New York City is a public transportation city. People generally take the subway, bus, New Jersey transit, Path, or Metro-North train to and from work. If they’re lucky, they walk. It would be rare to hear of anyone living in Manhattan and driving to their office *also* in Manhattan. I’ve been working here almost six years, and this is unheard of to me.

Atlanta, on the other hand, is a driving city. The city does have what appears to be a very clean public transit system called the MARTA, but no one seems to take it. All of my clients at the agency I am here to visit drive everywhere, and especially to work. My colleague who came down on this trip with me said she wanted to try being a “local,” so she took the MARTA from the airport into Midtown Atlanta, where we are staying. She elicited a number of laughs when she told the office this, as they informed her that no “local” would take the MARTA. Okay, then, someone please tell me who takes the MARTA? Someone has to be taking it and keeping it running!!

Another thing that is foreign to me – a large number of our clients have gotten their cars broken into. One of my clients just had his car window smashed a week ago, and his work Macbook air and iPad were stolen. Another client’s car got broken into twice last summer. These are the things that would shock a New Yorker. We don’t own cars up there, so what would we know about car break-ins?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I finally decided that I would write about this today. In middle and high school, occasionally I would watch the news on TV, usually the 10 o’clock news. The newscasters would report the news, take you to different areas for live coverage of certain incidents, and the show would be done. Apparently, though, on New York 1, the local TV news station here, the newscasters just reference major newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, even holding up and flipping through the actual pages and walking you through the highlights of each of the top stories of the past 24 hours. The only reason I know this is because I watch TV when I am on the elliptical or treadmill at the gym during weekday mornings. While it’s kind of nice to know that some of the news I am getting on this TV station is actually news being reported in mainstream, credible publications and not just about some tree that has fallen on someone’s car in Queens, what kind of job is this? People actually get paid to do this and get broadcasted on local TV to do dumb things like this?

So I suppose I’m late in finding out that a former Princeton alum wrote this letter to editor for her alma mater’s student newspaper that went viral last year, and this month, she is publishing a book called Marry Smart, a guide on how young women of college age and just slightly beyond can “marry smart” and live their lives to their full potential. The basic gist of her letter to the editor, as well as her book, is that our modern society and colleges across the world for that matter have put way too much emphasis on career track and planning for young women. Instead of focusing so much time and energy on careers, women during college should be investing more of their time and energy in finding their future husbands because that is their prime and most beautiful time of life (that is subjective…) and will be the time of their lives when they have the smartest and most attractive male options at the tips of their fingers. The window will soon pass, and if they miss the boat, they may never find their true loves of their lives and may need to settle on someone they are not madly in love with who will never truly fulfill them.

While this sounds like something I would initially get mad about, I’ll be honest and say there’s a lot of truth to this. While I would not take her advice literally (meaning, I think your potential for finding a life mate is over after you get that college diploma), I do think it’s important to acknowledge that you should never be thinking “career OR dating/relationship” or “studying OR dating/relationship.” If you can’t “multi-task” with launching your career and a steady relationship now (I put that in quotations because I think the concept of “multi-tasking” in balancing school and dating or career and a relationship is bullshit. If you can have friends and family and study, why can you not have a boyfriend and study?), what makes you think you will one day be able to balance career, marriage, raising kids, potentially even taking care of your elderly parents and in-laws, social life, and all of life’s everyday demands?

It’s good to be open to meeting new potential mates at any time of your life and not immediately x them out because of a stressful job or being in medical school. She’s sadly right – none of us are getting any younger, and I’ll be one of the first to acknowledge that men are selfish jerks and do not really care about your “internal clock” (you know, your egg count and how it significantly goes down after 30, and gets in the grey-to-black area after 35. This doesn’t affect them; it affects you), and their pool of options gets larger (meaning, they ARE looking at younger women, even the ones just fresh out of college when they are 35 and you are 32, and guess who seems more attractive?), while ours will get smaller. Men in college for the most part are immature beyond belief when compared to their female counterparts, but the rare gems that are mature enough should be considered.

It started snowing again around midnight and continued throughout the rest of the day. As I left work today, it became a mix of rain and ice fall. It feels so miserable walking through all these massive snow and mud puddles all over the city and seeing everyone bundled up and just trying to avoid slipping and falling. It’s estimated that we will get somewhere between 14 to 18 inches of snow once today has ended. Chris’s flight to come home tonight got cancelled, so I can’t see him until tomorrow night.

I’m so ready for spring to come. This winter just seems to have dragged on forever and ever, and it’s making me feel very impatient. I guess that’s also the way I feel about work right now – I’m impatient about communication improving and processes to get established. I feel like I am waiting for something to happen, but what if it never happens?

Tonight I went to my first mentoring training session. This mentoring organization is site-based, meaning we always meet with our mentees in a supervised environment at a specific site where other mentors meet with their kids. I’m still awaiting a placement, so we’ll see where I end up.

I was told at the end of it that I’d have to get a formal background check and get finger printed – just to make sure I wasn’t a former child molester or animal killer. It’s weird to think about getting a background check. You don’t even get to see the “background” report that these people are getting of you. I’ve always wondered what one actually looks like – a really one that is not on TV. Does it tell you information on the person’s siblings and all the things that their siblings and mothers and fathers have done, too?

Chris and I are not huge fans of Valentine’s Day. Neither of us gets giddy or excited when anyone mentions it. I do like doing something special for him on that day, but I don’t hype it up in my head the way most women do. I love card making. I love giving chocolate. I do not love stressing out about this overly commercialized holiday. So I don’t.

I don’t even really think about what we could eat on that day very much because I get mad at the restaurant industry when I think of all these hyper overpriced prix fixe menus just for that special night’s dinner. What usually tends to be the case (as I learned from reading Waiter Rant, a book based off of a highly successful personal blog of a man who has made a living out of waiting tables at different low and very high end restaurants over many, many years) is that restaurants, expecting couples to be willing to shell out lots of dough for their significant others (or who they hope will become their significant others soon), will create these fancy-sounding prix fixe menus and increase the price tag on them, yet will use lower quality ingredients but mask this fact by adding more cream and butter to the dishes. The average person who dines out doesn’t know much about food or food preparation, so they won’t even realize this reading the menus. I know a lot about both, and I will not tolerate giving into this nonsense.

I love eating out, but I will not do it on New Year’s Eve (unless I am traveling) or Valentine’s Day, because those are the two nights of the year when restaurants will create these special, crappy menus in an effort to rip you off. We may get delivery, or I may make us a nice meal. No eating out on Valentine’s Day.

So a new Malaysian restaurant opens on West 8th Street in New York a few weeks ago, and my friend suggests we try it out. Four of us went tonight, and I got this odd feeling as I entered the restaurant that I had been here before, but when it was a different restaurant/cuisine type. As we sat there, I realized it had previously been a so-so sushi place I visited once. Apparently, the people who took over this spot and made it Malaysian kept the decor and layout exactly the same and just redid the menu and staff.

This tends to be what happens when you live in New York for a while. You go to restaurants that are just so-so or sub-par (or horrendous), forget you ever really went there because there was nothing worth remembering, and then go back to the same location and get that deja vu feeling you’d been there before but can’t pinpoint when. Turnover here is really high, even when restaurants are tasty or innovative. This replacement was passable, but not worth eating again (the laksa was nothing like the laksa I know, and the Hainanese chicken was completely flavorless, even for a relatively blander dish). These are the places that need to be eliminated to give other places a shot.

Tonight, I went to an arts and crafts Meetup group. I’ve been wanting to meet more people who have similar interests, and since I really enjoy making greeting cards and scrapbooking, I figured it would be nice to find friends who do the same. Everyone who came to the group did something different – scrapbooking, card-making, sewing, calendar-making, embroidery, tatting (like crocheting, but even more intricate). It was fun being around women who had different crafts hobbies, but I’m not sure we quite clicked. They were all from the tri-state area and seemed so surprised when I said I was originally from San Francisco. I thought Meetup (and New York City, at that) welcomed everyone and attracted people from all over the place?

This sounds like such a PC, I-went-to-Wellesley-and-want-to-make-a-difference-in-the-world type thing to say, but I’d love to make friends who are from everywhere – here in the tri-state area, the Midwest, the South, the West Coast, Canada, China, Singapore, Germany, France, whatever. But when I meet them, it would be nice if they all didn’t treat the idea of not being from their native place as odd or surprising. I thought that was what made New York City so great – that it attracts people from around the globe? Or maybe it’s just that the people I met tonight just surround themselves with locals only?

Before moving to New York, waiting in line at the supermarket, or any store for that matter, never seemed like a big deal. The worst line might have 3-4 people in front of me, but I never had to wait more than 5 minutes to get to the cash register.

Now that I have been living here for over five and a half years, waiting in line is basically part of New York life, whether it’s for a restaurant (with or without a reservation, sadly), groceries, or even at freaking Rite Aid just to buy M&Ms for Chris. I’ve actually been at the Rite Aid right around the corner from my apartment on a Saturday, where I was disgusted to see a single-file line of about eight people. All Trader Joe’s locations in Manhattan are notorious for their lines that zig-zag throughout their store (and requires employees to follow the ends of those lines carrying large, bright red “End of Line” signs) and I guess that shouldn’t be surprising since it’s the most affordable place to buy good-quality groceries and produce in this crowded and expensive metropolis.

I went down to the Trader Joe’s during a break midday to drop off baked chocolate pastries I made for one of my best friends who works there, and I thought, hmm, maybe since it’s snowing and slushy outside, there won’t be a line there, and I can get away with grabbing a few things and not dealing with a huge crowd. Wrong. The line went all the way  to the back of the store. Apparently, these New Yorkers all had the same idea I did.

Actually, the best time to go grocery shopping really would have been during the Super Bowl last night as Chris suggested. Oh well. Maybe next year.