-Rex he ended killing. I don’t care if I spoil this movie. Please save yourself the hour and forty or whatever that is. The dinosaur he killed is lying on the ground as the ashes are coming down from the asteroid, and that moves on to like what they call it: the nuclear winter.
And then it progresses to like the mammoths walking in this landscape, and then it progresses to like, the humans building up a city off in the distance. It wasn’t good. And that was the baiting on that.
And I think it’s called Extraction with the guy who plays Thor. I don’t know. I might do that tonight. I might watch Extraction 2 tonight, so we’ll see.
65 wasn’t great. House of Dragon was top notch, I really liked it.
So that brings you all up to speed with what’s been going on in terms of film and television. And now I’m gonna transition to this stack of books here. Again, I will not be going into like a massive debrief into these books, but I kinda wanna give you a sense of kind of like what they’re all about.
Let me sip my tea for a second.
Good stuff, you know, chamomile tea.
Books to connect with your origins, scary books, and even more books
All right, where to start?
All right, you know what?
I’ll start with this one here really quick. So this one here, I mentioned this on the last podcast. It’s called Our Migrant Souls.
Our Migrant Souls
It was a pretty good book. I actually really did enjoy it a lot, and actually made me feel in several types of ways. Several types of ways in terms of being a Latino. Now with this one here, again, I won’t go into it. I won’t go into all of these because there are so many.
But this one is actually one of the real ones I did read. I went through it and it actually took me about… maybe a month to get through it (?). And it’s good.
It just talks about what it means to be Latino and where that phrase Latino, where that comes from in our society, and what it actually means now to be a Latino. Um… what our culture… how it’s perceived currently, it’s a little bit political. I’m not gonna lie. It’s a political book.
How our culture is seen right now during today’s landscape, how Latinos are being treated in today’s landscape. And, it didn’t really mean… I’ll be honest, it made me appreciate being a Latino. Especially because my story, our stories, they take place, they’re very prevalent:
We are first generation, second generation individuals, third generation individuals, whose culture resides in a different location, a different region of the world. A region which has been, in some cases, war torn.
So, a good example, (cause I’ve been out here a few times): El Salvador. During the 90s, I think there was a mass migration from El Salvador on over to the United States because of what was happening in El Salvador. And I think of other parts too, maybe Honduras?
But any case, he (the author) outlines some of these individuals he’s identified and interviewed, and kind of what it means to kind of be a Latino in a new country, in a new location. And I can sympathize with that, because my parents came over from Ecuador about (I have no idea), 42 years ago, 43 years ago. And they started building up a family around here, a life around here.
And in terms of grappling with what it means to be Latino, I’ve gone through that as well myself, you know? And it happened more in my youth. And I’ll share, I’ll deviate away from the book. And it happened because, well, I just got started on my career. I grew up in Logan Square in Chicago, which was predominantly Latino, before being gentrified.
So a lot of the experiences I had were around being a Latino, a Latino youth. So getting my career started, it was a huge cultural shock. I think that’s the best way to put it. It was a massive cultural shock. A lot of the folks I started working with, for one, they know the landmarks that I knew. Two, didn’t have the experiences that I had. So it was a little tough.
But reading this book. It really made me appreciate that there are others out there with similar stories:
Where you’re learning Spanish as your first language, where your parents are trying to learn English, or they’re trying to build up their own businesses. And I think as varied and colorful as our stories are, there are overlaps across a lot of us.
So it was nice to be reminded about that.
“It made me appreciate being a Latino. Especially because my story, our stories, they take place, they’re very prevalent”.
So I went on and on, and it also talked about, I think, Native Americans, which actually, touched really nicely or delved really nicely into the book I’m going to talk about briefly. So it was a good book, but after a while, I kind of got tired of it. And I know I get tired of a book if I’m dragging my feet on it. It took me about a month and a half to finish that.
I think after a while, I just kind of… “okay, I understand, you know, like it is about what it means to be Latino, through one’s own eyes, through the eyes of the country, as well as through the eyes of your culture”.
It wasn’t a bad book. I’m not going to say it was a bad book, but after a while, I kind of got tired of reading it. It took forever. And I told my wife: “I just want to finish this book already”. It’s just because I want to get it over with. I’ve invested so much time. Not a bad book. I thought I’d talk about it. I’ll probably return it. I got it from the library. It’s not bad. Not bad. So that.
They made references to the Native Americans and I think the reason why they made references to the Native Americans is because it kept talking about Indigenous folks and the Indigenous folks in the United States, the Native Americans.
So it got me really intrigued and I started looking up good books written by Native Americans and I found this book called Walking with Grandfather. I’ll show you the cover right now. This one right here, Walking with Grandfather. I love this book so much.
Walking with Grandfather
I’ll tell you why I like this more than that. Not to say that one, Our Migrant Souls is a bad book, but I love this book and I’ve told, I think my wife, I love this book because, one, it offers really great philosophical advice, practical advice, but also it wasn’t superfluous. It wasn’t beefy. It wasn’t trying to come off more than it was.
I think that happens to a lot of us. Listen, I work in the SEO space and a lot of folks use semantics and verbiage to make themselves sound smarter. So I’m glad this individual (his name is Joseph M. Marshall III), it was a really easy read, but it also just really great. It flew by. I think I missed to finish this in maybe a week and a half.
It was about Joseph F. Marshall, who basically lived… I think it was a reservation, but he lived on a farm with his grandfather during certain summers, and maybe throughout the year as well, actually. So he lived with his grandparents and he basically wandered the reservation, his farms, and the book is essentially outlining the lessons he learned from his grandfather.
And they vary:
I think one of the lessons… I mean there are several really great lessons including coming to terms with death, you know, getting back in touch with your roots.
Let me actually pull up the table of contents here:
- The Trail to Yesterday, The Importance of Identity. That one’s pretty good, I like that one.
- The Way of the Wolves…
Actually, let me talk about the Trail To Yesterday, The Importance Of Identity. So this one here was really great because:
It actually delves into my family tree (which I’ll talk about towards the end of our podcast).
That talked about the significance of understanding where you come from, understanding your forefathers, your foremothers, and basically, how I interpret it as (and everyone interprets it differently), but basically how those roots, understanding your history, how they’ll ground you.
Basically, it helps you stay firm in a changing world.
If you look at the world as just a constant hurricane where everything changes, knowing your roots, knowing your history, is meant to ground you. And, it’s funny, because I’ve been feeling that way as well. So that’s why this book resonated so much more with me. I’ve been feeling that way as well, and I’ve been striving towards understanding my family history, which is why I have a segment today called Carving Out My Family Tree.
And it just, it was very nice, or it was just very good timing, good coincidence that I picked up this book as I was building on my family tree.
I talked about Way of the Wolves. That was a good one because it talked about… I don’t know your perception of wolves, and I didn’t know much about wolves. I’m a city boy. I’m a city dude. So there aren’t any wolves in Chicago. Actually our hockey team might be the wolves. I don’t know. In any case…
I didn’t know this about wolves, but they’re very hierarchical. They have a family structure where there is a dominant one, maybe the male, I’m not sure, and then a mother and children that go with it. And then, the children go off, they grow up, and they start their own family. So it’s very much like us, us people.
But what I thought was pretty interesting was that the misconception that were around when the European settlers came by, I think there was just a lot of hostility between the wolves and their animals. And so they basically blanketed the idea behind wolves as being very carnivorous, hostile, and just savage.
And apparently the wolves, they are not a huge threat to humans. Yeah, they’re probably a threat to livestock, but I always thought that wolves were kind of like bears, where they just attack, and apparently that doesn’t happen. Based on this, it kind of steer clear of humans.
Other items include The Greyhound, which was about… it was pretty cool. It was about a dog that came through the farm and just hung out there for a bit, and then left when it needed to leave. So that was a really cool like, phases come and go, and they’re meant for a reason.
The Bull And The Arrow. And I guess the bow archery within Native American society was a craft. It was just something that was taken extraordinarily seriously. Makes sense. I mean, they’re the weapons and you’re building it out themselves. So I get sophisticated.
“The elders have such a significant role within society, within the Native American societies. It’s something that’s a little bit lost nowadays, where the value put into the elders, or the wisdom of the elders, is not as prevalent as it used to be”.
The Shadow Man. I don’t really… Oh, The Shadow Man. Oh, that was great too.
The Shadow Man was about, you know, there are times where we have to, as humans, get violent. That’s why we talk about war.
But even in this book, according to him, and he is a Lakota, yeah, he’s a Lakota Native American, he even talked about war and that war isn’t really something Native Americans really pushed for. I mean, I know there were neighboring tribes that fight with one another and even causes the Native Americans to send thousands of men to die in a battle just didn’t make any sense.
But then talks about when you have to take up arms against a hostile. So that was pretty cool. And I love how it ended in The Shadow Man, where once the warriors come back, there is a ceremony that basically helps wash away the ailments the warrior has, not physical ailments, but the mental, emotional ailments that come with actually fighting… killing. So that’s pretty cool.
Follow Me. I’m not going to I’m not going to lie. I’m sure I don’t remember that one.
The Circle of Life. That was a good one, but the last one, The End of the Journey is Just the Beginning… That one was good because it talked about death. It talked about how death is a natural part of life and to avoid death is doing life a disservice because they’re just so intertwined and they’re just natural progressions.
I don’t really talk about my level of spirituality, but over the last several years, I’ve been leaning towards understanding different spiritual practices. Not necessarily religions or organized religions, or denominations therein, but just understanding what others societies have embraced.
So, it’s really nice to hear about how Joseph M. Marshall perceives death, or the Lakotas perceive death. So it was good, it was good. It was a good chapter. It was a good book overall.
I mean, you know what’s funny? Is that Walking With Grandfather, this came again at a very great time, because I began to build up my family tree; but at the same time, I’ve had more opportunities to actually hang out with my grandfather. The dude is like 90 something years old, I think. But he’s a riot.
He’s a cute old man, man. He’s just something else. He can go on talking about the same old thing. He talks about where he used to come from, what time he came, when he came over here, what he got into… He was a carpenter. It’s very sweet to hear him talk. And then, you know what? He’s kind of a coworker, because he works at the shop with us. So he’ll post up and just hang out there, and just do his little work.
It’s really adorable.
But this became really great because it made me want to listen to him a little bit more. And I do listen to him. And it’s nice because, at the end of the day, those that are older, are elders, they’re not always going to be around. And it’s important to hear them out, see what they have to say around one matter or another.
And I think the end of the book here was basically stating that:
The elders have such a significant role within society, within the Native American societies. It’s something that’s a little bit lost nowadays (according to the book), where the value put into the elders, or the wisdom of the elders, is not as prevalent as it used to be.
I guess an example would be where there was an issue or situation:
They would gather all the elders who were the wisest of a tribe or society, and ask them to commune about what to do, how to proceed with a certain matter. And it was good. It is very eye-opening. And it makes me want to be a better person, and listen to my elders. It includes my parents, my aunts, and my uncles, and my grandparents.
So that was a good book. That was a good book. I really enjoyed that.
Now folks, the ones right here behind me, we’re gonna breeze through them in no time because honestly… I didn’t read them. I didn’t read them.
Yeah, I’m looking at them right now… All right, cool.
Sword of Kings
So, Bernard’s Cornwell’s Sword of the Kings…
I was like: “I’m gonna read this one”.
This is really cool, like, Game of Thrones sort of stuff. This is like the eighth book in an 11-part series. And I’m like… I’m starting in a really awkward spot… I’m not gonna read it.
I’ll put it to the side there.
Source: Wikipedia
Danger in Numbers
Heather Graham’s Danger in Numbers. Let me talk about this for one minute.
So if I haven’t told you what my routine is, my routine is basically:
When I go to bed, I read a book, something to calm me down, right? So I picked up this book because I was like: “oh! It’s a mystery. It’s a thriller”.
And I wanted to have a good time, like something really… I want to be entertained since I didn’t have as much time to watch TV. So I got this book and it opens up with a female corpse hanging from a barn, blood just running down, being stabbed by a big old something or rather.
And I was like: “I gotta stop. I gotta stop. This is not what I want to hear before going to bed. This is not, I’m gonna have weird dreams”.
So I got a chapter in, I was like: “no, thank you, I’m not going to read that”.
And that’s the end of that.
The Spirit Of Shuar, Wisdom From The Last Unconquered People Of The Amazon
I have this book, I haven’t read this, but I’m going to probably start reading it. It’s called The Spirit Of Shuar, Wisdom From The Last Unconquered People Of The Amazon.
So, this one I wanted to read because, again, I read Our Migrant Souls and it talked about Native Americans, and indigenous folks, and I began to look up books by Native Americans and that’s how I came to find it across Walking With Grandfather.
And this British Juar (I don’t know if it was in a list I found or one of those recommended readings), but it was like six bucks. And what really attracted me to this one was it takes place, I think in the Amazon around Ecuador. And again, I want to know more about my culture and all its peoples. So this one was really good. I haven’t read it, but this was a good choice for reading. It doesn’t look like it’s too bad. So we’ll see.
That’s probably on my list to read. So I’m going to put this to the side.
Exhalation
Oh, geez!. Oh, my goodness!. All right. The last book here, and I just started reading it. It’s called Exhalation by Ted Chang.
So far, it’s good. It’s really good. It’s just a compilation of short stories. They’re all, I think, sci-fi.
Apparently, this Ted Chang came out with a compilation a couple of years ago, maybe a decade and a half ago, and it was extraordinarily well received. And I wanted to get it. I wanted to get it.
I just started reading about a week ago.
I finished up the first short story called The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. And that was basically about like a time traveling gate built by an alchemist. And if you’re not familiar with an alchemist, apparently an alchemist is an individual that can warp different types of chemicals and materials to change its form. So for example, an alchemist can change steel, put it and change it into gold or convert it into gold based on his alchemy.
The alchemist in that short story created a time traveling gate, but it was good. It was very smooth, easy read. Really enjoyed it!
And guys, I’m not buying all these books. I don’t have the money for that. Libraries, that’s the way to do it, y’all. I mean, I really didn’t start going to the library until probably a year ago. And I took like four books out and what I do is pretty interesting:
I basically take three or four books at a time. I take them out and then I start skimming them, start reading them and if a book doesn’t catch my attention right off the bat or if it’s not attractive enough for me, I just stop. I know the only thing that’s lost is maybe some time but it’s not too bad. Books are expensive.
Books are like 20 bucks, you know? So the library is where it’s at. Definitely check out your local library, good stuff. That’s all I have about books.
The last bit. Family tree, give me one second. Another sip for my tea.
That’s good stuff. That’s good stuff as well.
Carving Out My Family Tree
Okay, cool. So the family tree, folks, the family tree…
You might be wondering:
“Edwin, why are you kind of digging into your family tree?”.
And I alluded to it earlier when I was talking about Walking With Grandfather. The only constant in this life and this world I feel is change, it just continues to change. And that’s not right or wrong, but I do feel like that is the state of affairs:
Just change happens.
And I feel as though to kind of help one get situated in the change, it’s important to understand where they come from, where their roots are. And that’s why I wanted to do my family tree.
I think ,in my case, it’s a little bit different because I am a first generation American and my roots happen to be in Ecuador. My parents are Ecuadorian. My wife, her parents, are Mexican. So yeah, we’re both kind of like in the same situation, my wife and I. Basically first generation in a different country.
But what this really, all that means for me is… building out a family tree isn’t…
I have my cousins and stuff, and that hasn’t been bad. That’s been pretty easy. It’s easy going up to, like, my grandparents. It gets harder and way more complicated when it gets beyond my grandparents. And that includes my grandparents’ siblings and their parents. So it gets, for example…
actually have this here:
I was talking to my grandmother, she was in town visiting my brother, who broke his leg about a month ago (less than a month ago).
I was talking to my grandmother and I asked her if she remembers her siblings. She does. So she has four siblings from her mother and father. What ended up happening, was her mom passed away when my grandmother recently got married. But her grandfather, so my great grandfather got remarried. He got remarried with a second family and they had five kids.
My grandmother doesn’t know her, I guess, half siblings. I guess they are, half siblings. I only got two names. And the trick is carving out and mapping it out, right? Now, I don’t know how far or how wide I want to take it. And I say wide because it does get pretty darn wide.
In this case here, one of my grandmothers remarried. One of my, I want to say, my grandmother from my maternal side… One of my grandfather on my maternal side, his mother got married, so her branch splintered off as well. So now what ends up happening is these new family members start to creep up and it expands the family tree.
Which is not a bad problem. I think it’s exactly what I wanted:
I want to understand our family tree, our family dynamic. And what that has done is basically open up the amount of family that I can potentially know. Now, the problem is keeping track of it.
So I have this notebook. You might maybe have already seen me scroll, but this is the notebook that I basically use on a very regular basis. I scroll down all my notes, my thoughts, and all that good stuff.
I started to scribble down my family tree. It’s a good exercise when something happens or you learn something new, you scribble it down. Like today:
I found something else that was new from my father about his mother and her parents. So I scribbled it down right away…
Couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, really wild, out of the blue, one of my mom’s cousins visited our shop, and my mom, who’s been taking care of my brother is no longer at the shop on a regular basis, but she happened to be there at that exact time and he surprised her. So then I met somebody else from my family tree and that kind of expanded it.
So all that meant was I have more cousins that are out there. And, with today’s age, it’s probably going to be a little bit easier to reach out and kind of map it out, especially with some of the younger ones.
But in a case like that, a notebook like this is great because you can scribble down some of your learnings right away.
However, when you’re formally putting it together, just because you want to make sense of it, that’s what I’m trying to do. I told my wife I’m grappling with this right now because I don’t know how to map it out correctly. I don’t like that I have all these names. I have all these relationships, but this notebook isn’t helping me. So I struggled with that a little bit. And you know what? I started to do software.
I started to use a software called Miro. Miro Board is a whiteboarding tool. And it was good.
I thought it was going to be good (for the family tree), but it became a lot more convoluted. Plus, it didn’t feel right. I feel like with something like this, I want to be able to physically… be able to draw my family tree. So that’s kind of my urge.
So what I did, I came up with it last week:
What I ended up doing was I bought a binder. I bought a binder and a whole bunch of plastic sleeves. And what I’m going to do is map out, I call them pods. So my family, my siblings and I, my parents were a pod. And I’m gonna start mapping out pods, put them in a sleeve and just house them in my binder. So when I need them, I can just start taking them apart and then putting them together, basically like puzzle pieces.
“I feel as though to help one get situated in the change, it’s important to understand where they come from, where their roots are. And that’s why I wanted to do my family tree”.
See the various relationships that exist, the connections, who’s related to who… It’s going to be pretty wild! And I just started doing that. It’s not easy, like you would think. Oh! It should be pretty straightforward. It should… right?
But as I begin to kind of map it out, it’s actually a little bit more complicated than I initially would have thought. So that’s what’s happening. I’m building that out. I’m glad I moved away from the software and actually writing it out. I’m really curious to see how it turns out.
It’s probably an ongoing project for a while. And we shall see. And the other part of this honestly is, I want my son and whatever kids we have thereafter to kind of understand their background as well, their family. So they know that it’s a lot larger than myself, my wife and his mom and dad. And that he comes from somewhere else, that his roots are there, they just need to be uncovered.
I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s going to be very interesting, especially as I start having these conversations with various people. I think I went as far back as my great grandparents for my maternal grandmother and grandfather and my paternal grandfather. I did not understand my great grandparents on my paternal grandmother. So what that means is like my dad’s mom’s parents. I didn’t I haven’t carved it out yet. So I’m pretty curious to see how that goes.
So yeah, I mean that’s kind of what I’ve been up to out of the office. It’s kept me busy. It’s actually a lot of fun. I’ve been between reading and looking at my family tree. It’s been a lot of fun. And earlier on I talked about career and stuff and… yeah, I haven’t had a lot of time to kind of focus on building out my personal brand, making it a lot more like a passive income, passively income-y.
But that’s okay.
I think this is actually really great. I think this is awesome because it’s stuff that I… It makes me happy to learn about our family like this. And I think… I don’t know if anyone else is doing it, so it’s… I can’t wait till I finish it so I can share with other folks in case they want it.
But it does tie back into how I have so many hours in the day, and I can either focus on my personal brand, which is not bad, or focus on my family tree. And, the family tree stuff is a lot of fun. So I enjoy that a lot.
Last thing before we go:
What else has been happening? I’ve actually been getting into shoes, shoes and hats…
And I don’t want to say I have a lot of style, but I’m always tempted to buy new shoes for either. I bought my first pair of Jordans not too long ago and I was like: “these are nice”. And then I want to buy another pair of Jordans, but they’re pretty pricey, and on top of that, I’ve been getting the hats as well.
So like right now, let me share this. It’s like a beige New York Yankees hat right here. It’s nice though. It actually fits really well. It goes great with a couple of outfits.
You pair that with a nice pair of shoes or sneakers… and these are some sneakers right here.
Some Nike Air Max. I got cleaned up a little bit, but… Kind of been eyeing a couple of sneakers here and there. I want to see where it goes.
Acouple of years ago, I was talking to a director at (I think she was a director or she was like the chief digital officer) a major shoe retailer, and I was being interviewed by them for a contracting role or a consultancy role. I didn’t get it, but I built some really good relationships.
And one of the things I told her was that I don’t think I can pull off sneakers. That I don’t have that persona to pull off sneakers. And she’s like “you can pull it off. Anyone can pull it off. You just got to wear it. You got to wear it in confidence, you know? And she’s right. You just got to be comfortable with it, match it with whatever you feel comfortable with.
Like, I wear, I’m not wearing one right now, but I wear collar shirts a lot. And she’s like: “they’re perfect to wear color, that you can pair with collar shirts”. So I started doing that and they are nice. They really are. I’m really enjoying it. So we’ll see. I might buy more caps. I might buy more sneakers. Who knows? But we’ll see. Hopefully I’m tempted to buy another pair of sneakers as well.
I was looking at some last night. We’ll see. Well…
That’s all I have for today, folks. I am running at 50 minutes.
Thank you so much for listening to (or reading) me. I appreciate it. And hopefully, I can get back to you all in less than a month. Obviously, though, it’s been about approximately like a month or so. I turned these things out.
Well, thank you so much for listening to the Out of Office Chat. I hope you have a wonderful month. Please take care. If you want to reach out to me, just feel free to reach out to me through the comments or however.
Catch you all in the next one. Take care.
