Like many Americans, I grew up around people. People talking. People gossiping. People interacting with each other.

It was just natural.

But the thing is for me I thought that I had the excuse to be quiet. I was exempt from interaction with others. I was not obligated to participate, talk, laugh, or frown. I could be a fly on the wall, completely unnoticed.

And yet, is that why I feel so comfortable around crowds of people? At last when I don’t have to interact with them.

So it surprised me when a colleague mentioned how she was overwhelmed with the crowds at Maker Faire this year. That it was too much. The crowds, the people, the everyone. It never bothered me (except the lines for the things that I wanted to do, of course). I felt at home in crowds where I could be anonymous. Where nobody knows my name. And I can, for once, be anybody.

Lunch is the meal in the middle of the day. The meal that is often away from home. The meal that is often in the company of strangers (or at least people who don’t know you at all) The meal that, if taken from home, is cold, perhaps reheated. Or made somewhere else. That’s lunch.

At school, it was the period where I desperately tried to fit in. The times where I sat with other girls pretending to be interested in conversations about beauty maintenance and other girls. It was also the time where you were ostracized for eating alone.

By the time I got to college, I didn’t want to bother with eating with other people. It was such a burden. At the dining commons, I would eat in the smaller room. The room where other people never ate. So nobody ever saw me in the bigger room. For years though, afterwards, friends would always be shocked—”Why are you eating alone?” Because I just do. It was too much anxiety to eat with someone. To come up with conversation, even empty conversation, between bites, because silence was never okay.

Then I graduated. I don’t know what I did in graduate school, because I don’t quite remember any specifics except cooking chicken and potatoes at home and bringing it to the lab. How did I eat? Did I eat normally at all? Regardless, it was there that I learned to “never eat alone”. Because “you may be missing an opportunity to connect.”

I took the professional networking advice to heart and did not eat alone for many years. Especially lunch. This is the time that I was supposed to build up my network, get to know people, connect with them. Everybody eats. Everybody.

But in the last few years since I already have a steady professional network…now I want to retreat back to my college ways. I want to eat alone again. To eat messily. To have nobody see. To choose the food. I remember in recent research, I asked what lunch meant to the participants. One participant who worked in HR said that lunch was a break from work. She worked with people all day and that with lunch, this was the time when she could be alone, eat her lunch away from her desk. That’s me I think. It’s me to go away and recharge. To enjoy the lunch that I had a $5 coupon for at a place with a long line and at a place where my colleagues won’t come with me to be relax for that one sacred hour during the day.

A cognitive linguistics class blew my mind in college. The idea was that our language shapes our reality. More importantly, it also shaped our expectations—the mores, the etiquette that we have when heading into situations. Especially new situations. That words—the choice of the words that we choose—can subtly affect our choices and actions. For example, a RESTAURANT frame suggests that we go inside, a table is presented, we sit down and are given menus, the server returns and takes the order, the server gives the order to the kitchen, the kitchen prepares, the server presents the food, and then we eat and pay with cash or credit card, then the server takes away the dishes. That’s what it suggests.

I wrote an essay about the meaning of a friend and quite easily received an A.

Frames. I got the concept easily. Not all the students grasped the concept and struggled. I never knew why, because I understood almost so intuitively, so well. Everything that we did in the class was like I had done it all my life. The breaking of phrases, prose, and language structure.

And lately, I realized why. I naturally have a tough time with gray areas. Everything has rules and order. The thing that I struggle with every day is that I live within frames. That I am comfortable when I can predict how things will be like. But then with a new situation, I welcome it of course, but it’s almost all at once frightening. Especially when there are experienced people around me. I will dodge and avoid. I will research so thoroughly. If there is a restaurant that breaks the frame—perhaps paying happens first or that we need to get our menus on our own in a far off location, I struggle and feel uncomfortable—did I do it right? did I look like a fool? I remind myself that everybody probably struggles but the knot is uncomfortable.

We were in a casual eatery today. Well technically speaking not even a restaurant, but a place that flaunted high quality cheeses, wine, beer, and several dishes that leveraged cheese. Entering, I wasn’t quite sure and had avoided the venue for a long time thinking that it was a place that was about wine and beer and cheese. But then I thought it was a table service type restaurant. Was I supposed to pay first or find a table on my own? Is it expected that I should be paying for my entire table? Would it be strange if split order separate and unequal dishes? So of course, these questions unsettled me and panic rose up as I stared at the menu neatly written in chalk.

This anxiety lasted for at least seven minutes while I squeaked out my order. In the end, I did what I wanted to do, enjoyed my cheese, and breathed a sigh of relief that now I knew how this eatery would work. And now I was experienced.

I never used the cognitive linguistics again though. Except to impress people that there are some languages that don’t have the color purple and languages that use absolute positioning (north, south, west, east) for directions rather than relative positioning (right, left, ahead, behind) and how their minds…their very minds are so different.

Yesterday during fourth of July, we drove through Chinatown and it was glorious.

A firework bursted in front of us, splashing it sudden blue, red, and yellow sparks between the Chinatown facade. Bursting into millions of colors. Another firework squealed and set off sparks. The tires silently rolled over the remainders of paper with the moonroof open. The glee of observers seemed to touch me, but I grimaced slightly, wondering if the ashes would fall in and my eyes would be injured. A group of Asian males scattered to the sidewalks letting the cars pass through, running over the tattered cardboard on the ground, the remnants of a recently set firework.

Deja vu of moments in Pittsburgh passed through my chest, reminding me of how fireworks is legal there. But definitely not here in California.

Suddenly as we made a right turn, a voice yelled, “Po po! Five oh!”

Blue and red lights now flashed without the beating pows of a firework. It screeched behind us up the hill.

Then moments later when we craned our neck toward the street, it was empty and silent once more in the dark storefronts of San Francisco chinatown.

What if?

Now I was skeptical when I first heard about Soylent. I read the blog awhile ago intrigued more about someone who decided to use their own body as an experiment, since he was so “tired” of having to fill himself with food.

Having interviewed ice cream shops across the world, I have learned and confirmed that food brings people together. Everyone eats. I had wondered how life would be like if food was just a secondary need…or even the bottom need. That hunger didn’t exist. Would we be robots? Would we even be human? Could I even be that person?

And why would they ever name a product Soylent? Especially after the film where a crying Charlton Heston wails in agony after he discovers the truth about Soylent Green?

And yet.

Do people even care about the name? Or do they even know about the movie, besides its witty punchline? Or do the potential users are as oblivious and think it has soy!

A few weeks ago, I attended a startup meetup that happened to go to crowdtilt—the platform that helped fund the first round of Soylent. And there with the abundance of packets, I got one packet to experiment.

And so being the people we are, Chris and I hosted a Soylent party where we pour shots of Soylent. We took the powder in one packet—usually made for an individual’s three servings in one day, mixed it with water and ice cubes, and finally dousing the oil into the mixture. Then pressing the liquidfy, it spun into a plain cream-colored mess.

First, just the plain version. Then second, a banana mixed with soylent. Then third, drinking chocolate mixed with soylent. Then fourth, two bananas and drinking chocolate mixed with soylent. The final variation was the best, smoothing out the grit and taking away the nastiness of it all.

I didn’t feel full. Quite naturally, I only felt slightly bloated (perhaps from other things that I stuffed down my stomach.) There are days that I barely eat, especially when I am not at an office. I nibble on snacks, drink water, and fall asleep with an emptiness. But at least twice a week, I splurge. I find my favorite cuisine and order the best dishes—often full of protein and carbs…and the most that I would probably eat that week. Then it starts again. So wouldn’t it be better (and healthier) if I did have Soylent?