My cousin’s cousin is in town again this week from Montreal, so I’m meeting him for dinner on Wednesday night before Chris and I leave for Banff and Calgary. He was interested in eating at a certain restaurant downtown, but I immediately vetoed it when I saw the high number of reviews for the mediocre ratings on Yelp, and then the real kicker came: when I saw they only take cash or AmEx. American Express is the only option for credit cards — really? Who the hell does this place think it is?

Last week for the first time, I ate at a restaurant that only accepted credit cards. I get that — that completely makes sense given that fewer people today carry wads of cash with them, and it protects businesses from theft. But to only accept an expensive credit card like American Express is just ridiculous and unacceptable to me. There are endless restaurants in this city to try, and we’re definitely not missing out on anything by not going there.

Today, we invited two of my friends over (who are a couple) for brunch with us. I made a spread that I am quite proud of, and we ate, drank, and caught up on all things travel, moving, and house hunting related. They’re actually looking to purchase an apartment in Astoria in the next year and had just come from an open house en route to our place.

Because Chris and I have always looked at New York as a temporary home, it’s always interesting to hear about others’ desires to stay here long-term, especially in the city and not stereotypically leaving for the suburbs. I told Chris that my guy friend always said he had the desire to move to California at least short term, but long term, he didn’t feel comfortable being so far away from his parents.

“That is like the opposite of you,” Chris remarks.

“Yeah, that’s kind of true,” I responded.

These comparisons always make me hear stupid voices in my head, telling me that maybe I don’t love my parents as much as the kids who have strong desires to stay and live closer (or even WITH) their parents. I’ve been told that, either directly or indirectly, many, many times over the course of my now 12 years away from home. I think the argument is terrible, though, and I don’t just say that out of defensiveness. Kids are meant to “leave the nest” and pursue their own lives and not be dependent on their parents, whether that is emotionally, physically (eh?), or financially. Everyone’s desires and comfort levels will always be different, and maybe they change as time goes on, but I’m 100 percent comfortable being across the country from my parents. And I think they’ve gotten used to it as time has gone on. It’s really for the benefit of both sides to have space.

After almost exactly four years, Chris and I went back to have dinner at Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village this evening. The funny thing was that although we knew the last time we were here was in August 2012, we didn’t realize that it was actually August 6, 2012, when we went, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. The place is exactly the same: the same New Yorker attitude type service (they’re polite, but not overly so, and very much to the point), the same old-school decor, and the same menu… just prices that are considerably higher than they were the last time we came. The last time we came, my friend Rebecca was here with us, and this was what we considered her last fancy “going away” meal in New York before leaving the U.S. for a temporary stint in Singapore. It’s crazy how much time has passed and how different our life circumstances are.

She’s no longer in Singapore and has moved back to San Francisco with her husband, and she’s actually coming back this September on a work trip and will be spending the weekend with us, going around the city and eating all the things she misses. It’s exciting to think of her coming back and reliving all of our food local travels through this city. She’s probably one of the only friends I have who is willing to go to almost any restaurant with me, regardless of cuisine type, price, or decor.

I’ve never considered myself a high maintenance person, but I suppose we all have our own biases about ourselves and really need to hear what other people think of us. I’ve never been the type of person to spend an hour or two doing my hair and makeup in the morning. I don’t really care about brand name bags or clothes, and in fact, I try to avoid clothes or bags with massive labels or brand names displayed on them. I don’t expect lavish gifts for birthdays, Christmases, or anniversaries. But it’s all relative, isn’t it, especially when you are comparing yourself with people around you.

Chris and his demands of floor-to-ceiling windows in our next rental in New York City make me think I’ve now married a total prima-donna, and my friend and former roommate agrees. However, she reminded me how she thought that I was high-maintenance when we were looking at rentals in our attempt to leave our Elmhurst apartment.

“How was I being high maintenance?” I asked her incredulously. “Because I actually wanted a mailbox and a working doorbell?”

She didn’t answer and laughed it off, but she’s happy not having either of those things since she lives in an apartment building now that has neither of those things.

There’s a massive New York City guide to apartment rentals that outlines all the things that tenants legally need to have. Clearly, she’s disregarded this, as have most of naive New Yorkers who move here from other parts of the country and world because they want a cheap deal. I mean, I’m the reason we got a working smoke and carbon monoxide detector in our last apartment, and a toilet that did not flood.

The older we get, the more we tend to want and expect of our living spaces. Part of this is influenced by perhaps an increase in salary (is that elitist to expect that the older you are, the more you make?), but the other part of it is just wanting to be comfortable. However, one thing remains in my case, and that is that a mailbox and working doorbell will always be on the “must have” list. If you want to call that “high maintenance,” then so be it.

There’s a guy at my gym who is just like the Joker from Batman. He has crazy messy hair that has grey and black streaks. He wears messy clothing, and he jumps rope like a mad man who has no method, no rhythm or rhyme. He has a stare that could probably burn other people’s eye sockets out, except he never makes eye contact with you or anyone; he just stares into space, in his own workout zone, intensely training for whatever it is he is strenuously working out for.

Joker has been annoying me recently because he loves to maniacally jump rope right in front of my favorite crosstrainer/elliptical. I’ve been running on treadmills for most of this week and usually do half time on one and then half time on the other, but this week, I haven’t even had the option to use the cross trainer because he’s been blocking it. He can’t even see when people are approaching him, and I’m terrified of getting slapped with his jump rope.

I told Bill, this guy I talk to at the gym, that the Joker scares me. “Did you ask him to move?” he asked me.

I hesitated. “No,” I said sheepishly.

“Yvonne, maybe you could just wave and say, ‘hey, can you please move?'” Bill said to me smiling.

I don’t really like to talk to people at the gym unless I absolutely have to. I’m hot, sweaty, have no makeup on, and I just want to do my workout, shower, and leave. Is it such a crime to just expect Joker to have common sense and do his jump rope routine far away from the machines that other clients would want to use?

Tonight, a friend and I went downtown to try a Filipino-fusion hole-in-the-wall that opened recently on Hudson Street. They have items on their menu like adobo chicken burrito, poke bowls with coconut rice, and ube ice cream. The food was really tasty and cheap, and is representative of the very recent popularity and influx of Filipino-influenced restaurants popping up all over the city.

When I was younger, I used to think “Asian fusion” was full of crap — it annoyed me that “fusion” restaurants were opening. My thought behind this was — each individual cuisine is already so good, so why try to mess it up by fusing any two or three together? I’ve changed my mind on this, though, especially if the restaurants do not claim to be authentic Chinese or “authentic” Filipino. If the food tastes good and works, why not? People of different cultures and races become friends, get married, and interact with one another, and so their cuisines would likewise do the same thing and have chances at being successful. Our opinions are always changing about everything.

Tonight, Chris and I went to see the off-off Broadway show Engagements on the Upper West Side. The show is about a woman who is constantly being invited to engagement parties seemingly every weekend in New England. Finally, her best friend gets engaged, and at their engagement party, she ends up sleeping with the best friend’s fiance in an attempt to end the engagement. A lot of chaos ensues after that, but the show conjures up a lot of marriage and engagement hoopla that I’ve either encountered or heard about through friends and colleagues.

What makes me sad when I think about weddings and marriage is the general stereotype that people who aren’t married by 30 or 35 are somehow inadequate in society. This idea was pretty much the premise of Sex and the City, and it obviously resonated with a lot of women. What if you spend your twenties 120 percent career driven or traveling the world to save lives — what time will you have to be in a committed relationship that has the promise of marriage at the end of it? Or what if you’ve just encountered a lot of bad luck and dated all the wrong guys or girls? Or what if you’ve just been in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or what if you “invested” five or ten years in a relationship and realized at the end that this guy was never really interested in marrying you, or equally bad, you’ve realized you don’t want to be with this guy “forever”?

We found out Chris’s cousin got engaged last week, and we jokingly said that we didn’t expect her now-fiance to have stuck around. Her reply, half-joke, half-real, was that she hadn’t thought of ever dating again and that she had no plan B if this 10-year-long relationship did not work out. I don’t hear about that many relationships that span from high school to late twenties. And even when I do, hearing about them ending happily in marriage is even rarer. So the “no plan B” comment she made — that’s a reality that ends up poorly for most people in this small segment of the population.

After doing some fruitless haggling on the phone with the general manager of the Crunch 38th street location gym, I decided to change locations and go to the location closer to work for the next year. It’s always sad when loyalty isn’t rewarded, and all they do is tell you that you are getting a great deal even when they’ve been raising your rates consistently over the last three years.

How many people do you think actually pay an entire year’s worth of gym membership up front? If I’m going to pay a higher rate and also pay up front, it better be the most glamorous gym I’ve ever stepped foot into. In this city, gym memberships are typically $90-200/month, excluding any ridiculous enrollment fees they make you pay. To get better deals, you can pay up front, but that also means bigger commissions up front to the sales person.

I can’t stand slimy sales people. While I could have sent him a nasty email to his follow up message letting him know he doesn’t know a single thing about sales, I simply let him know I would not be renewing at his location. Take that, loser.

This week has been dismal for multiple reasons for me. This week ends in the third anniversary of my brother’s passing. This week contained my first experience firing someone. And, it is the week of the Republican National Convention, where I heard so much fear and hatred among the Republican speakers and audience, with the exception of Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump’s speeches, that it honestly made me fear for the future.

I’ve never seen a series of speeches that tried to instill fear in the American public. Usually when I think of Republican or Democratic national conventions, I tend to think of them as a time to instill hope for the future, but these speeches were all about how we should fear for our lives and fear our neighbors and potential immigrant neighbors, load our guns, and defend and preserve what is America. I don’t know what America is if it’s a place that is hostile to neighbors, or thinks that it’s actually an easy feat to immigrate here. The “facts” that were discussed during this convention did not appear to me to be facts, but more lies that try to make people hate Hillary Clinton, who really doesn’t deserve that much hate and is frankly getting a lot of this hate because she’s a powerful woman, and make us hate each other more. It felt hurtful to me to watch these speeches, and it pained me to think of the future ahead of us with a potential leader who has no true game plan at all.

Bill Maher and Michael Moore are right. We’re a nation of people who are idiots who will likely be led by Trump because of our laziness to see the truth and cut through all of the Trump campaign’s bullshit.

What is really amazing is all the crap that the Trump presidential campaign has been able to get away with simply because it is Donald Trump running for president. Every time something stupid has been said or done by this campaign, I always wonder: what would America have said if Mitt Romney said that Mexicans were rapists? How would people have responded if Obama had said he wanted to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico? And if Michelle Obama had plagiarized Laura Bush’s speech from a major convention, the right would never have forgiven Michelle.

The plagiarism of the speech speaks to several things: Obviously, Melania Trump likes Michelle Obama; she admired this speech so much that she read it to her speech writers for her inspiration, leading to this plagiarism (gasp, looking to the other side for inspiration!). Melania can’t write, even though the Trump campaign insists she wrote the speech herself. And, this issue also raises the issue that I know will be raised by the further left in the media and by black people (and really, anyone of color who thinks deeply about this, including me): white people stealing the work of black people and claiming it as their own — an ongoing battle since forever.

Oh, dear. This is the world we are a part of.