An old friend who I stopped speaking with last year suddenly e-mailed me an apology today. She said I was a true friend, and she said she was sorry that she got so upset with me after a senseless comment I made to her last year, which she took extreme offense to and overreacted about. As soon as I realized she was being hypersensitive and neurotic, I stopped talking to her and told her why. At that point in my life, I couldn’t handle having any more people in my life who I had to walk around egg shells to be around, or who were just extremely negative.

In a past version of myself, I might have obsessed over this e-mail and wondered why she sent it, what prompted her to write me, why she was even thinking about me after so much time had passed. But in the current version of me, I really felt little to nothing. I’ve stopped caring about things as much as I used to, especially things that are just insignificant or dramatic without reason. However, there is one point she made in her message that I read twice: “One of your greatest assets is that you are not superficial.” She said I was one of the most real people she’s ever met. We live in a world where we’re always wondering who’s actually authentic and who’s fake. My cynical (yet realistic) side thinks that most people are either fake or just not the type of people I want to be around, perhaps because their values in life so greatly clash with mine. But it’s comforting to know that someone who I am pretty much at odds with now admits that I’m authentic, and superficiality isn’t something I value at all.

Tonight, I had dinner with a college friend and her colleague, who are both in town for a work project for the next few days. I hadn’t seen her since last April, when I was in Phoenix with Chris and my parents to see the Grand Canyon. Then, she was supposedly happily married and planning to have a child. Today, she is divorced, single, and happier than ever.

It’s crazy how time flies. It really doesn’t feel like a year ago since I last saw her, and it’s hard to believe that in the time that has passed, she decided to not have a child, leave her husband, and get a new job. So many changes can happen in such a short time frame, and it’s hard to keep up with the why’s and how’s of the decisions that everyone in your life makes. I know in a nutshell what led to the dissolution of her marriage, but I’ll probably never get the opportunity to hear all the details. I guess that’s not a bad thing because maybe I don’t really want to know or shouldn’t really know. But then that makes me wonder: how do you really determine what you should know or should not know, and how do you draw the line, and with what people? You don’t want to seem like you are intruding or trying to invade someone’s privacy. As though it helps me at all personally to know the most intimate details, and I’m not going to be broadcasting it everywhere anytime soon. Why we are friends with people isn’t always as simple as people think it is.

Like many other New Yorkers who like to eat out, I am a huge fan of Danny Meyer. I have no idea what he looks like or what his personality is like, but I love the restaurants he has either started or been a part of. Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, and Eleven Madison Park are restaurants that I have had some of the best dining experiences in my life, so I was really excited to finally get a reservation at Maialino, his other well known and loved restaurant in the city. Everything we ordered tonight exceeded expectations along with a couple of surprises. When Chris ordered us a pork belly appetizer, It ended up coming to the table in the form of a pate mixed with duck and duck fat and was paired with these delicious little pickled cucumbers and apricot jam. The cocktails were artfully crafted and smooth, and surprisingly they were not as expensive as we thought they would be. We had some quick small talk with our waiter, and he laughed when he heard that the reason we came was because of Danny Meyer. It’s only in cities like New York where patrons would actually know or care about “celebrity chefs.”

I have a friend who is visiting New York this weekend who I will meet with tomorrow, and since she’s only been to New York a handful of times, she looks at New York as the city “that has everything” in terms of food and cuisine. And she’s right. As New Yorkers, we take for granted the variety and quality we have in this city. Sometimes, I can feel myself getting complacent when I’m deciding what to eat next when it comes to restaurants. Shame on me (to be fair, it’s mainly because we need to pick a restaurant near the theater district, which is notorious for catering towards tourists). It will be sad one day to finally leave it, but as long as we are here, I want to relish it as much as possible.

For the longest time for breakfast in the last two years during the weekdays, I was primarily eating fruit. Most of the time, it was grapefruit or an orange, and other times a banana. I realized I couldn’t eat a grapefruit every morning for breakfast after I started getting tooth sensitivity in the back of my mouth. It’s sad when you think you are doing good things for yourself, and then you realize that these “good things” are actually causing other parts of you (your teeth!) harm by using their evil little acids to eat away at your tooth enamel.

I started deliberately incorporating protein into my breakfast recently after being told by a trainer that I’m not getting enough, so occasionally, I will have yogurt or oatmeal on work day breakfasts now. And this week, I discovered the joy that is Chobani 2 percent Greek yogurt with passion fruit on the bottom. I’ve never, ever seen real passion fruit in yogurt before, so this was (sadly) a huge highlight of my work day. And it didn’t taste artificial at all; it tasted pure and sweet and slightly sour the way it should. It even had the passion fruit seeds in it. I proceeded to hide the one remaining passion fruit yogurt cup in the fridge and then ask our office manager to buy more for future weeks.

Sometimes, it’s the little things during the work day that make things all better.