The 2015 PittsBurgher from a Picky Eater's Perspective

Being a picky eater is not fun. Nobody who is a picky eater enjoys it. We look at delicious food. We smell delicious food, but we cannot enjoy the taste of that delicious food and it makes us sad. Sometimes we can grow into foods. For example, I started to like burgers, just plain burgers, when I was 23, and eventually the other condiments in the years after. I still hate mustard, and mayonnaise is my arch nemesis. However, you cannot force me to like foods. I can't even force me to like foods. So please trust me, and your picky friends, when we say we don't like something, because chances are we've tried it at least twenty times. You aren't the only person to tell us that we won't know unless we've tried it.

Fortunately and unfortunately, BBQ cheeseburgers quickly became my favorite food. The unfortunate part is that I rarely stray away from that burger because I generally discovered that I hate most other flavors in a burger. So coming from a distraught picky eater, I went to the 2015 PittsBurgher event and rated each burger. Here's how it went, starting with my least favorite.

The Godfather from Latitude 360

This burger was simply awful for me. I think it had relish or something in it. I was hesitant in trying it. In fact, I didn't want to, but I brought myself to do it and I did not like the flavor of this one at all. I'm sure there are people out there that loves this kind of flavor, but it isn't me.

Rating: 1

Big Kahuna Burger from Cain's Saloon

I got really excited for this burger because it had grilled pineapple in it. I love pineapples. However, I did not like it one bit because simply put, it was way too spicy. I never got to taste the pineapple because the red chili pepper flakes they put in their coleslaw was too overbearing and felt like it burned my tongue.

Big Kahuna Rating: 1

Casino Royale with Cheese from BND'z Burgerz and Dogz

I've never been a fan of spicy foods. My mouth is just too sensitive and it sucks. It really limits what I can enjoy, and that includes this delicious looking burger which I just couldn't.

Rating: 2

Black and Bleu BBQ Bacon Burger from Duke's Rib House & Grille

I really had my hopes up for this one because it had some of my favorite ingredients in it. Sadly, my experience with bleu cheese was not a favorable one, and it had an overbearing flavor. It was quite tough because the burger itself was actually very flavorful, so to have a single flavor really overwhelm it was quite surprising.

Rating: 3

Doce's Burger from Twelve on Carson

This one was just kind of sad. I didn't get to taste this one too well because this sandwich was sloppy and overwhelmed with my nemesis, mayo. I could taste the other veggies after the initial mayo shock, and it was a yummy garden, but I could not take to tasting that mayonnaise again.

Rating: 4

Bacon Cheddar "Mini B" Sliders from Bill's Bar & Burger

Not spicy (finally, I had too many spicy ones before this little guy), but it also didn't seam to have a wow factor. Yeah, the pretzel bun was cool, but it was also pretty bland. My fiancé went on about how he could taste a special sauce, but I couldn't. At least I ate the whole thing.

Rating: 6

Phenom from Jamison's

This one was hardly fair because it was a kielbasa and not a burger. But despite my past experiences with kielbasa, mushrooms, and something else they said that sounded gross, it was actually pretty tasty. I still picked off the mushrooms as I saw them and ate the ones I didn't.

Rating: 7

TMB (Tomato Mozzarella Basil) from Max & Erma's

This one tasted really good. It was a powerful flavor, but the grilled tomato and mozzarella reminded me of my staple meal, John's bolognese. Although the basil did seem a bit much. I wasn't fond of its aftertaste, but I otherwise liked it. It was also really juicy or greasy, but I couldn't tell the difference.

Rating: 7

Blind Pig Burger from The Union Hotel

Now this was delicious! I was skeptical (as I usually am with foods), but I loved the flavor and it didn't seem like there was anything that detracted from it.

Rating: 8

Hangover Helper from Bigham Tavern

This was interesting. I had my hopes up because they were last year's winners. It was also my first burger when I got here, and I was naive to think that all of them would not just be burgers but the restaurant's choice of special burger. So when I saw that this had eggs on it, I didn't think highly of this burger (remember, I'm picky?). Turns out eggs on your burger is pretty awesome. So was the sauce (Sriracha I think?). Regardless, it was my top favorite and I hope it wins the PittsBurgher again this year!

Rating: 8

Super disclaimer for the easily offended: just because I am a picky eater, it doesn't mean I can't appreciate the deliciousness I could have, nay, should have experienced. I may not enjoy some of these burgers, but these are solely my opinions and in no way reflect upon the restaurant or their burgers because I am in no way qualified to actually do so. I'm just a woman with a blog.

Video Game Escapism: The best medication for Anxiety

I'm a big advocate of using video games as a coping mechanism for dealing with the stresses of real life. I usually get very ingrained in the characters lives and problems and forget all of my own stresses just for the time I am playing. I find that this is the best way for me to cope with my own anxiety and depression. When I'm having a particularly anxious spell I feel stuck in my problems, like I can't move forward or even begin to resolve them. In video games, I can see real quantifiable progress as I complete quests and gain experience.

I can play four to five hours at a time given the chance, which I know some people would find very strange or even a waste. Usually it depends on what the game is.

Since real life is so open ended, problems have no real black and white solutions and meeting objectives is usually not a linear endeavor. I enjoy the rigid black and white world of video games. Sure, the most recent generation of games is aiming to be more gray and less defined, but the very fact that someone programmed a series of choices and outcomes makes the game digital overall.

This is not a bad thing, I like the fact that video games have hard and fast rules that I can learn and use to my advantage. I like that I can't make any mistakes so bad that the world changes fundamentally and I like that at the end of the day, all of my problems are eminently solvable.

Recently, I have been playing through the Witcher 3, my console of choice is the PS4 and it has basically enslaved me for the best part of a month. This game feels different from any other I have played. Many reviewers have raved about how it has changed the landscape of RPG gaming and raised the standard of narrative and quest design. While this may be true, there are deeper implications with this change.

Being a perfectionist, I also strive to do video games correctly. I want to get the "good" ending. I want to collect everything and I want all the good characters to like me and all the bad characters get their comeuppance. If I do something wrong, I am always tempted to reload and try again rather than living with my flawed actions, I get enough of that in real life! I try to not look at guides to story line to manipulate the game to my desire and I try not to correct actions but sometimes, it is so easy to just try again when you have that conversation with an attractive female character that didn't quite turn out how you were hoping.

In the Witcher 3, it is actually quite difficult to see the puppet strings. You make decisions important to the game without even realizing it, innocuously seeming NPCs take on an entirely different and unexpected role and there is no way of knowing what the right choice even was. Consequences can happen hours after the event when you barely even remember what could have caused the outcome. The game introduces you to a vaguely familiar character or situation and says...

"Hey, remember this random thing you did that you thought I wouldn't notice? Well here's a steamy bowl of consequences, and if you don't like it then just reload back a few hours!"

...Knowing full well you have long saved over that timestamp and you couldn't bare losing the character progression. Well played Witcher 3, well played...

Well for a person like me who likes the fact that I can do everything "right" in video games and no screw up is too large. It was hard to deal with at first. I thought I had done the right thing, played by the video game rules, only to find out that what I did had done had dire consequences for the future.

*Warning* Spoilers for the Witcher 3 beyond this point!!

For example, I met a random guy tied up on a river bank by bandits... Pretty cut and dry, don't even think there was a quest, just a random event, untie him, send him on his way, he promised me a big reward when he got back to his camp...

Several hours later...

Bump into the same guy at a camp, turned out he is head of the bandits now and murdered a camp full of innocent men, women and children and is so grateful for me helping him he offered me a bunch of gold that might as well have had blood literally dripping off it... So I turned down his gold, murdered him and his friends and tried to forget that my actions got a bunch of random people killed.

Then there is Fyke isle... Long story short, no one goes there because it is terrifying as balls and haunted. I meet the ghost at the top of the tower. She tells me a heart wrenching tale about how she was eaten from the inside out by rats while in a paralytic state, able to feel the pain but not cry out. I thought that sounded pretty nasty so I agreed to help her put her spirit to rest at last. I chose to release her from the tower and.....

...she murdered her ex-boyfriend who she blamed and then disappeared into the ether to wreak havoc on more innocent lives across Novigrad. Great. Good job me, you fell for a soppy story and released an insane spirit on the innocent.

So it seems nothing is as it appears in the Witcher 3 and regular video game tropes don't seem to hold up at all. I could do nothing once I realized my mistake, other than take it and walk away. No second chances, no righting my wrongs, just live with it.

Then there's the Witcher contract to hunt a prostitute killer... I trace him to a brothel, burst in to find him about to kill a prostitute he tied to a chair, so naturally I kill him... Only to find another body much later on... apparently the guy I caught literally red handed was the wrong guy. Or at least he had an accomplice that I didn't bother asking him about as his head rolled across the floor.

Then you have the love interests, Triss and Yennifer. Naturally I assumed that no bad could come from seducing both because that's how video games work. I'm the hero so they should both be lucky to have me. I seduce both for the whole game then expect to have a grand moment of choice scene at the end and choose a winner while the other goes her separate way with absolutely no negative consequences...

Well, come the end game and things were better than I could imagine: a threesome! Just as I predicted, the hero always gets his way...

Except it was actually a trap and I ended up embarrassed, alone and tied to a bed... WTF! And that was it, I had failed and was doomed to be alone thanks to my own selfishness.

There's many more scenarios, but I think I made my point.

So what the Witcher 3 teaches us is that we should choose a partner, be faithful and spurn the advances of all others. Then we can live happily ever after. So kinda like real life then... In real life I would never act the way I made Geralt act. The worst part is that throughout the game I couldn't stand Yennifer, she acted more like my mom than a lover and I really liked Triss. Yet, when push came to shove I saw no problem in telling Triss I Geralt loved her only to go and cheat on her with Yen.

Why? Because that's the old video game rules, I can have it all! If I wanted to be monogamous and not murder everyone who looks at me funny, I'd go outside! And I was genuinely pretty disappointed that I Geralt ended up alone in the end because of my own poor choices.

I mean come on! Even Lambert ended up with Keira! And he was a total A-hole the whole game!

But there you have it, video games have changed, no longer does being the protagonist guarantee a happy ending with no consequences of your actions. and now I will have to be a lot more careful about the decisions I make.

Just on a random aside: How awesome was the 'mission' where you get drunk with your Witcher friends, dress up in Yennifer's clothes and drunk dial a random mage on the mage phone in an ill-fated attempt to invite over some hot sorceresses to the party. One of the funniest scenes in a video game of all time.

Dear Childhood Best Friend

We haven't seen each other in a very long time, and I've found myself thinking about you this past week. You moved very far away a few years ago, and I figured it was time I finally wrote to you.

You broke my heart. Not once. Not twice. Multiple times. You kept doing it and seemingly without remorse. You grew up and became a psychopath and I hope you're living a miserable life.

But I still miss you.

Not the you you are now. I miss the you I knew when we were kids. You were tons of fun. I still remember when and where we met.

I had just moved to the area and was riding a new bus. I got on for the first time, and I saw this mousy brunette sitting in the middle. There were some bitchy girls in the back and few other kids speckled around. I sat across the aisle from you. You were very quiet. Didn't look at me at all. Just read your book. So I just kept to my own business and looked out the window. The bus was almost never packed.

It would seem like you brought something new with you on the bus every day. First it was Beanie Babies. I had a pretty good collection on my own, but you had some I've never seen before. Other times, you brought these really cool animal robot toys. I saw you had this one like a lion, so I finally spoke up.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's a Zoid," you responded.

"That's cool. What does it do?"

"It fights other Zoids. This is Liger Zero X."

And so our friendship began. I started asking my mum to buy me Zoids when we went to Walmart, but my collection was never as big as yours. It didn't matter, we shared them and made up our own stories.

We learned about our other interests like drawing, and eventually discovered anime together. We could never pass by Walden's book store in the mall without going in to look at the manga rack to see if the newest book of favorite series' were there.

Some of my favorite memories include buying random fabrics from JoAnne's and running around the woods by our houses, playing pretend. We were queens of the various animal kingdoms. We were warrior princesses of an anthropomorphic fox species. We were super saiyans. I was Sailor Jupiter and you were Sailor Uranus. We both crushed on Legolas and Aragorn, son of Arathorn.

I brought you to all of my family functions. You met my cousins, and she's just as quirky as us, so we had loads of more fun making music videos. We were so close, we promised each other that we would all be each other's Maid of Honor when we got married.

We had wondrous adventures together, but it came to an abrupt halt when we started dating boys.

I wasn't mature enough to really care. I thought boyfriends were just friends that were boys. I got a boyfriend before you, but I still made time to hang out with everyone because that's how I was. You turned into something different when you got a boyfriend.

You started to ignore me. You essentially forgot about me. Then you actively avoided me. It really sucked. It tore me up because you were my best friend. I shared all my secrets with you. When something shitty happened, you weren't there for me. I needed you.

When your boyfriend dumped you and you remembered that I existed, I forgave you. I missed you. I was excited that things were going back to the way they were before. But it didn't last long. You turned into a serial dater. You forgot about me every time you had a new boyfriend, and every time, it broke me down just a little bit more.

I moved away for college and lived in my dorm in the city for a year. We barely saw each other. I had hoped you had changed because I asked you to come be my roommate in the city for our first apartment. You did. We had some fun, but it quickly deteriorated. I started to learn you weren't who I thought you were.

Not once did you get a real job when we lived together. Your job as a stripper paid well. Too well. In fact, all of your boyfriends were previous clients. You dated a 32 year old man (we were still only 19 and 20 at the time). You dated a computer savvy college student (probably your best yet). And you didn't come home a lot. Almost ever. Our apartment was more like a storage space for your shit while you slept at mens' places. I'm sorry, clients. Sure, you weren't the stereotypical stripper that got addicted to drugs. But you were the stripper that dated clients and allowed them to pay you under the table for going on dates with them like an escort. I never asked if those packages included sex because it just wasn't my business and honestly, I didn't want to know.

The biggest blow to my heart is when you started visiting my cousin without me. I thought we were best friends, only to feel betrayed when you two started hanging out behind my back. It's not like she was a short drive away. It required a lot of planning to visit each other because she lived four hours away. It also sucked because my cousin never visited me when we lived together, but she visited you after we got our own, separate apartments. She visited me for the first time just last October, and I've been living in this city since 2009.

Regardless, you chipped away at my trust in you. You're the reason why I can't stand you now.

Since we've parted ways, my cousin got married. You couldn't even be bothered to attend her wedding when she asked you to be her Maid of Honor because you'd rather take your shirt off at your job. It's okay, I attended but didn't get to be her MOH either. I'm not even mad about that. I'm mad because you blew her off.

Now I'm about to get married, and my cousin will be in my bridal party, but you won't. And that makes me happy. You moved to the Virgin Islands to live with a guy you met online when you were 15. I hope you make each other miserable. You are such a despicable person, you had the gall to accuse someone I love of raping you because you needed to pull the "victim" card to keep your relationship with that weirdo together.

You're a liar. You're a heart-breaker. You're a disgusting human being and I hope you get what you deserve, because I certainly am.

Cheers.

The Kinetic Barrier to Change

I'm not sure if I mentioned in a previous post how it came to be that I became trans-located from the UK across the pond into the US.

It started fairly easily... I wanted to live in the US!

The previous five or so years, I had become quite enamored with the American culture, I had studied American history in high school as an optional course as a change from science and it was fascinating. I had become a huge fan of football* thanks in part to happenstance and to an obsession with playing Madden with my younger brother.

Just for a bit of personal history, the first game I ever saw was Super Bowl XLI by pure chance. I was bored at home on a cold February night and randomly flipped onto the opening ceremony of the Super Bowl on C4. I watched the whole thing intently; the half time show with Prince, the endless Rex Grossman bumbling, and that was where my love started. I wanted to know more... watch more videos, play more games. 

For whatever reason, my brother also started to love football around the same time, a few years of Madden and following the NFL network later, and I was a mega fan. There is no off season to me. I watch the draft. I watch the scouting combine. I don't just blindly follow the Giants either because that was the first place I lived when I moved to America. I am a huge Giants fan, but I can talk with any fan about any team. Although I'd rather not talk to certain team fans...

The point is that I have grown closer and closer to the US culture for several years before I left. My love of football was just part of that...

In the meantime I was moving into the final year of a Ph.D. program in chemistry and wondering what I would do afterward. Most people look for a Post-Doc but I was far more interested in getting out of the lab and moving into a career.

Then one day someone, knowing how much I love America, I was asked why I don't move there...

It seemed obvious but my first thoughts were..

"How can I do that?!"

"I don't know where to start."

"It sounds expensive."

"I don't know anyone there."

But then I realized...

These were just excuses! I loved the idea of moving to the country that I loved, albeit in theory at this point. Sure, I'd visited a few times but Hawaii, Florida and New York City hardly seem like the real America. I didn't know what it would really be like.

So the next day I started looking into how I could get to America...

One solution was to do a Post-Doc... not my first choice. but by far the easiest way to get a Visa and a Post-Doc at Princeton would get my foot in the American door, and it would be great for my CV.

I began planning, found a flight, a place to stay, got my visa, and prepared. It didn't really dawn on me that I was really leaving my whole life behind until I was on the plane. My life was literally packed into two suitcases and I could barely breathe with anxiety and the worst heartburn of my life.

I landed into JFK airport that evening and made the huge mistake of deciding to stay in a cheap hotel in Queens before moving on to Princeton the next day. An even bigger mistake was foregoing the taxi service from JFK, and instead opting for the AirTrain to Jamaica Station followed by a five block walk... at night. This whole plan had me wondering if I'd made a HUGE mistake by coming here at all... and if I would even live to regret it.

The next day, I headed to Princeton, lugging two packed suitcases through the busy New York City and the architectural black hole that is Pennsylvania Station. I figured, how hard could it be to change trains from the Long Island Railroad to the NJ Transit... Boy was I naive!

Finally I made it to Princeton, this time opting to take a taxi to the place I'd call home for the next month, a rental house just North of the University. The family I was renting a room from was welcoming, but all I really wanted to do was decompress, so I went for a walk before even packing away my clothes.

The first time I saw Princeton town, my heartburn and anxiety evaporated immediately.

I felt like I was home, finally...

And I've felt like that ever since.

True, I've since moved to Pittsburgh, which I much prefer to Princeton, but I knew for the first time that I was on the right track. America was my home, and I knew it.

So if you've read this far, congratulations! I don't pretend that my story is exciting, or even interesting, but it is unique to me and it does hold a lesson.

You can be one of those people who just talks about "one day I'm going to do this", or "I want to do this". The word "but" usually completes the second part of those sentences. I used to do it too.

"I want to live in America, but..."

Until someone I trusted asked me why don't I? I really didn't think it was real. 

It doesn't matter what your dream is. Talk is cheap, as they say, not in money though, it's cheap in time and effort. Achieving any dream, however small, requires overcoming some barrier to happiness.

I realized while writing this story that this barrier is much like the barrier towards a chemical reaction. It's the reason why paper dreams of bursting into flames, but instead it just sits there, as a piece of paper, until it catches a spark. That spark helps the paper overcome the reaction barrier and the paper burns just as it always wanted to.

Let me explain what I mean using the diagram...

In Chemistry reactions lower energy just means something is more stable but if you trace the energy pathway from Y to X there is a high energy peak between the two. Much like life, there is always an uphill struggle if you want to make a life change to a happier state.

But notice the red line! That looks MUCH easier, I want to take the easy path to happiness!

Well you can, but that requires a catalyst. A catalyst makes that effort less and the change easier. My catalyst was my friend who basically sat me down and told me to get my head out of my ass and start doing something toward my goal or stop talking about it! 

My goal was to live in America, my barrier was the torturous journey, expenses and effort of finding a job in another country, and my catalyst was a trusted (albeit abrasive) friend... and now I'm at point X and looking for my next low energy state!

So stop reading this and figure out what you want and start working toward it!

And most importantly, find your catalyst...

*For the purposes of this and ALL future posts, 'football' refers to American football! If I mean 'soccer' I will say soccer, which I probably won't because it sucks and is boring. Very few things annoy me more than being questioned every time I say football as to whether I in fact mean 'American football' as if it is that surprising that a British person would prefer football to soccer. Just for the record, it is Americans who decided to use the same bloody word for a completely different, all be it superior sport, and thus create the confusion.