Tonight, Chris and I had dinner with his boss, who also happens to be Australian from Perth. They had been trying to arrange a get-together with their life partners for about a year and a half now, and that’s how long it takes people to arrange dinners today in this lovely metropolis we call New York City. The wait was worth it in the end, as it included a great dining experience with two bottles of wine at Laduree, endless revealings of Chris’s not so “polite and lovely” qualities, and discussions of Australians, Americans, politics, and travel.

It’s weird how when I meet most people that Chris likes, I always tend to like them. With his boss, it was like an immediate affection was developed. The way he delivered his speech, his general aura, and even his soft gaze on you as he speaks was so warming, kind of like his best friend in Melbourne. It almost felt like the same guy, except not.

I rarely meet people and like them right away. It just doesn’t happen that often, but it does happen with most of Chris’s friends. Even Aziz Ansari, in his latest book, says that when going on dates with new people, you generally can’t really make a solid judgment about whether you really like them until at least the sixth or eighth meeting.

How do you meet people that you like instantly? Does that possibility just decline as you get older, or do you just need a filter like a good life partner to help you find these people?

Today, I had a chat with one of my colleagues, who joined our company about seven months ago. We are remodeling the space on the twenty-second floor of our building to accommodate additional work space and employees, and so all the employees who used to sit on that floor, primarily on the tech and product team, have been displaced. Some are working from home, while others are scattered all over the twenty-third floor with the rest of us.

It’s funny how we are at work; if we aren’t sitting directly with people, we probably don’t talk to them much at all unless we have work-related things to talk about. Things get busy with all of us during the work day. With this colleague, we got along very well every time we spoke, but given we’ve always been on different floors and did very different work functions, we didn’t have much opportunity to talk. We talked about how she was born in India, raised in Oman because of her parents’ jobs, went to school in Canada, got naturalized and became a citizen there, and is now in New York. It was funny how she told me the first part, though. She said that she was raised in the Middle East, which is where her parents still are. That’s funny, I thought. How come she didn’t tell me which country she was raised in? So I asked her which country, and she said Oman. And I said, oh, I know where that is. She laughed and said pretty much no one she talked to knew where or even what Oman was. A lot of people asked her if Oman was a city in India. She said it was so exhausting that she decided to just tell people she was raised in the Middle East and leave it at that.

Stupid Americans.

A year or two ago, outside the window in our living room, we constantly had birds hanging around the window sill. We’d wake up in the morning and hear them cooing, we’d be there in the afternoon and they’d be sitting there — they were constantly there. Of course, Chris couldn’t stand it, so whenever he heard them, he’d shoo them away and start banging on the window. What can I say? He likes to mark his territory, especially since he pays rent for this apartment and they do not.

Eventually, the birds went away, but I always thought that there must be a nest underneath the window, otherwise why else would they constantly be there? Well tonight, our super came to uninstall and remove the broken AC unit to discover that on the backside of the unit, in the little nook were the remains of what clearly was a bird’s nest, and it even had half a broken egg in it. It was one of the saddest sights I’d seen. What I’d guessed about the nest was true, except it was even closer to us than I’d actually imagined — it was just on the other side of the AC unit!

This is what it takes to survive in New York City as a bird: you have to hide in someone’s air conditioning unit to be safe.

Tonight, I sat at a bar overlooking this little island of Manhattan, having drinks with a friend and his friend, who is a former colleague of mine. I listened patiently as my former colleague discussed the perils of being on the verge of turning 30, in a relationship that’s barely gone on for a year, yet his girlfriend is asking him questions about their “future” together, which she foresees as having marriage, two children, and a house in the suburbs.

“Life was so simple in my early to mid-twenties,” he lamented. “I could just party, have fun with girls, no commitment, no nothing. Now, I get questions on the future, ‘are you the one?’ Life is so complicated now.”

What is this, the common late twenties/early thirties whining of every male in the city of New York? You have a romantic relationship, a job, a place in life, and it’s not enough for you, and you don’t know if you have fully “maximized” and are unsure if what you have is “good enough?” This is why I could never be with a guy who was my age. The talking of “check boxes” that women must meet to be “the one” seems to be a reoccurring theme in discussions I’ve had on dating and marriage with guys around my age. I really don’t think that looking at relationships like a job spec sheet benefits anyone.

In New York, there are constantly restaurants and bars opening and closing every single day, and that’s not an exaggeration at all. There are restaurants claiming to be authentic Cantonese or Korean fusion or Japanese-Mexican fusion with a twist. You can find all kinds of things here if you look and are willing to explore enough different neighborhoods.

Tonight, we went to a Korean fusion “gastropub” and had dinner, and then moved downstairs to their hidden jazz bar, where we had drinks and a fusion carrot cake served with a matcha green tea ice cream. The ice cream was notably sweeter than the matcha green tea ice cream we had a few times in Japan, and oddly, the texture ended with a powdery finish. I wasn’t certain if I was a fan of this until the last bite, when I decided I didn’t really want it anymore.

And so the withdrawal continues as the search for green tea matcha flavored things continue, even though we still have bags and boxes of green tea flavored things in our own apartment.

I love New York a lot, and after living here for over seven years, I wonder how much I will miss it one day when I leave. But then, I remember the things about it that I’m not very fond of, especially regarding how commitment phobic people tend to be here, and I realize that’s the biggest aspect I will not miss.

Planning things in advance is not something that people generally like to do here. I’ve always loved to plan things in advance, so I will usually ask friends at least a week in advance if they are free for whatever dinner or event I’d like to attend with them. In an age of texting and when e-mails get ignored and never responded to (and people think this is acceptable behavior), texts oftentimes don’t get responded to within a day, or two… or even four, despite the fact that these messages are “instant,” and most of us have our phone settings so that text messages pop up on our lock screen when we click to view the time on our phone.

In passing, we always say to people, let’s do this! Let’s have lunch at this place! Let’s get drinks at that place! Everyone is so excited and happy about it in the moment. Then, when it comes time to actually locking down a time and date, people freeze and don’t respond right away, if at all. It’s as though you are literally locking that person in a room for the hours that you will be with her, and she just can’t handle it. So she doesn’t. And it never happens.

It’s okay. I didn’t expect it to happen.

There are few things worse to me than saying that you will do something and not following through. And it’s the worst of the worst when it affects someone else’s life that cares about you. I experienced it from a very young age and then pretty much expected the world to be full of shit. I generally don’t believe anything anyone tells me about what they will do until I see it happen. But now, I’m a bit relieved to say I don’t take it as personally anymore and just sum it up by saying that the number of people who care about me — really, genuinely care — as in, will cry for days if I died and then be haunted by my (hopefully happy) ghost for decades after — in life is really, really small. And everyone will disappoint me. But what’s most important is how I choose to deal with that disappointment.