While many of the buildings on the Upper West and Upper East Side are old and pre-war, many high-rises have been coming up in the last couple decades since as we can all see, New York is a very tall and concrete jungle. Many of the buildings are marked as “luxury” when you look up their names in Google Maps, or when you see signs outside their front entrances. However, I would argue that the term “luxury” in front of “apartments” is used a bit too loosely, and it’s pretty frustrating when you’re actually looking for a good-amenities building.

Today, I walked into a “luxury apartment” complex just two blocks over from where we live now. I asked the doorman if there would be any availability, and he gave me their website name and the name of the leasing agent. I went online to look at their available units, and the apartment layouts were horrendous: with one unit, when you enter the apartment, you’re literally entering the kitchen. Another one was a two-bed/one-bath apartment; if you’re going to be a luxury building and you have two people living in an apartment, shouldn’t they both get their own bathroom at least to pay the insane amount of rent you want out of them? One of the last units I looked at had a kitchen that was literally a corner of a room, and it looked like the people designing the place just forgot to add a kitchen to the unit and slapped it on at last minute. Did I mention the photos of the gym made it look like a dungeon?

Apartment hunting is never fun, even for people with fatter wallets.

Are the worst. Where could it possibly get worse in real estate than in New York in this country?

We went to take a look at a few apartments in Lincoln Square and Columbus Circle, and I really did not like one of the leasing agents at all. One of them I hadn’t even interacted with, as I communicated with her partner, but she didn’t even want to come down to the lobby to see me unless I specified a budget. “Well, you need to tell me what your budget is.” “In New York, nothing can be perfect. You have to pick and choose. Closet space or natural light? Big kitchen or big living room? What’s it gonna be?” “The reason I keep asking about budget is that I really don’t want to waste your time or mine. Sometimes, I get people coming in and they ask, ‘Well, I’m looking for a one-bedroom for $3,500/month, so what do you have to show me?’, and I have to say I have nothing because our prices are much higher than that.” These are all the annoying, pushy things you hear when you’re looking for a new apartment in the metropolis that is Manhattan.

We even were told of a full-floor penthouse in a building in Lincoln Square that was $45,000 per month in rent. At that point, why would people just not buy? I guess once you’re talking about rent in the five-figures, money probably doesn’t mean much to you at all.

There are so many new “problems” in society now with the emergence and prominence of social media. Who do you “friend,” and who do you keep as “friends” even when you’re no longer friends in real life or acquainted via work? (For the record, there’s a difference between “being friends on Facebook” vs. “being friends in real life,” and sadly in everyday conversation, we actually have to clarify that with people we speak with. Why do we feel a need to “stay connected” via Facebook or Instagram even when we have zero intention to ever speak with or see former colleagues or classmates or friends ever again? I see people watching my Instagram stories every single time I post, but I know we’ll never interact one on one ever again. So why are they so nosy about my life, anyway?

I actually have unfriended people almost every year. Sometimes, it’s been in waves. Other times, I see some stupid, obnoxious, or ignorant as hell post they put on Facebook, and I think, “I’m still connected to this person, really?” And I’m sure people have felt that way about me, too. I don’t care. It’s not always personal. It’s that as you get older, you realize that the circle of people you care about gets smaller and smaller, and you know your time on earth is running out, so why not just focus on the people you really care about instead of thinking about all the nobodies you don’t care about? I’ve unfriended people who have actually tried to RE-ADD me as a friend within the same day or two, as though they had some add-on monitoring turned on that alerted them to when and who attempted to un-friend them. Why are people so desperate to stay connected to people they don’t care about? Is it because they have no lives of their own that they feel compelled to keep track of where their lives are in relation to others they don’t care at all about?

I was planning to be out and about today, but it was raining quite hard with a lot of thunder, so I ended up staying in. It’s been a week of introspection for me, a lot of reflecting on the last several years, if not the almost nine years I’ve been in New York City. I suppose this is normal every time you reach a pivotal point in your life, whether it’s about a new life circumstance change like marriage, a move, or a new job. You never know what’s going to happen next, but while you are waiting for that “next thing” to begin, you think about how far you’ve come that’s led you to this point.

I noted yesterday how sad this last job made me because it would always be tied to my brother’s death, and today, I thought about how everything that happens to me now, I’ll never be able to share with him. It’s been nearly four years since I lost him. That’s four years of never sharing, of never hearing his voice or seeing his face. I wonder how he would have reacted. I can imagine him asking me ten million questions about why this last job wasn’t amazing or didn’t meet my expectations. I can also imagine him thinking the new benefits package is borderline excessive. But I can also imagine how proud he’d be for me. I only wish he could have had some of that pride for himself.

But these are the moments, the pivotal and happy moments, when I think of him and really miss him. I miss my Ed. I wish he were still here in a happier and healthy form.

I hate to say this, but as hard as it is to believe, our mother is far calmer now than she had ever been when Ed was around. Even when she’s at her worst these days, she’s never as crazed or out of control the way she was when Ed was here. It’s like he was a constant physical reminder to her that she wasn’t perfect, that she didn’t do enough for him. I know she thinks about him constantly through the day now even with him gone. But she doesn’t have anything or anyone staring her in the face anymore.

I told her about the new job. She kept glowing, saying how proud she was of me. “You’re all I have now,” she said. “I have to be proud. I only have one daughter… I had two children, and one came out wrong, but one came out very well.”

Ouch.

When I resigned from my last job, my manager’s manager pulled me into a conference room privately to convince me to stay. They wanted to make me a counter offer (these are pretty much always failures; DO NOT EVER TAKE A COUNTER OFFER. DON’T BE WEAK). My then manager had relocated to the LA office, so he was “managing” me remotely. To be quite blunt, he was never really a manager, more just someone who checked in with me on status of action items and to make sure everything was on track; I learned zilch from him. He could barely stick up for himself, much less the rest of his small team. The moment I realized I needed to look for a new job was when a superior on the team, new, German, and working remotely, attacked him during a team call (he hated my boss and thought he was one of the most incompetent people he’d ever met… and made this painfully obvious in pretty much every encounter), and I actually had to stand up for my boss and respond (to which the German responded quite well, might I say). But my manager’s manager was another story; she was fierce, articulate, shamelessly honest and was viewed by many people at the company as “ruthless and only in it for herself.” It’s hard for me to say this about her because there’s a glass ceiling for women in every industry, and although I didn’t agree with some of the things she said and did, I admired the fact that she had elevated herself to the level she was at in spite of the invisible but obvious gender barriers…. not to mention she’s a person of color. As women, we feel like we need to “act like a man” to succeed, to be more competitive and cut throat, so could I really blame her?

What she said to me in that room that day I resigned — I will remember forever. “Leaving here will be the biggest mistake of your career,” she admonished me. “You will regret leaving.” Fear is what was in her voice, even if she wouldn’t admit it herself. She didn’t want to lose an integral member of this team, one she actually respected and thought highly of. “We need strong women like you at this company,” she insisted. “We would not be sitting in this room right now if I didn’t care about you or wanted you to stay.” Well, no one ever said that to me before I said I was leaving, so thanks for the compliment.

So here I am, just over three and a half years later, about to begin a new role at another technology company. And I am remembering these words she spoke to me. I was so desperate to leave the agency world then that I took the first and only job offer I got from a tech startup; everyone else wanted to pigeon-hole me and make me consider more agency roles. I don’t regret leaving. I didn’t leave to go to the best company in the world, nor did I go to a company where I would stay until we would leave New York the way I naively imagined. The last three years career-wise have been eye-opening, excruciating, painful, angry, complacent, many times boring, and uninspiring. Many moments, I wondered to myself if I even belonged in the tech industry; maybe I just wasn’t thick-skinned enough. For the first time in my young career, I was extremely cognizant of my gender, my race, my culture, and not in a good way. For the first time, I saw extremely unethical behavior by people considered to be my superiors, and I was expected to turn a blind eye to it. But it’s all over now. I was able to live my life outside of work the way I wanted, working remotely, traveling the country and world, and getting engaged and married during that time even though I had colleagues who didn’t genuinely care about my life events and showed superficial interest. This was a stepping stone in my career, a gateway to better opportunities, and a rude awakening to me that I need to stick up for myself more and be more fierce. There were things I could have done differently, too. I don’t have regrets in general. But if I did have one regret career wise, it was that I didn’t leave this place sooner, as I had interviewed during multiple periods over the last 3.5 years and just stopped out of complacency and the fact they kept giving me raises and promotions. Complacency gets the best of us.

I won’t be as naive again, though. I won’t think that this new opportunity is going to be the greatest thing since sliced brioche, that I’ll be at this company forever, and or we’ll ride into the sunset together. I am optimistic about it because of everyone I met and how authentic everyone seemed, but I won’t X out the potential bad things that always have the potential of happening. It’s okay to be realistically optimistic. I just want to move forward and live my life.

This late afternoon, I wandered around the Upper East Side at potential new buildings where we could be moving to this summer. Chris is set on our moving, and he wants it to be a building with a doorman and multiple amenities. One of the things he is looking for are floor-to-ceiling windows (yep, we want that life), and so I spent a lot of time looking up at the tall buildings to see what their windows looked like.

Something I didn’t expect to encounter when looking at buildings and speaking with doormen was the horribly rude and inhuman treatment of some of the doormen by the entitled and overly privileged residents. At the front of one building, I witnessed a woman, just back from shopping at Whole Foods, with multiple paper grocery bags in her hands. When she reached the doorman standing at the door, this woman immediately shoved the grocery bags into the man’s stomach and asked, “So, did you see my kids? Did you tell them what I asked you to tell them?” And as she’s speaking, she’s already walking away from him into the building. Is that the treatment this particular doorman is used to? He seemed completely unfazed, as though this was normal behavior on this rude woman’s part, and responded as though everything were “normal.” This is all “normal” to them? He’s just the one who serves who can be treated like garbage and as though he’s not even human, and she’s the entitled rich witch who’s probably treated those in the service industry like this all her life and doesn’t realize she’s not even treating this man like a human being (nor does she probably care)?

It was so shocking. I never even knew people lived in buildings with doormen until I moved to New York. To see the over-privileged and their lack of regard for other people of other social status is so sickening to me.

Tonight, we went out to Jersey to see Trevor Noah perform live at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. It was a bleak, rainy, and windy day, so although Chris arrived pretty much soaking (I had my trusty long rain coat, rain boots, and umbrella), we both enjoyed the show a lot.

It’s hard not to enjoy a comedy show when the comedian is coming from South Africa to the U.S. and has a completely different perspective on everything from government to racism to “what is considered a normal experience.” He joked about the time when he first moved to the U.S., specifically to Los Angeles, and his roommate, who is American, asked him if he wanted to go out to get tacos. Trevor had no idea what tacos were, and his roommate was in shock, so much in shock that he repeatedly kept asking him, “You’ve never had a taco? You seriously have never, ever had a taco?” No, dude, he hadn’t. “You seriously cannot understand when other people have had a different life experience than you?” Trevor asked us, half serious and half joking. I get what he means, though, and I think we’re all at least a little guilty of that.

Another point he made during the show that resonated with me was when he expressed frustration at how people on the right like to say, “I don’t see color,” when it comes to different people’s skin color and ethnicity. I always wanted to grind my teeth when I’d see or hear that in the news by people on Fox News or young blonde conservatives like Tomi Lahren. “So, you don’t see colors when you reach the traffic light?” he responded. But the main point really was this: “There’s nothing wrong with seeing color. It’s about how you treat color.”

Well, there it is.

Tonight, we had dinner with one of Chris’s friends, who is also his colleague and someone who attended our wedding. On average in the last three years, although the two of them get along very well, I’ve only seen him three times, so on average once every year. Last year, it was at our wedding! So I was excited to see him again and be exposed to his more pronounced Australian accent (I guess everyone’s Australian accent is more pronounced than Chris’s at this point…), as well as to his many opinions and recent life developments.

Chris’s friend has a lot in common with Chris; both are Australian who have relocated to the U.S. for work; both are extremely ambitious and confident, have intense work travel schedules that take them both all over the world, and have a huge passion for technology; both are also extremely opinionated, political, and charismatic; they both love a heated (but intellectually stimulating) debate. It doesn’t happen very often, but very occasionally in life you meet those people who, when they engage with you, they make constant eye contact with you and draw you into their conversation seamlessly, and make it feel as though you’re the most important person in the room. This friend is one of those people. He’s like Barack Obama in that way based on what I’ve read about how engaging our former and missed president is.

We had dinner at a cozy restaurant in West Village, followed by a very long night cap at a nearby watering hole that served $16 cocktails flecked with gold, leaving real gold flakes on all our lips by the end of the night. Chris’s friend brought a female friend along, and the four of us talked about everything from cooking to travel to politics to more politics to a relationship breaking down to theater and even dogs. Topics were on everything from “how do we define ‘snobby’ when we are discussing food?” to “what does it actually mean to be ‘racist’?” to “am I really being an asshole by doing X action?” What always gets me excited when I am around people like this friend is that he never shies away from the controversial or the offensive; again, he’s like Chris in that way. Except when he and Chris are in the same room, they will battle it out, and it’s so stimulating for me to watch the debate and occasionally interject and see others, like our new friend at the table, participate, as well. I rarely get these meals where extremely smart and opinionated people put their personal feelings aside and debate for the sake of pushing intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness and don’t feel like they’re going to make the other side cry or even cry themselves. These conversations are really important to have. It helps with understanding better those we care about, and it allows us an opportunity to explore others’ opinions, which in most of these cases, are really just extensions or stretches of what we already think (because frankly, none of us here are conservative or rooting for the end of women’s birth control or right to choose, or for the breakdown of Meals on Wheels, and none of us believe that “color” doesn’t exist). It did get to a point in the night where our new friend said she had to take a break from even listening to the debate because “sometimes some nights, you just want to go out and have fun and enjoy yourself, and not discuss politics or question whether we’re really all racist bitches!”  It’s a fair point, but it’s sad when there’s zero nights when you and your friends can have that opportunity to debate and be provocative and push buttons. If you never expose your vulnerable side, you will never truly know another person. And in turn s/he will never know you.

It was a rich and fulfilling evening.

After his performance last night, Ronny stuck around and greeted guests to thank them for coming. The venue was quite small, so it was easy to approach him and chat for a bit. I’m always so surprised when I find that people who perform for a living in front of crowds of hundreds or thousands of people are shy in real life. They’re happy to have millions of eyeballs watch and critique their every word, but when one-on-one time comes, they almost clam up. That’s kind of how Ronny was. I got behind another couple to say hi to him while Chris was paying the tab, and he seemed almost embarrassed that I wanted to talk him to him beyond just saying thank you. The more questions I asked and the more I wanted to engage with him on everything from his time in Australia to Malaysian food outside of Malaysia and Singapore, he seemed more and more awkward. It was kind of cute. There’s no way I’d ever be able to do what he does for a living; it’s even more exciting that he’s an Asian comedian in a white/black dominated comedy world.

We’re all biased. We all have our self interests, the things that make us feel self-righteous. We all judge regardless of what we say. But what always throws me off is when people are so marred by their own biases and disgust for humankind that they cannot see the positives in the world.

We were at drinks late tonight with two of our friends, and one of them goes off politically about welfare like unemployment insurance, educational funds for army veterans, and Medicare. Basically, the gist is that he is implying we’re all naive to think that these are truly “benefits.” “Do you really think that the government provides all of these things to us to really ‘benefit’ us? They do it because people protested and revolted and demanded this stuff, otherwise they’d burn everything down and kill others!”

Well, no one said that people never protested to demand their rights. Hello, Civil Rights Movement and women in the late 1800s and early 1900s demanding their right to vote, which was denied to them merely because of their vaginas. After visiting the Civil Rights National Museum twice, I realized that JFK probably gets far more credit for being supportive of civil rights and black people in general than what he really deserves; it was purely political, unlike what they taught us in school. JFK was never going to participate in any “Black Lives Matter” type protest for sure. But at the end of the day, the origin or the reason for these laws or benefits is irrelevant to what positive benefits they provided to people then and now. Was my friend going to reject or deny taking his unemployment insurance when he was between jobs, or was my mother, who looks at the world just like he does and thinks “the government doesn’t give a damn about anyone,” NOT going to take advantage of Medicare and her monthly social security payments? Of course not.

It’s always fun to see people enjoy their “welfare” benefits but complain that the government “doesn’t give a shit” about anyone. Maybe they don’t really care about you, but you still get things from them. Don’t be the person who blindly and happily takes but doesn’t want to give a single thing in return, even if what you are “giving” is merely a little credit or one kind word.