Tonight, we had dinner with our couple friend we just met late last year during my friend’s nonprofit food tour. In a week, they are moving to Switzerland for six months for one of their job’s rotations. They are both very outgoing and extroverted, and every single lunch and dinner for their last two weeks in New York City would be spent with some combination of friends, colleagues, and former colleagues. They were both excited about it when telling us, but the whole time I listened to them, I imagined myself feeling completely exhausted.

It made me think about what our last two weeks in New York will be like when we leave eventually. We don’t even have friends that could fill up a week’s worth of meals in this city, let alone two weeks. A lot of the “friends” we made were just people we spent time with at work, and once we left work (or the company altogether), they were out of our lives. I’m sure that when we leave, the last few weeks would be loaded with doing a lot of the touristy things we never got around to doing, loading up on all the theater we will be leaving behind, eating at restaurants we hadn’t yet tried but always wanted to, and perhaps the occasional meal with a friend who would be staying here. But I really think it would be far less people focused and far more New York City — I will miss you — focused.

Tonight, I organized a team dinner for all of the account and campaign managers who work on my clients, and I got a lot of push back from our finance team regarding the spend limit. I finally got a spend limit approved of over double the original amount I was given, and it was sad because the restaurant I chose is supposed to be a reasonably priced place.

For a party of at least eight, the family-style dining includes four appetizers, four mains, and a shared dessert plate. With two hours of unlimited house red and white wine, the price per person is $84 (before tax and tip). And that is supposed to be “cheap” by Manhattan standards. It just goes to show that the term “reasonably priced” is extremely, extremely relative.

I finally redeemed my Drybar gift certificate I got from my boss today since I’m going out with Chris and friends tonight to celebrate my birthday a day early. I walked into the Drybar on the Upper East Side this afternoon for my appointment and was greeted with glasses of mimosas, a large selection of gourmet cookies, and stacks and stacks of beauty and fashion magazines. The boutique was brightly lit, decked in white and yellow, and every woman sitting and waiting for an appointment seemed high strung and as though they were regulars at this spot. Clearly, I did not fit right in.

I got called in and my stylist asked me what brought me in. I told her I was new and had never done a blowout before, but that I’d like the Cosmo, the look from their limited menu that has loose curls. I told her my hair does not take curls well at all… so good luck. She washed and conditioned my hair, and proceeded to segment my hair out and clip, clip, clip it all up. And she began her blowing out and her curling. And I felt too much heat at my roots and so much on my hair that as the minutes went by, all I could think was, there is no way this could be healthy. But at the end, I was impressed with what she had done in such a short period of time. I had a head full of curls, and it actually looked good — I had volume, curls, and bounce. I also felt like a different person when I looked at myself in the mirror. This is why this place is addictive, I thought as I walked out. Women love being treated and pampered, and we all seem to love the idea of being transformed into gorgeous specimens.

But I have too much prudence to make this a regular fix for myself. It’s not in me to get too obsessive about my hair and other aspects of my physical appearance, and I’ll never be a fashionista who makes what she wears a top priority in her life. Food and travel are so much bigger and more exciting.

I met with my mentee in the high school mentoring program I participate in tonight. I felt bad because I haven’t been able to make a single session for the last four months because I’ve been out of town every single time a meeting got scheduled. I’d always apologize in my emails to my mentee, and in each email that approached the next session, she’d always say that she hoped to see me then and that she missed me. It always made me feel like a negligent mentor.

So, I finally see her after not seeing her since last May, and what has happened to her since then? Not only has she curled her eyelashes and put on eye shadow and lipstick, but she’s even curling her hair now and trying to wear heels! She’s still growing into her body and is very awkward when she moves. I’m sure that was like me when I tried to wear heels and stand up tall when I was around her age. I told her she looked really cute with her hair, and she gave me a disgusted look and said it looked terrible and that she messed it up several times that morning.

She says she’s been an hour and a half late to school for her mentoring class each Tuesday because of the train and bus, but I wonder if it’s because she’s spending extra time doing her hair and makeup in the morning. These are the issues of teen girls across the country, if not the world, regardless of socioeconomic background or English language proficiency.

My birthday is coming up in a week, and so for the first time in four years, I’m actually organizing a birthday dinner for myself… at my favorite Indian Chinese restaurant in Queens. I’m even thinking about ordering a cake to have cut at the restaurant.

I remember the last time I did this, and the dinner ended up not being that enjoyable. The drinks event afterwards could possibly have been worse from my memory. But this year, I actually have high hopes for it. Maybe it’s just because I may be more confident now, and I really don’t care if the people who come get along or not. Or maybe I am more confident in the people in this crowd because I actually like all of them individually. Back in 2012 when I think about it more, I realized that I invited a lot of people not really because I liked them, but thought that they’d be offended if they weren’t invited, or just because of association with one of my other friends. That’s never a good reason to invite someone to anything, right?

I’ve honestly never worked at a workplace where it’s seemed that no one really cares, other than say my boss and a few colleagues that work directly with me every day. The truth is that I’ve cared less and less about it as time has gone on, so now, I am desensitized to it. I don’t bother saying anything more than “good morning” to the colleagues who sit around me during the day, and then “good night” at the end of the night. A few people will say “welcome back!” from my trip and being away, but no one will ask anything deeper than that except for the people I previously mentioned.

I told this to one of my friends, and she told me that she had a really great relationship with her teams to the point that they even go out for things like movies and trivia nights through the week and weekends. She said she’d be sad if she didn’t have this culture. I suppose that after a while of dealing with what I do at my own work, I’ve just become desensitized to it that I really don’t care anymore and accept it for what it is while I still choose to be here. Let’s be realistic: I don’t really come to work to work with people directly on my team. We all have our own sub teams that we work with, and clients externally that we service. We could literally all just work remotely from home every single day, and it wouldn’t have any major effect on any of us and our relationship (or lack thereof) with each other. There are advantages and disadvantages of having jobs like this where the actual touch point you have with the people at your own company is low, but at least the benefit for me now is that it’s very flexible, and I don’t need to be at the office every single day and pretend I have a relationship with people I don’t really care about.

January is the month of hibernation, according to Chris. Each January in the last five years, he’s been anti-social and refuses to leave the apartment unless it’s for work, theater, or really warm food. We came from Australia, where the weather was slightly humid and in the 80s and 90s Fahrenheit. Then, we moved on to Hong Kong, where the temperatures were quite steady at a mild low- to mid-60s our entire time there. It felt almost like San Francisco. And as we exited our plane coming from LAX to JFK this evening, a very cold gust of wind that was about 20 degrees F hit both of us, including my socks-less feet. We were home.

We went through the usual things we do when we get back after almost a month of not being here: unpack, open up our endless mail, which usually includes Christmas cards (labeled “Happy Holidays” from PC friends and family in California to “Merry Christmas” from friends who aren’t as PC) and random packaged gifts, and cleaning up accumulated dust that has appeared on top of the toilet and the sink in the bathroom. And as I went through all these things, I realized that this January would be a little different from all the previous ones because this time around, I would have a long list of wedding-related tasks to get done — a very, very long one.

Why didn’t I just hire someone else to do this all for me? 🙁

I’m a good friend. After a night of partying at my company’s holiday party, I agreed to dragging Chris and myself out to Brooklyn to drink and catch up with my good friend and her boyfriend, who earlier this week had shoulder surgery and wanted to be close to his apartment for convenience. I told myself that I’d have two drinks to catch up with them and leave, but somehow that ended up being something more like five drinks plus two shots. And we didn’t get home until past 4am. This morning, I woke up and could barely speak. My voice was gone.

Then, the rest of today felt unproductive, as I had a long list of things I wanted to accomplish our last weekend in New York before leaving for Melbourne for Christmas, and pretty much nothing got done. Two nights in a row of heavy drinking ruins all productivity. Once upon a time, I could have gotten through this, and now almost at 30, I cannot. I’m so exhausted.