Ever since that infamous New York Times article was published last spring about the unfair treatment and pay of nail salon workers, I’ve been painfully cognizant and wary of nail salons and have pretty much resisted any impulse desire to get my nails done anywhere. Granted, I rarely get my nails done outside of my apartment, mostly out of my own cheapness, but I resisted the idea even more after I read this article even though I knew beforehand that it had to be a bad lifestyle for the salon workers. I mean, the cheapest manicure to be had in New York (which I personally have benefited from) is $10, and how could anyone possibly be making any real money at that level of earning?

As a little indulgence that would perhaps happen on my own dime about once a year, I started looking for nail salons that pay a fair wage and have safe working conditions for their employees; these places typically charge $25-45 for a basic manicure, which probably makes more sense given the cost of living. A publisher partner has asked to take my team and me on a mani/pedi outing, so now we’re scheduled to go to Ten Over Ten next Friday at my request. Now I can feel a little better about supporting a business that treats its employees properly.

Tonight, I met with Chris’s cousin’s friend from Melbourne who is doing grad studies at NYU, her friend from Melbourne who is interning temporarily at the Council for Foreign Relations, and my good friend for dinner at a restaurant that specializes in South Indian cuisine in the Curry Hill area of Manhattan. I’ve made a number of South Indian dishes, including masala dosa and appam, and these were things that were on the menu tonight. I ordered the kal dosa, which according to Chris’s mother is the most basic everyday dosa eaten by Indian families in South India. Chris’s cousin’s friend ordered the appam, not because she actually remembered it but because she vaguely thought she had the dish before and wanted to make sure she remembered it, as the last time she’d had it was in South India visiting relatives. I was curious to see how it tasted since I’d never had it or even seen it on any restaurant menu ever. I took a piece of her appam and was a little confused and almost even disgusted when I tasted it; it was sour, which made sense because the batter is fermented, but it was too sour. I’d had it the very first time when Chris’s mother and aunt made it for a Christmas Eve dinner, and after that, I replicated it myself here twice. It’s supposed to taste coconuty because the batter has coconut and rice, but this appam had zero coconut flavor. It was salty and very sour. I was so disappointed. And it looked so pretty, too, so it was obviously made in the right style pan.

And then it hit me: I think I’m a better Indian chef than the people who work in the Anjappar kitchen in Curry Hill, and I’m not even Indian. I was able to replicate the flavor of a real appam better than the Anjappar cooks could. I had a brief moment of smugness that I had to hide and keep to myself.

In the last two days, I’ve run into two of Chris’s friends, one of whom is a former colleague of mine. New York is a big place with millions of people, and yet we managed to bump into each other and catch up briefly.

I don’t know how observant people are when they run into me by chance, but one of the first things I always think of when I run into someone I know is, when was the last time I saw this person? How different or the same does this person look? I don’t think I’d seen the friend I ran into today in over two years, yet she looked exactly as I remembered her; it’s like she hadn’t aged a single day. She told me that I looked even younger than the last time she saw me, which I found really hard to believe because I feel like I’ve aged ten years since then. We really are more critical about ourselves than we should be.

Tonight, Chris and I went to meet a friend of mine who is dating someone new that he met online, and as soon as I made eye contact with her, I knew immediately she was someone I’d seen before. I soon found out that yes, she was originally from San Francisco, and yes, she went to my high school and was three years ahead of me. The reason she was familiar to me was that she was actually the student body president when I was a freshman at Lowell. What a small world. Of course, she had no idea who I was since then, I was just a lowly freshman while she was a senior, but it was interesting getting to know someone who I kind of already knew, and who was dating a good friend of mine here in New York.

She was pretty spooked that I already knew who she was and that we went to the same high school. She said that she never really talked much about high school or being in student government, or even about San Francisco. Why? I asked her. She said she’s just a different person now and is so different than what she was in high school. “But every interesting person has a past,” I said to her, smiling. Our experiences are what make us. Sure, I don’t think it’s necessary for her to share with everyone she meets that she used to be student body president when she was in high school, but I do think it’s important that people know where she’s lived and been to see how she has evolved. I don’t think I’m the same person as I was in high school, but I do think it’s a part of my life that was important that’s helped me get to where I am today. Now, I know a world outside of San Francisco, as she clearly does, but I still have San Francisco as a part of me as she also does. We should never forget the past.

I don’t know what it is about New Yorkers, or maybe it’s just my colleagues in my office, but I don’t seem to know anyone who does their own laundry. A number of my colleagues have laundry in their buildings, yet they don’t do laundry themselves. They have their laundry dropped off at a neighborhood cleaners’ and then come back a few days later to pick it up. A few others are using tech startup companies’ apps to have their laundry picked up from their apartments and sent back, all neatly folded and pressed. It’s like hearing about people doing their own laundry is a rarity. We do our laundry in our basement, but we had to get a few jackets of Chris’s dry-cleaned, so I was lucky enough to find a reasonably priced cleaner just two blocks from our apartment. I noticed they had a sign posted for cleaning leather bags, so I asked the worker how much it would cost to clean my small Kate Spade bag. “For your bag? Eight-five dollars,” she said. “It’s expensive because we outsource it!”

Eighty-five dollars to clean a bag that cost less than four times that same amount? No, thanks. People are way too high maintenance in this neighborhood if that is really a considered a “reasonable” price.

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.