I'm feeling very fulfilled these days because I am directly impacting someone in areas that I feel most passionately about - education and women's issues. I'm helping her with communication skills, with goal-setting, with learning the soft skills required to succeed not only in school or careers, but also in life in general. I am amazed at how much I've grown and learned in the past 7 years, and I definitely wished I had a mentor back in high school so I could have had a jumpstart on all this knowledge. And I'm glad to finally not be doing tutoring or instruction, which I have been doing in my past volunteering/job experiences.
Learning is a lifelong journey, and I'm definitely excited about learning how to be a good mentor, how to not spoon-feed and give advice all the time, but instead sit back and truly listen. How to get the student to open up with her own ideas and let her come up with the solutions. Learning how to let go of control, which translates into how to be a good parent. I think that as much as I'm giving to this mentorship, I'm getting back twice as much about being a good person and more.
On a random note - my team was talking about our uber ratings and ride statistics, and I found a website that helps pull your uber ride history. Interesting fact - I've taken 490 rides, and spent 7 days, 21h and 18m in uber rides! Pretty impressive huh. I've been using uber since 2014 September-end, so it's only been 3 years.
These days I've been taking a lot of uber rides because of my travel (and we're not renting cars anymore). Perhaps this is why - in just this past week, I've been hit on twice by my uber drivers. And that's a record - I usually get hit on once every few months, but somehow this week I'm getting a higher hit-on rate. Interesting!
And the most awkward time was last night, when I was taking an uber ride from Berkeley to SF. The moment I got on, the uber driver said that he's so glad he gets to hang out with lovely people like me. He repeated that multiple times - whenever I asked him how he's doing or how was his day, he said it's great, he gets to meet lovely people like me. Or when I asked how he liked driving uber, he said oh it's wonderful, he gets to meet lovely people like me. It was getting to the point where I was getting uncomfortable (and weirded out), yet he was driving so slowly. And I was at least 30min from home at that point.
I started to use some "taichi" techniques of conversation, steering it more towards himself so I can avoid the conversation topic about me. I asked him about what kind of music he liked, and he started playing music for us and that helped speed time by. Unfortunately, it didn't work well enough. He asked me if I was single, and then proceeded to invite me to an African club. He kept asking me if I wanted to hang out, and whether I was free tonight, or "how about Saturday?" or "how about Sunday"? I told him it's probably not a good idea.
Sigh. Sometimes being a woman can be difficult, because you end up with unwanted attention. Sometimes it's great, because you get all the attention you were looking for. It's just hard to balance both, and I still need to figure out a better way to deal with being hit on. Maybe I should just lie and say that I have a boyfriend?
Funky thing - I broke a spoon today at lunch while trying to open the plastic containing all the cutlery. Who knew I could be so super-humanly strong??
