My mind wanders a lot on the treadmill, and it sometimes wanders into great ideas. I’ve spent the last three years of my blogging existence wondering what topic will get me out of my daily grind and onto my blog more often. This morning, on mile 1.5 of my run, it finally hit me– the topic that gets me riled up during regular conversation, that turns a sentence into a speech, that keeps me clicking through news stories. A woman’s perspective.

During a routine haircut last week, I walked into a new salon– a small boutique of two stylists and a colorist. My stylist Jerry, and the store’s owner Ally carried up a constant conversation of snarky, amusing chatter. As I enjoyed the sound of my split ends being snipped away, I listened to the latest on celeb gossip and San Francisco happenings. Somewhere between RPatz and LiLo, Ally said something that, a week later, has sparked my women-centered epiphany. Referring to the Brangelina/Jennifer triangle Ally said, “You know Brad likes controlling women. Angelina’s all, ‘I know I saw you thinking about talking to that woman over there,’ and Jennifer’s totally ‘OK, whatever, I’m going to yoga’. She was too chill for him.” At the time, I chuckled and moved on. But today on the treadmill it made me wonder, is that really why Brad cheated? Do men really enjoy being “possessed”? Even so, why should women have to change their innate personality to have a faithful partner? Anyway, during this pointless internal conversation, I realized that what women think about interests me. And the issues that affect us– be it our relationships, our career prospects, or our spa appointments– are my treadmill thought fodder. So this is my new year’s bloggy resolution: blog more about women. I think you’ll find that I’ll be posting more.

"The Chocolate and Coffee Love Affair"

Oded Brenner is fighting for his new coffee shop, and he’s fighting for his customers– personally. Founder of Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man, and owner of 60 establishments worldwide, this restauranteur has not let his significant fame change the way he does business.

In September, my boyfriend and I filed a complaint on the website of Little Brown, a coffee shop on 85th St and Lexington Ave. We had been there a couple times and were disappointed with the service. Not really expecting a response, we sent some feedback through the website’s “Contact Us” link. An hour later I received an email and a text message directly from Oded Brenner apologizing profusely.

“Little Brown is my new baby,” he wrote. “A true feedback like you sent me makes me very upset!” Brenner invited us to re-experience Little Brown with him– on the house. So we agreed to meet him at the coffee shop. (Who turns down chocolate from the Bald Man?)

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Brenner’s story, I’ll catch you up: The chocolate pioneer learned his craft working with world-renowned pastry and chocolate experts throughout Europe. He took these newfound talents back to Israel and opened up his first chocolate shop in the mid-nineties. Since then, Brenner’s work has spread worldwide. And somehow this chocolate extraordinaire found time to read our complaint and respond personally. Being a Max Brenner enthusiast, I couldn’t help but giggle like a star-struck teenager.

But Brenner was far from a stereotypical star. Wearing checkered shorts and a casual button-down shirt, he was sitting on a stool when we walked in. He introduced himself and started us off with three chocolatey drinks and a few edibles as he talked about Little Brown, which opened this February. “I spend all my free time working on it,” he said. While we tasted Brenner’s freshly-baked creations, he watched us eagerly. Beaming after every positive response, he’d say, “It’s incredible!”

Though Brenner already owns 60 restaurants worldwide– including Max Brenners Chocolate by the Bald Man in Union Square–  he doesn’t want to use Max Brenner publicity to draw attention to his new endeavor. “It’s a different experience,” he says.  “Max Brenner is a place people come for a celebration, but I want people to come here for their coffee every morning.”

The goal is a casual, relaxed coffee shop. “It’s about the experience,” says Brenner. So even though Little Brown is located directly across the street from a Starbucks, he hopes that the retro decor, cool ambiance, and trendy baristas will draw in customers seeking a less corporate experience. And it seems that Brenner is a true embodiment of the cool, casual culture of his coffee shop. No work is below him. As we chatted he kept a close eye on the ebb and flow of customers, jumping up every once in a while to straighten chairs, clean off table tops, and make sure things were running smoothly.

I’ve seen Brenner several times since then. Little Brown became our regular Saturday morning treat, and “Oded” waves to us each time he’s there. The Bald Man is still ironing out the kinks in his new business, but the delightful chocolate concoctions will keep me coming back for more.

Your current location, the articles you read on HuffPost, updates on the club you got into, your relationship status as you break up, get back together, and break up again with your boyfriend– there was really nothing else left to share with your “friends”. But three NYU Stern graduates found one more category of information to share that says a lot about you: your browsing history.

Demetri Karagas, Paul Ratajczyk, and Steve Gutentag decided in April 2010 to create sitesimon, a web tool that allows you to share with your friends the sites you’re on (Originally named for it’s function, “sites i’m on,” the web application is actually pronounced “site simon”). Their goal– to facilitate a new level of communication between friends through passive sharing. “This is something that allows you to share what you’re doing or discovering,” says Karagas. “It’s about discovering the web in a new way.” The idea is, unlike sharing links on Twitter or Facebook, you can share what you’re looking at without thinking about it, thus allowing your friends to see web pages that you may not have deemed worthy of a tweet or status update.

About the Founders: Gutentag, Karagas, and Ratajczyk have not yet defined particular roles for themselves– they each contribute to a variety of tasks, from networking, to managing the budget, to coordinating with the programmer. “We call ourselves janitors a lot to remind ourselves we have to do everything, including cleaning up the messes we make” says Gutentag. The co-founders are the only equity-holding members of the sitesimon team since they are currently self-funded. They also have a contracted programmer, Justin Fargione.

How it Works: Mashable posted a great article about the start-up earlier today, but here’s a quick summary: you create an account on sitesimon.com, which has a visual set up similar to Facebook (to ease new users’ acclimatization). You can then download the browser add-on–available for Firefox, and since last week, also for Chrome– and start sharing!

Concerns & Solutions: For those users who just don’t want to risk accidentally broadcasting more personal surfing history– like that time you were on WebMD with some questionable symptoms– the sitesimon boys have come up with a few solutions. First and most simple is the manual share option, where instead of automatically sharing all browsing history, the tool only records pages you click to share. Second, sitesimon automatically blocks all websites with the prefix “https,” which indicates a secure network used by online banking sites or email hosts. And third, you have the option of adding certain websites to a list of blocked domains. For example, if you list Facebook.com, all of your Facebook stalking– whether it’s through pictures or hacking into your roommate’s Facebook account– will be hidden to your sitesimon followers. Finally, you can choose to turn automatic sharing on and off.

Despite the many options, the founders anticipated some hesitance from users. The site is currently in beta testing, so users who request access are able to explore the tool and provide feedback directly to the website. “Once they start to consciously think about what they’re looking at, they think ‘Oh this is kinda cool,’ and they get past that barrier and they start sharing everything,” says Gutentag. “We’ve seen that with the beta testers right now—a lot of them start off pretty slowly, and then after they start to use it, they just share everything.”

Growth & Updates: Sitesimon had a couple hundred users three weeks ago, but since last week’s release of the Chrome add-on, and the recent news coverage by Mashable, the number of active users has grown significantly. In the long run, the founders hope to implement innovative methods of revenue-generation like targeted ads and offers, or real-time coupons that correspond to your browsing history. Even sooner on the horizon are some new and exciting features to the website, two of which were added this week. First, they have created a point system to recognize the website’s “trailblazers,” according to Gutentag. Essentially users get points for being the first to visit a site that later goes viral. The second update is a new commenting system that is attached to pages as opposed to domains, so if you visit a page once and someone comments on it, when you visit it again a month later the comment will be brought up again.

Stay tuned for more updates on sitesimon and its founders!

Click here to request a beta invite code. Meanwhile, take a look at the sitesimon blog!

Update:

The boys of sitesimon presented Monday, January 10th at NY Tech Meetup. See Gutentag’s  presentation here.

Le Bernardin has been described by top critics as “nearly perfect,” “number one in the City,” and “the most influential seafood restaurant in America.” Opened in 1986, the restaurant immediately secured a four-star rating from New York Times critic Bryan Miller, and has maintained that rating since. To get a closer look at this infamous source of seafood innovation, I interviewed Alex Luppi, 27, who has worked as a bus boy and most recently a front waiter at Le Bernardin for the past two years.

A native of Sag Harbor, Luppi saw his father’s ups and downs as a restaurant owner from a young age. As he grew older, he realized that his vivid childhood memories of eating out and preparing meals had created in him a passion for the food industry. He worked at several places, including his father’s restaurant, before joining Le Bernardin.

“I used the avenue that had been created by my dad at arguably the best restaurant in New York,” says Luppi. Apparently Le Bernardin’s chef Eric Ripert frequented Luppi’s father’s Southampton restaurant,  so he offered Luppi the opportunity to interview for a position at Le Bernardin.

At traditional French restaurants, there are four positions amongst wait staff—in order, bus boy, back waiter, front waiter, and captain. After a long interview process, Luppi was offered a position as a bus boy, which was a demotion from his old job, but at a considerably more reputable restaurant. He accepted, and 14 months later, he was promoted to front waiter, skipping the position of back waiter altogether.

“The thing about Le Bernardin is, they only promote from within,” says Luppi. “So they hire front waiters but they don’t hire captains and they hire bus boys but they don’t hire back waiters.” Luppi’s promotion was fairly unprecedented, and he was warned to expect “ruffled feathers.”  But along with the pressure from his colleagues, Luppi also faced pressure from his new position. A change from the intense physical stress of busing, Luppi now had to experience the mental exhaustion of being a front waiter— learning to dynamically memorize the orders and courses of multiple tables simultaneously, and learning the management styles and expectations of the various captains.

“Some people think that we make like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars because they look at the check and they see how expensive it is,” he says. “The reason that it’s so expensive is it causes a lot of stress because of the extreme precision of what needs to get done.” For those of you who have not visited the restaurant—first of all, do it. It might cost you 4 paychecks of savings, but the culinary experience in itself is worth it. But more importantly, the service is like a dance—as Luppi points out, your water glass is never empty, your wine glass is refilled without your noticing, and the used plate from your just-finished course is whisked away just as you realize you no longer want it there. But this level of service requires perfect coordination and communication, which is understandably not without its share of mistakes.

However, at a four-star Michelin restaurant, there is unfortunately no margin for error, and mistakes are resolved quickly and ruthlessly. “There were points where I did something incorrectly and they just said, ‘All right, go home.’ It was very quick,” says Luppi. “You’re left in this ominous, like, ‘Oh my god, should I call? Will they call me? Should I go back for my shift tomorrow?’”

But the job also has it’s perks. “The think what I enjoy the most is the people who come there with a real bright-eyed, kid-at-Disney-World kind of enthusiasm,” says Luppi. “You can see they’re super excited to be there. You can see they’ve probably been saving paychecks for god knows how long and that’s the best.”

And while the average person may be overwhelmed or intimidated by the upscale atmosphere of Le Bernardin, Luppi offers some comforting insight. “People think that we’re judging them,  but honestly, the last thing on our mind is what we think about the people that are coming there,” says Luppi. “We’re really concerned about doing what we need to do correctly. There’s really no pretense.” Luppi says that in the last ten years, the “face of fine dining” has altered drastically—from the snobbish environment created by the stereotypical stone-faced Maitre ‘D, to a more relaxed atmosphere with a goal of making guests feel comfortable.

In fact, in this restaurant, Chef Ripert is not only known for actually being involved in the kitchen, but also for his accessibility to restaurant guests. “He comes out fairly often to do a round of the floor,” says Luppi. “He does the best he can, but he doesn’t take pictures in the dining room—he only takes pictures with people in the kitchen.”

Chef Ripert isn’t the only celeb in Le Bernardin. Luppi has seen—and served—a host of celebrities, including Woody Allen, Leonardo Dicaprio and Martin Scorsese, Mic Jagger, Sean Connery, Alicia Keyes, the Dalai Lama, and President Sarcozy. “I just met President Sarcozy– either two or three times. I’m not even sure how many times,” says Luppi.

Besides getting settled in my new job, I’ve spent the past couple weeks coming up with an idea and laying the groundwork for a new angle: Unreported New York. I am going to cover people who make New York City what it is– not the people who are constantly covered by the media, but the people working behind the scenes, whose stories are ignored or unnoticed. You’ll get fresh perspectives on the city that you may already know and love.

My first piece is an interview with a front-waiter at Le Bernadin. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, this three-star Michelin restaurant has been called the best seafood restaurant in America. Le Bernadin is widely known for Chef Eric Ripert’s legendary culinary creations and the wait staff’s impeccable service, which culminate to present a near-perfect dining experience.

I don’t want to give away too much, but I already have other interviews lined up with people working in various industries. I’m also planning a more drastic revamp for the new year, but more on that later.

Stay tuned for my next post!

Over the next 15 minutes, my roommate and I learned that the man was a paranoid schizophrenic in his mid-30s, with a previous “coke problem.” He was standing by his open window on the 26th floor, threatening to jump. He had called his ex-girlfriend– the woman in our room– to tell her what he was going to do.

Thankfully, the man did not jump. A little after 10:00 a.m., one of the police officers answered a call, said, “They got him,” and group immediately exited our room. As they walked out, the woman asked what would happen to her friend. According to the officer, he has been taken into custody.

First, I tried to find pepper spray. Turns out, no online purchase of pepper spray can be mailed to New York, because the state law has implemented restrictions on self-defense devices. Pepper spray can only be purchased from licensed firearms dealers or licensed pharmacies. (I also found out that posession of tazers or stun guns is entirely illegal). So I looked up a licensed pharmacy in Chelsea– the idea of going to a weapons dealer freaked me out– called the “New London Pharmacy.” When I got there, I found out it would cost me $45. After having seen pepper spray on sale for $12-$15 online, I was indignant at the thought of paying three times as much. So I left without the pepper spray.

My next step was a self-defense course. I checked out LifeBooker, Yelp, New York Magazine, and the cheapest deal I found was $65 per class for group self-defense courses. Sixty-five dollars. As an unemployed student with a negative net worth (for now at least), that falls just under my weekly budget.

So here I am, the typical, young, sidewalk-using,  summer dress-wearing, 5-feet-2-inch-tall New York City resident. And I’m defenseless. People create Web sites, like HollaBackNYC.com, the subways sport signs warning against underground harassment, and organizations conduct surveys of sexual harassment against women, and yet we have no official support. The knowledge of how to defend yourself is affordable only to the upper echelon of New York society, and even the law deters us by adding an extra step to buying protection. So where does that leave us?

Well, I’m going to John Jovino Gun Shop, a licensed fire arms dealer in Little Italy, and paying $25 for a can of pepper spray and some peace of mind. And the second I find employment, part of my first paycheck will go towards the fees for a self-defense course.

Here’s an interesting blog post I found on this topic!

I watched Sir Ken Robinson’s talk at TED today. If you have no clue who he is, that’s OK, because I didn’t either. He’s a prominent British author who specializes in innovation related to the education and development of human capital. Presenting an articulate and comprehensive analysis, Robinson talked about the need for a “learning revolution,” a complete reinvention of our education system. His main point: our view of success is linear when it needs to be organic. We expect that everyone goes to school and then to college, and anyone who wants anything else is crazy.

His talk hit close to home. I’ve been in school since I was two years old. And from then until my recent graduation, I have “excelled.” I have excelled at completing homework assignments, doing well on tests, and generally meeting most academic expectations. But through this 18-year-long process of meeting expectations created by others, I have forgotten how to create my own expectations. And this is precisely the problem with the school system. By providing a linear list of expectations for students K through 12– school, college, grad school– we have created a society of students who have always been told what comes next. And when it’s over, we don’t know what to do next.

We have lost the ability to look within ourselves for motivation and inspiration. We are afraid to step away from the conventional path that we have been taught to follow. And so, most of us end up sacrificing the search for our real passion in exchange for the security of a pre-determined path. And eventually, as Robinson says, we end up “tolerating” a job we’re good at but aren’t passionate about.

So I am going to set a new goal– to create my own expectations.

But after a celebratory week-long post-graduation trip in Europe, the adrenaline rush is wearing off and reality is catching up. I am no longer “an NYU student.” I have joined the ranks of the rest of America’s unemployed. I am officially unemployed.

It’s a short sentence, but those three words have completely changed my identity. For the four years I spent in New York, I was an NYU student. For four years I lived in a bubble of university life (albeit NYU University life, which differs significantly from your typical state-school campus bubble), pursuing good grades, an extensive university network, and hyper-involvement. But in the real world, the “well rounded college student” identity doesn’t mean much. Especially in New York City. Thousands of qualified, intelligent, well-connected graduates come to the City to compete for a handful of jobs. So now, my strong record is only a ticket to the race. Once I start running, the work I do and the identity I create will define my success.

No worries though. This unemployed city chick has a plan, a degree and a four-month sublease. So before reality hits me too hard, I’m hoping my plan will help me create a new identity as I learn to leave my old one behind.

Hundreds of people lined the temporary metal barriers set up along Third Avenue and all around Cooper Square and Astor Place. New York Police Department officers were standing everywhere– every 10 feet, a different cop directed pedestrians. I was passing by Saint Mark’s Place at about 11 a.m. when my cell phone rang, but the officer wouldn’t let me wait on the corner of the street to finish my conversation.

I asked an officer why people were lining the streets– was  Obama going to walk by? “No,” he said. He laughed at the prospect of these people catching a glimpse of our President. “They might see his car drive by, but they won’t know which one it is.” Surely enough, over the next half hour, black cars with flashing lights drove up and down Bowery. The crowds peeked over fences each time, hoping Obama would step out of one of the cars.

Among the crowds, two or three of the usual New York “crazies” held posters and yelled. One man called Obama Hitler, and another screamed about the Communist government. The Hitler guy waved a sign on a broom handle until an NYPD officer took away the broom handle. I overheard an officer say “If things get out of hand, don’t nobody want to get hit with that.” The guy resorted to holding the poster up with his hands.

At about 12:00, a fleet of NYPD motorcycles drove up Bowery to stop right by the entrance to Cooper Square. Unfortunately for the excited onlookers, it was a distraction– Obama snuck in through a white tent set up near the back entrance to Cooper Union.