A friend of mine has been traveling the last week for a conference but wanted to meet up for lunch today, but he had a lot of meetings. So I offered to come to his neighborhood (Park Slope) to have lunch with him since I was more flexible today. Before I met him for lunch, I parked myself at a nearby cafe and enjoyed a latte while taking a work call and also doing some emails. I noticed that the back of the cafe had a pretty large outdoor seating/garden area that was partially covered and seemed like a pleasant place to catch up. When I met my friend and his wife at the Middle Eastern restaurant we planned to have lunch at, they also had a nice outdoor dining area in their backyard, so we requested to sit out there. As we chatted and ate, my friend got bitten by mosquitoes a couple times. Oddly enough, I was not bitten even once.

“I love these little cafes and restaurants with backyard seating!” I told my friends. “It’s always nice to eat outside when the weather is good.”

My friend, scratching his mosquito bites, told me that “outdoor seating” in Brooklyn is not as big of a perk as we want to think it is. He was told from other Brooklynites that it’s probably only very pleasant to dine outside in Brooklyn for about two months of the year. The rest of the time, it’s either too cold, or, in this case, there are so many mosquitoes that you will inevitably get bitten and be very itchy and unhappy after.

We like to romanticize all these living situations that we don’t have. And then when we get easy access to them, we realize that there is pretty much always a negative to every positive you can think of.