It was a sad day today. I worked from home this afternoon so that I could be there to sell our kitchen island, bar stools, and microwave to a Wellesley alum who saw my furniture sale postings on our Wellesley Facebook NYC alumnae group. Even though I was happy to make progress on our move and getting rid of items we won’t need in the new apartment, I felt a little empty watching her boyfriend wheel out the kitchen island, and even more so when they managed to squeeze it into their small van. I’ve spent so many hours sitting on those bar stools and preparing food at that kitchen island. We have so many fond memories together, and now it’s gone. Now, it’s being carted off to an apartment another Wellesley alum is purchasing on West 96th Street.

I guess today, it’s more real that we’re moving because our kitchen island is gone. Now, I can think more about the future and the new kitchen in which I’ll be cooking and prepping food.

A lot of changes have happened at my company since I’ve started. A number of people have left, a few boomerangs have happened, and last week, the announcement of a new CEO came. The specific team I’m on has been growing quite quickly, and it’s been a really good feeling to know that I have a team where everyone seems passionate not just about their work and the company, but about taking care of each other. It’s such a different place for me to be from a work perspective — to feel like people genuinely, truly care not just about my outputs but about me.

Difficult conversations have come up in light of our new CEO. Our former CEO and co-founder discussed ensuring that they met with a diverse set of candidates that included women and people of color; if they never set this rule to begin with, they probably never would have even had a first round interview with someone who fit either category. And a result of this mention during the announcement was: how hard did we really look for someone who was a woman or non-white person? And what does white male privilege actually mean?

When I heard this conversation in our New York office this week, I couldn’t help but smile and suddenly feel really excited. It was obviously a very uncomfortable and awkward conversation, but the fact that it was even happening and people were willingly choosing to participate and admit their privileges was such a relief to me. I’ve been working full-time for over nine years now, and I’ve never had a moment of such pride and gratitude that I work where I work than I did today. It wasn’t even just this conversation that sparked it; it was the overall feeling in general of coming to work every day, having the good relationships I already have with so many of my colleagues across teams that I not only like but respect and think are truly smart and driven people, feeling like our company is actually trying to solve a real problem and that we’re really going somewhere and not being delusional about our future. It’s such a good feeling to finally have.

I had a long, two-hour chat with my colleague visiting from the Amsterdam office yesterday. She’s Chinese-American, originally from Queens, but has pretty much decided that she’s never leaving Amsterdam (or really, Europe) ever, and wants to live there for the rest of her life. She loves the high quality of life, the cleanliness, the affordability and relatively low cost of living, the relaxed attitude of the Dutch and all the expats she’s met there. And her husband, who is also American, feels the same way and wants to stay. She misses her family and friends here, but she says every time she comes back, she realizes how much her friends are changing, how different they are than her, especially in a time when her last good friend has had a child (she’s the only person in her friend group who hasn’t had a baby yet).

She told me how frustrated she gets each time she comes home at the American attitude around parenting and children, especially among her friend group, and how many of her own friends speak condescendingly to her because she “doesn’t know what it’s like” to have children, because otherwise she’d behave very differently. “It’s like Americans just don’t understand that you can actually have a life when you become a parent,” she said. “You can still travel and eat out and roam the streets. In Amsterdam, people are just so chill about babies and still have fun and have lives and don’t think their lives have to be all about their child. Here, people are just so high strung and think they have to give up everything for their child. The way it is in Amsterdam is just so much healthier.”

That’s so true. We really do think our lives end when we have children in the U.S. I can feel it myself. Things change a lot, though. I don’t want to be the type of person she complains about. We all still need our own sense of selves even after becoming a parent.

During my onboarding period, a number of people had said to me to never underestimate the power of a donut, a sandwich delivery, a lunch, a free meal — anything that feeds a customer is likely to make her happy, so just do it to get potential better results. I’ve had one customer who has been hard to get a hold of, but finally she was in town this week, and I offered to take her out to lunch. She was working at Chelsea Market, so I offered to take her out for lobster rolls. Someone who was once tight-lipped and guarded suddenly had f-bombs exploding out of her mouth and was spilling the beans about everything I asked her. This lunch meeting was turning out to be a success.

That lobster roll was really good, too. They said it was mayoed, but the mayonnaise was so light that I barely noticed it was there.

When I was little, I remember always hearing older people starting sentences and rants with, “when I was your age…” and “when I was young….” and then going on to make some statement about how much harder they worked, how much more well behaved they were, or how much less they expected of the world than my generation of “young people” did. It was annoying, and I rarely said anything in response to it. Arguing against it wasn’t going to get me anything, and trying to disprove them certainly wasn’t going to do any good. Older people always think they are right. That’s still the case now, and I’m 31 now.

But I can’t help but think that now sometimes of people five, ten, fifteen years younger than me. I was on a train with a large number of children from some summer program today, and I could not believe how loud they were. They couldn’t have been any older than eight or nine years in age. And the program leaders, adults who were likely around my age, were futilely telling them to quiet down. I could barely hear the thoughts in my own head, and I was counting down the minutes until I could finally exit that car.

When I used to go on field trips during school, our groups were always so freaking quiet in elementary and middle school. We were warned many times before leaving the school grounds that we represented our school, so don’t we want outsiders to respect us and our school by our good behavior? We’d line up in pairs with our designated buddy, or in single file lines, and be so quiet you’d barely even realize a bunch of kids were surrounding you on the Muni. There was either a lack of discipline in that school, in that program, or just a lack of care. If this is the way the average school or summer program is in New York, then that really is not something that makes me excited about the future of our children.

Today, we spent the afternoon at Chris’s mother’s cousin’s house in Hell’s Kitchen, where a number of other cousins were there. We were the youngest couple in the room. We caught up over delicious Turkish food, wine, and too many desserts, and everyone seemed quite jovial and genuinely interested in hearing what everyone else had to share. That’s the thing about all the Indians I’ve met; they’re always smiling, always happy, always enjoying. Why can’t my family be like that? When my family gets together and I am there, it’s as though I am just counting down the minutes after the event ends so that my parents can just gossip endlessly about all the stupid things that were said and done that irrationally pissed them off.

There’s the stereotype that Chris and his brother love to tell me, and that’s that every time Indians see Indians, they immediately start smiling. It’s like the default look on their faces when they see each other. It’s as though even though logically, we all know there are literally billions of Indians all over the freaking world, when we see Indians in a place that is not India, we all get excited and think, hey, there’s more of us! Yes! Is that indicative that Indians are just happy people? I once asked. They weren’t clear cut on how to answer that. Because all I have to say is, when Chinese people see other Chinese people, and when Vietnamese people see other Vietnamese people (not always as clear, especially with mixed people like me), they certainly do NOT get excited, and their initial thought is NOT to smile at the other person.

I was a little devastated at dinner last night when we found out that a friend of ours, someone we’ve only met less than two years ago but have hung out with regularly, announced that he may be leaving to California for good. He’s been in the midst of a job search for over seven months now, and nothing has panned out, mostly because he’s switching careers and industries, and hiring managers are rarely willing to take big chances on more senior roles. He and his wife were planning to move to California at some point in the future anyway, so he figured that if this job search doesn’t have any solid leads in the next month, he’s going to be packing up and leaving for good. And once he gets an offer, his wife would quit her job and join him out there.

It’s sad news to hear, but people’s lives have to go on. It’s just sad for us because they’re probably the only couple friend we spend time with regularly and really enjoy. They’re the only couple friend we have where when one person’s talking, the other three are actually engaged and listening. It’s the only couple friend we have where both of us like the other two as much as the other does. We rarely see them separately, as that’s just how our relationship has been, and it’s been really enjoyable and comforting to have them around because they’re just not the typical New Yorkers at all (and funny enough, neither of them is originally from New York) in that they love having people over at their house and just lounging around. If they do leave, I’ll really miss them. The world doesn’t revolve around me, but I really hope his search works out so that we can still enjoy his company locally.

I can count on one hand the number of banh xeo I’ve had that have been really good, and not just passable: San Jose, Orange County, Vietnam, St. Louis, and in Melbourne… Oh, wait, and at home, too, because I’ve mastered the recipe that Andrea Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American cookbook author I love, has made public. The few times I’ve tried ordering it in New York, whether it’s been in Queens or Manhattan, it’s been pretty terrible. The texture is soggy, there’s no coconut milk flavor, and there’s zero crunch. But tonight, at Madame Vo, a popular modern Vietnamese restaurant that has opened in the East Village, I actually sat there a little stunned when the beautifully plated banh xeo came to the table. As soon as the server set the dish down, I could smell the coconut scent wafting towards my nose. When I eyed it carefully, it was seared properly so the edges were crisp. You could see brown fry marks on it. And when I actually bit into it, as big-headed as it sounds, it almost tasted like what I’d produce at home. This place is pricey, but it’s also a keeper. It’s the only place in all of New York City that can produce a banh xeo I’d actually willingly pay for. And it’s comforting thing considering that it’s such a labor-intense dish to make.

In a city like New York, where people hire everything to do everything for them — everything from food and tampon delivery to laundry to shoe repairs to even sofa doctoring (yes, this exists), it’s very odd that with a task like moving that anyone you know will ever offer to help you. That sounds like a thing people do in other smaller, more homely cities, where you can actually rely on neighbors and trust them. In New York, surprisingly this time around for moving, two different friends have willingly offered to help, as one had a car and said it would be useful for us, and the other had, well, his physical size and power to help us. We declined both, but it’s so unusual to have even the offer. Even when I’ve heard of friends moving, it’s never even come into my head to offer to help pack or move. It’s one of the worst and most tedious tasks ever.

It’s still hard to believe that I’ve been living in this apartment for over five years now. I went from living in a massive, kitchen-renovated, and cockroach-infested apartment above two cheap and nosy Toisan landlords in Elmhurst to transitioning into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a co-op building on the Upper East Side, where no one even knew I moved in or existed other than Chris. It was an adjustment making do with the much down-sized kitchen space, but we made it work. Hundreds of delicious and laborious meals have come out of this kitchen, probably far more than the landlord would ever have imagined given the space constraints. The kitchen island/bench that Chris purchased for this place has had my presence standing in front of it, chopping vegetables and preparing different dishes for five years now. My favorite place in this apartment is right behind that bench. And oddly, even though I will be going into a far more beautiful, more spacious and much newer kitchen, I will miss this bench dearly. This bench and I have bonded. I’ve even cleaned parts of it that Chris never even thought needed cleaning. Sometimes, it’s the simplest things that you will miss. This is one of them for me. I hope whoever ends up buying it from us will appreciate it.