Today in the elevator going up to my office, I’m standing with two women, both of whom do not live in the city and made that very clear. They’re both grumbling about how warm it’s becoming (New Yorkers never seem to be happy with the weather). This is the conversation I overhear:

Woman 1: It’s getting really hot outside (makes a face). Did you take the subway here?

Woman 2: Eww, no! I walked. The train is disgusting!

Woman 1: I know. It’s so gross. I walked here from Grand Central, too.

Why do people work and live in the New York City area if they are going to complain about how “gross” and “disgusting” the subway is? The New York City subway is one of the most extensive subway systems in the world, and we’re really privileged to have it and not be forced to drive everywhere in massive congestion and road rage. Some people seem to love reveling in their ignorance and ivory towers. Stop complaining, everyone. Just take it for what it is, or leave.

These are the times when I get really frustrated at New York City, when it is spring time, and Chris and I are getting ready for his parents’ arrival at our apartment, and we amass dust balls the size of our heads under our bed and couch and dresser. This city is like a rodent, roach, and dust ball magnet. There really aren’t enough to go around in this great big metropolis, are there?

We are spending the last night before Chris goes to Chicago for work to make sure everything is clean and tidy for his parents’ arrival on Wednesday. As we are going through bags of clutter and things to toss out, I’m lamenting all the things I have hidden in my old big suitcase I used to move from Boston to New York: a rolling pin, oversized cookie sheets, a real oven rack, pie pans, and lots and lots of picture frames, all of which Ed gave me, that we have zero space for in our tiny Manhattan apartment. It’s either I am getting old, or I am just tiring of New York in general. We have no space where I can comfortably put all my supplies or access them easily. My scrapbooking material is in several boxes being hidden under the bed while Chris’s parents stay with us. I even have Christmas ornaments I have collected over the years all in a bin under the bed, getting no love because we have no Christmas tree of our own to put themon. I feel cooped up and wonder how much longer we will need to keep living like this. I think I just got a wrinkle thinking about it.

An old friend who I stopped speaking with last year suddenly e-mailed me an apology today. She said I was a true friend, and she said she was sorry that she got so upset with me after a senseless comment I made to her last year, which she took extreme offense to and overreacted about. As soon as I realized she was being hypersensitive and neurotic, I stopped talking to her and told her why. At that point in my life, I couldn’t handle having any more people in my life who I had to walk around egg shells to be around, or who were just extremely negative.

In a past version of myself, I might have obsessed over this e-mail and wondered why she sent it, what prompted her to write me, why she was even thinking about me after so much time had passed. But in the current version of me, I really felt little to nothing. I’ve stopped caring about things as much as I used to, especially things that are just insignificant or dramatic without reason. However, there is one point she made in her message that I read twice: “One of your greatest assets is that you are not superficial.” She said I was one of the most real people she’s ever met. We live in a world where we’re always wondering who’s actually authentic and who’s fake. My cynical (yet realistic) side thinks that most people are either fake or just not the type of people I want to be around, perhaps because their values in life so greatly clash with mine. But it’s comforting to know that someone who I am pretty much at odds with now admits that I’m authentic, and superficiality isn’t something I value at all.

Tonight, I had dinner with a college friend and her colleague, who are both in town for a work project for the next few days. I hadn’t seen her since last April, when I was in Phoenix with Chris and my parents to see the Grand Canyon. Then, she was supposedly happily married and planning to have a child. Today, she is divorced, single, and happier than ever.

It’s crazy how time flies. It really doesn’t feel like a year ago since I last saw her, and it’s hard to believe that in the time that has passed, she decided to not have a child, leave her husband, and get a new job. So many changes can happen in such a short time frame, and it’s hard to keep up with the why’s and how’s of the decisions that everyone in your life makes. I know in a nutshell what led to the dissolution of her marriage, but I’ll probably never get the opportunity to hear all the details. I guess that’s not a bad thing because maybe I don’t really want to know or shouldn’t really know. But then that makes me wonder: how do you really determine what you should know or should not know, and how do you draw the line, and with what people? You don’t want to seem like you are intruding or trying to invade someone’s privacy. As though it helps me at all personally to know the most intimate details, and I’m not going to be broadcasting it everywhere anytime soon. Why we are friends with people isn’t always as simple as people think it is.

Like many other New Yorkers who like to eat out, I am a huge fan of Danny Meyer. I have no idea what he looks like or what his personality is like, but I love the restaurants he has either started or been a part of. Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, and Eleven Madison Park are restaurants that I have had some of the best dining experiences in my life, so I was really excited to finally get a reservation at Maialino, his other well known and loved restaurant in the city. Everything we ordered tonight exceeded expectations along with a couple of surprises. When Chris ordered us a pork belly appetizer, It ended up coming to the table in the form of a pate mixed with duck and duck fat and was paired with these delicious little pickled cucumbers and apricot jam. The cocktails were artfully crafted and smooth, and surprisingly they were not as expensive as we thought they would be. We had some quick small talk with our waiter, and he laughed when he heard that the reason we came was because of Danny Meyer. It’s only in cities like New York where patrons would actually know or care about “celebrity chefs.”

I have a friend who is visiting New York this weekend who I will meet with tomorrow, and since she’s only been to New York a handful of times, she looks at New York as the city “that has everything” in terms of food and cuisine. And she’s right. As New Yorkers, we take for granted the variety and quality we have in this city. Sometimes, I can feel myself getting complacent when I’m deciding what to eat next when it comes to restaurants. Shame on me (to be fair, it’s mainly because we need to pick a restaurant near the theater district, which is notorious for catering towards tourists). It will be sad one day to finally leave it, but as long as we are here, I want to relish it as much as possible.

For the longest time for breakfast in the last two years during the weekdays, I was primarily eating fruit. Most of the time, it was grapefruit or an orange, and other times a banana. I realized I couldn’t eat a grapefruit every morning for breakfast after I started getting tooth sensitivity in the back of my mouth. It’s sad when you think you are doing good things for yourself, and then you realize that these “good things” are actually causing other parts of you (your teeth!) harm by using their evil little acids to eat away at your tooth enamel.

I started deliberately incorporating protein into my breakfast recently after being told by a trainer that I’m not getting enough, so occasionally, I will have yogurt or oatmeal on work day breakfasts now. And this week, I discovered the joy that is Chobani 2 percent Greek yogurt with passion fruit on the bottom. I’ve never, ever seen real passion fruit in yogurt before, so this was (sadly) a huge highlight of my work day. And it didn’t taste artificial at all; it tasted pure and sweet and slightly sour the way it should. It even had the passion fruit seeds in it. I proceeded to hide the one remaining passion fruit yogurt cup in the fridge and then ask our office manager to buy more for future weeks.

Sometimes, it’s the little things during the work day that make things all better.

The world is becoming salad crazy, and because of the obsession for salads and the facade of “healthy eating,” salads are not really a cheap thing to get for lunch or as a dinner side anymore. Depending on where you are buying your lunch, your salad could cost anywhere from seven to twenty five dollars. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but knowing the time it takes to make a really good, well-thought out salad that I actually look forward to eating, I can see why restaurants and businesses think they should be able to charge this much for these items.

Tonight before our show in the theater district, Chris and I went to have dinner at a place in the area, and he was really disappointed in the salad I ordered us. It was a chopped escarole salad with ricotta insalata, pistachios, and a pickled jalapeno vinaigrette, which I was really excited to try since I’ve never had pickled jalapenos, nor had I ever had a vinaigrette that was spicy in a salad before. I really liked the taste of the vinaigrette and the combination of flavors, along with the different types of richness from the cheese and the roasted pistachios, but I did agree that $11 seemed a bit steep for the chopped lettuce we got, as well as the portion. We rarely order salads when dining out, and trying this one out and seeing that it wasn’t fully worth it, we probably won’t be ordering another one again. But at least now I have the idea to replicate this salad on my own at home for far cheaper. 🙂

Tonight, I had drinks and dinner in Astoria with my friend, who brought his friend and a former colleague of mine at my last company. He and I sort of reconnected at my friend’s birthday event a few weeks ago, and while on the train back to Manhattan after dinner tonight, he was telling me about how frustrated he is that he’s turning 30 this year but feels like given the rent he pays to live in the East Village, he has just enough money to pay his rent, live his life here, and “maybe” one vacation to somewhere abroad a year. He said he’d love to travel more, but the rent kills him. His landlord just informed him that his rent is going up by just over 10% this year, so he wants to move, but where? He thinks he should be saving money to eventually buy his own place, but he’s nowhere near it. And he wants to enjoy and travel now while he’s still young.

When I first moved to New York, I read a book about saving and investing that said that you should never spend more than 25 percent of your income on rent. As sad as it is, I’m sure the majority of 20-somethings in New York spend at least double that, if not more. I’ve always been in a fortunate situation with income, rent, and savings, so I can’t relate to this that much. If anything, it’s a reminder to me how different my life is than most people my age. But what I do feel strongly about is that most people don’t plan at all around my age. They fail to plan, and as cliche as it is, failing to plan is planning to fail. You don’t suddenly end up at 30 or 35 with enough money to have your first child if you didn’t plan on saving in the years leading up to it. It’s almost as though living in New York forces people to “live in the now” and ignore the future by spending over 50 percent of their income on rent, going out for endless and ridiculously priced drinks and dinners, and forget that there are things they want in the future that will need planning today.

I spent a bit of time reviewing different photographers’ portfolios in the last couple of days during my free time, and I feel like making a decision of which photographer to choose is too difficult. They are all clearly very talented in their own ways and have their own styles. Some are a bit more romantic and flowery and dreamy, while others are more dramatic, almost saturated in emotions and colors of the day. How do you ultimately make the decision?

Some photographers say they need to “fit” with the couple that they are shooting. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not sure how I wouldn’t “fit” with anyone I’ve spoken with over Skype so far, as all of them seemed incredibly personable yet professional and fun at the same time (we’ve already weeded out photographers who were too exorbitantly priced). All of them have also not given me a straight answer when I ask how they might say “no” to weddings that they may not be a “fit” for. The only close answer is when the couple has indicated a type of photography that they prefer (rosy romance vs. theatrical drama). What makes a photographer so remarkable that you are moved to immediately choose them?

My friend, who is trying online dating, was planning to have a dessert/drinks date with someone new he met online dating tonight, but she flaked out on him at around 4:30pm today and claimed she had some big audition tomorrow that she has to practice for, so she couldn’t make it tonight. Clearly demoralized and frustrated, my friend said online dating has not yielded a single positive result for him. Instead, he’s had a number of people who have just decided to cancel on him last minute.

Ironically enough, today I also listened to a Freaknomics podcast on online dating. While looks are clearly a high priority for anyone who is looking for their future husband/wife/fling online, I found out that weight somehow doesn’t actually matter in the long run based on studies down. A chubby or slightly overweight person who is decent looking has the same chances of scoring a date online as does a person who is decent looking and slim. Maybe the U.S. is just becoming more accepting of overweight people. I guess in some ways we kind of have to be when I’ve been told that just by living in the U.S., I have a 70 percent chance of being overweight. Oh, America.