I’ve been doing some thinking lately. I tend to spend too much time thinking sometimes. But lately, I’ve been thinking about people and relationships and communication. People are pretty interesting, especially in how they communicate and how they relate to other people. In my own experience, it can be pretty hard to find other people that you truly connect with. And then, even if you do, sometimes those people may not feel the same way.

Moving across the country has been an interesting experience for me. (And for Rickytoo, I’m sure.) We basically left behind almost all our friends and family and really only knew a handful of people here when we moved. Which has made for some interesting dynamics. Obviously, it changed the relationships we had with people back in Indiana. Ricky has no intention to purposefully go back to Indiana for a visit. I, on the other hand, usually go visit about every six months or so. I’ve been back three times since we moved here almost two years ago. But even with our lack of face time (not the iOS app), we still manage to maintain some pretty decent friendships with people back there. A few have even been out here to visit us (or happened to be passing through for other reasons and made the effort to connect, which we always appreciate). I still consider some people in Indiana to be my very best friends, and I make a concentrated effort to see those people when I am back for a visit. These are people that I have a pretty meaningful history with and have grown to basically see as family. I love these kind of people. They are the ones I can truly be myself with and don’t feel like I ever have to worry about losing them as friends, even if I am a few thousands miles away most of the time now.

There are other people in Indiana too, or in other states for that matter, that I may not see very often, but thanks to the popularity of social media nowadays, I have the ability to keep up with their lives and even see them every now and then, usually. I’m grateful for this, and it’s one of the best things I see about social media. These people may not be family or “family” but I’m grateful for their presence in my life and I like that I can count them as friends.

There are also new people that I am meeting. Ricky and I didn’t meet a lot of people right up front when we moved here, but it has happened gradually through various channels. This is what’s interesting to me. Some of the people back in Indiana I have known for years and it was through common interests or activities – school, church, work, etc. Well, most of those channels no longer exist for me. I don’t go to church or school anymore, and all of the people on my team at work are in other states. So the people I meet tend to be through more non-mainstream avenues. It also means they tend to be people that I have to make an effort to spend time with. What I mean by that is that I don’t see them on a regular basis like one would in the more mainstream channels I mentioned above. This makes for an interesting dynamic and is where that whole communication thing really comes in. Ricky and I have had different experiences with people that we’ve met out here. He’s pretty good about perpetuating contact with people and making an effort to spend time with them. Especially people that reciprocate. But you get different responses, which always make me wonder what people are thinking. Some people reciprocate and also seem to want to make the effort. Some people seem to want it at first, then for whatever reason their effort at contact seems to die down. (These people always tend to make me really curious, especially if they are people I felt like I connected with. I wonder why they seem to lose interest. I have to restrain myself from overanalyzing it and just accept that the connection might not have been what I thought.) Other people may not always be the best at making the effort to connect, but let you know in other ways that even though they may not be good at it, they do want to connect. (These people tend to be nice in that even though you may not see them all the time, you do know that they care and are almost always there when you reach out to them.)

We are all funny, fickle people. We change and adapt and grow. We also help each other and hurt each other. I, for one, have a tendency to let myself be affected a bit too much by other people’s actions, when really, those actions have way more to do with that person than me. What I hate is feeling like I don’t know why someone seems to have no interest in connecting with me, especially when I feel like I can easily connect with them. I don’t know why I try so hard to understand it or feel offended or hurt by it. It’s happened often enough that I know it’s really not about me, nor is it usually worth worrying about.

Things like this also affect how I react to other people. I meet people that I do connect with or people that I even admire or respect almost from the get-go, and I worry that I will somehow turn them off – that I will say or do something to make them quickly lose interest in me. If they do, I should know that it’s just not meant to be. But these types of people generally are the ones that I want to like me the most, because they are the people I respect and admire. But of course the only thing I can do is be myself. My messy self. And if they like me, they like me. If they don’t, they don’t.

I really have no conclusions about any of this. It’s all just observation as a result of way too much thinking. But sometimes it makes me kind of sad how precious little we ultimately all really think of each other. We are so wrapped up in our own lives or our own thoughts about ourselves that we give little thought to how we make those around us feel most of the time, or how we might be able to help them. It’s also a bit sad how little we open up to each other, how little we bare our souls. Ironically, doing that would likely be the way we would best connect… having someone understand us even more or love us in spite of those things that we didn’t even want to talk about. It’s oddly enough the things we hide that would likely bring us closer. Yet our fears tend to keep us from sharing our true selves.

Oh well. There’s always the internet to hide behind.

[Disclaimer: if you think this is about you, then yes. It is.]

If you’ve followed my blog for very long, you remember the whole Amy’s Baking Company fiasco. There was an episode of Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay where he supposedly did something he never does – he walked away. The episode went viral in a big way. So many haters came out of nowhere. So many people posted all kinds of bad things online based on what they saw on this TV show. I found it all pretty interesting, and it became a huge thing here in Scottsdale, where I live, and where Amy’s is located. It went so crazy that the restaurant closed for a while, but ended up scheduling a grand re-opening, which I had the opportunity to attend.

I and the group of friends I was with were some of the first people there the night of the grand re-opening. At first we were told not to post anything on social media that night, but after talking to Samy and letting him know that we weren’t there just to be haters, but that we would be fair and genuinely wanted to try the food and experience their restaurant, he said it was ok. So I tweeted about it and posted pictures of my food. Ricky tweeted about it. And the other couple with us posted on Yelp. And, well, we honestly had a good experience. We ordered drinks, appetizers, and meals, and we all split our food with each other. We even had pizza. The only thing we didn’t have were desserts, which was unfortunate because that is what Amy was rumored to do best.

It was an odd night. We were on TV for being there and talking to reporters afterwards. I had a reporter from the Associated Press tweet at me and want to talk to me on the phone about it. We were mentioned in the local and national news. Ricky and I got our 15 minutes of fame, I guess. And we got a lot of interesting and somewhat comical feedback about it. I blogged about it, but since I’ve switched my site over to a new platform you won’t see all the crazy comments that I got. But I am still archiving my old site, so definitely visit the post over there too. You won’t want to miss some of these comments. I have never gotten as much feedback on any other blog post on my site. I was accused of being a plant, paid to be there and say positive things about it, which cracked up all my friends that normally follow me on Twitter and read my blog, since they knew it wasn’t true. The whole situation was pretty wild. It’s crazy how nuts people online will get over a restaurant they’ve never been to and will likely never go to, all based on a reality TV show.

So that was a few months ago. Let’s fast forward to just a few weeks ago. I had friends in town visiting from Philadelphia who had seen the Kitchen Nightmares episode and all the aftermath, and they wanted to visit Amy’s for themselves. I was curious to see how Amy and Samy were doing also, so I met them there to hang out and actually get to try some of Amy’s desserts this time. And I have to report, the desserts are actually really good. The restaurant wasn’t busy when we were there, but Amy and Samy seemed to be in good spirits and gave us great food and good service. Lucky for them, the hoopla seems to have died down. My friends actually went back several times while they were in town because they loved the desserts so much. They also had a hummus appetizer, which they claimed was really good as well. (I think that was one of the appetizers we had at the grand re-opening, if I remember correctly, and I think I agree with them about how good it is.)

Fast forward even more to this past Friday night. The season premiere episode of Season 7 of Kitchen Nightmares, where they decide to make another visit to Amy’s Baking Company. Curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to watch this episode as well. Halfway into the episode, I was pretty disappointed since they had not really shown anything new. It was all a rehashing of the previous episode, plus a bit of “bonus footage” that they hadn’t shown the first time, all still along the same lines as that episode. They did send a reporter (not Gordon Ramsay) back to Amy’s to see how things were, but none of this was shown until the last 10 minutes of the episode. And it was pretty much just more of the same. You could tell that they egged Samy and Amy on to try to catch more of “the crazy” on video. But really, this whole episode was pointless. All it was was a rehashing of the same thing from last time. Are Amy and Samy crazy? They’re a little odd, sure. But having been to the restaurant more than once now… it’s a good place to eat. It’s not a place I visit often, obviously. But I’d go back again. The food was good, the desserts were good, and the service was good. And honestly, I think more highly of them than I do Kitchen Nightmares. Their season premiere “Return to Amy’s Baking Company” was a pretty crappy episode. It was weak and only done for ratings, because they knew people would be interested. But it was far from good TV. Try again, Kitchen Nightmares. And Amy and Samy, just keep doing what you’re doing. You might be a little wild and crazy, but you’re doing just fine.