This year for my birthday dinner with friends, I decided for the third year in a row to drag everyone out to Elmhurst again, and this time, it would be for Indonesian food. There really isn’t any Indonesian food in Manhattan, and even if there were, it would be much more expensive than in Elmhurst. With our party of nine including tax, tip, and a lot of Thai iced teas, we managed to spend just $22/person on dinner tonight. For the amount of food we had, I doubt we could have had a cheaper meal anywhere else. That’s the thing when you organize a group dinner: you want a place that is affordable and isn’t going to make anyone feel poor after.

No one gets excited about Elmhurst, but I still do because of the variety of the cuisines and food, the low price points relatively speaking, and… well, this was my original ‘hood when I moved to New York City. So it feels comfortable to me, like another home neighborhood in my heart. Even though I’m not close to my cousin who is here in New York, he’s actually the reason I even considered this neighborhood in the first place because he lived here, and I feel like I got a more “local” experience because of that. Locals know and would consider living in Elmhurst; people who move to New York for the first time would never even be aware that it existed. And.. it’s kind of their loss because of how rich the culture is there. I’m proud to have lived there for my first four years in New York and have zero regrets.

As an adult, I’ve gradually started learning to like a lot of things I never really was interested in at all as a child or teen. These things range from oysters (raw and cooked), stinky French cheeses (I love blue cheese now!), mustard (I especially like the French mustards… American mustard is still pretty boring to me), fois gras, and now, caviar. Caviar is one of those things that I’ve enjoyed the very few times I’ve had it, but I cannot really say that I fully appreciate it enough to say, spend $120 on a little tin of it every other month. Chris took me to L’Appart, an intimate Michelin-star rated French restaurant downtown in Brookfield place, to celebrate my birthday tonight, and one of the things they are known for is their caviar selection as a course you can choose before the actual tasting menu. The French caviar was served in its tin on ice, along with four long brick-like Brioche toasts that oozed with buttery richness, and a log of different toppings ranging from whipped avocado, hibiscus-pickled cippolini onions, to a chive-specked creme fraiche.

Each bite of caviar, on a spoon made of pearls, no less, was creamy, a bit briny, and decadent. I don’t know how we as human beings decided that fish eggs would be such an expensive delicacy, but I could certainly get used to enjoying this every now and then as a pure indulgence. Who knows what nutritional value these things have, anyway?

In New York, we’re used to waiting in stupidly long lines for everything from barbecue to basic brunch (and I mean… really basic) to ramen (not the Cup of Noodle variety, no). So when I found out I had Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off, I figured.. what better way to spend the day honoring such an influential figure than strategically going to places that normally have lines, but probably won’t on a weekday cold winter morning?

Okay, so I only made it to one spot in the morning given my workout went a bit long (had to run four miles to justify the indulgence of today), and I ended up at Super Moon Bakehouse, the sister bakery of Mr. Holmes Bakehouse in San Francisco, the home of the “cruffin” – the croissant-muffin hybrid. And.. I got a little carried away since I ended up taking home six baked goods that wouldn’t necessarily be called cheap.

But the chocolate dipped passion fruit curd filled cruffin… was a piece of glory. The passion fruit curd was just a bit tart and authentically fruity. It had a LOT of curd that just oozed out. And the base of the cruffin was extremely crunchy and shattered everywhere this morning. I could easily do this once a year every year, and maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad.

It was a beautiful day.

The world really needs more kind people. We need more smart people, yes, but we also need more kindness to enable the belief that the world is really a good place full of good people. If no one believes in the world, then no one wants to help it get any better, right?

Since I’ve moved to New York, I’ve encountered many kind people… and certainly many of the opposite. But it’s the little kindnesses of strangers that make me believe in this city. When I’ve unknowingly dropped a glove on the seat next to me in the subway and someone actually walks after me to give me that glove, when someone’s told me that my backpack was open (which had my work laptop conspicuously sitting in it), when people have offered to help carry my massive luggages up the stairs that first subway trip I moved to New York with two massive bags — each time, I’ve been really grateful and happy. So when I hear people say that New Yorkers are shitty, selfish, impatient, awful people, it personally annoys me. For the most part, I look at this city as full of people who are all here to help each other; we kind of have to given that we’re such a terrorist target.

Today, our favorite handyman came to our apartment with half a bottle of one of his favorite whiskeys. He’s done favors for us when he hasn’t had to. He randomly just thinks of us when he has certain thoughts or advice he wants to give on everything from restaurants to cooking techniques to even apartment things. When I see people like him, I think, wow. We’re so lucky to have met such generous, kind people in a city that is seemingly so anonymous and out for themselves.

Tonight, we had the pleasure of watching Trevor Noah do his comedy monologue at Radio City Music Hall. After having come back from South Africa, as I’ve watched Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, I feel like in some silly way that I kind of “get” him and am even more familiar with his accent just because of the time I spent in his home country. It seems a little ridiculous, but I’ve seen his country, and I understand more about it now. I love that he gives a more global perspective as the host of The Daily Show. I loved Jon Stewart on it, of course, especially as a local New Yorker and the spin that gave to the show, but I think that Trevor Noah gives a perspective that is very much needed during today’s day and age  of xenophobia, anti-immigrant and Muslim sentiment, and the general miseducation on the U.S.’s standing when it comes to all major metrics across developed, “rich countries in the world.

The Daily Show‘s viewers dropped after Jon Stewart left and Trevor Noah took over, but clearly he’s been received well because of the awards he has won for his writing and work on the show, not to mention that in September of last year, he renewed his contract with Comedy Central to host, write, and produce the show for another five years. It makes me happy that Comedy Central is acknowledging that we need a new face and perspective, and that the American public who watches the show is also realizing this, as well.

A good friend of mine recently got engaged, and he came over tonight for dinner as we discussed how the proposal happened, what the plans were for their wedding, and everything related. Stereotypically, when we think of engagements, we think of them as exciting events, times when the couple is extremely happy and jumping out of their skin delirious about their future together. But with this situation, my friend was happy, but not extremely excited; it seems like the right thing to do for him, and he’s moving forward with it. He cares about this person, but he’s not head over heels in love with her. It just makes sense.

I’d be so devastated if I ever found out Chris felt that way about me when we proposed. But I guess that’s why secrets exist; you can’t always share everything.

Maybe it’s just the romantic in me. Yes, people get married out of necessity all the time. It’s not always love that brings people together. It’s money, politics, legal crap, immigration — you name it. But I think everyone kind of deserves the excitement and chaos that comes with a happy engagement. It’s hard to replicate that excitement in any other situation in my head.

Even though I had come back to the office on Friday, only four people showed up given that it was the day after the major “bomb cyclone” that hit the entire Northeast. It was quiet, and I was actually able to get a lot of catch up work done. Today, everything was buzzing as it always was. It was as though nothing had changed since I left.

It always seems a little hard to come back to the everyday life that you lead when you were away in a place so foreign and different where you actually felt like your mind expanded. How do you then properly convey what you learned? Does anyone actually really care to hear it? Well, why would people care that much that I suddenly have this obsession and deep love for elephants just because I saw them up close and fed them and saw them travel in herds, playing and bathing and taking care of their young?

Here in New York, the “concrete” jungle that we love so much, we’re so far removed from the elephants and the rhinos of Africa. We live in our own bubble, ignorant of the daily struggles that others go through simply trying to live, and also risking their lives to ensure that future generations know the beauty and intelligence of these creatures. Suddenly today, standing at my standing desk and working at my laptop with a large monitor attached, my work suddenly felt so meaningless. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my job or the people; it’s quite the opposite of that. It just felt like in comparison to the conservation work that people were doing in South Africa and all over the African continent, my work seemed so trivial.

Since we got back from South Africa, Chris has already backed up all our travel photos from this trip, so when we are in our living room, we’ll have our photos play on our Chrome cast as our TV “background.” Many clear, vivid shots of the rhino we saw during our safari appeared, and every time it shows up, I admire what a pretty and cute creature it is.. and get angry about how the Chinese and Vietnamese people are poaching these innocent animals and randomly believing that their horns will be a cure-all medicine for cancers.

But while I was thinking this, I was also flipping through my trusted Cantonese cookbook today, especially given we are homebound due to the 9-degree temps we’re experiencing today, and I found an herbal tonic recipe for persistent coughs and mucus. It contains figs, apple, and “almonds” (the almonds are actually apricot kernels, hulled and unhulled). I looked it up on the web to discover that many people who had tried everything from cough syrups to lozenges to even prescription cough medications had no luck suppressing their coughs until they made this drink for themselves.

Maybe not all Chinese medicine is a fluke. Maybe I should even try making this.

When it gets far below freezing in Manhattan, the city becomes a bit of a ghost town. We peered out our window this morning on a day where the high was supposed to be 11 degrees Fahrenheit, and there wasn’t a sound. We didn’t see anyone walking on the streets at all. And when we finally hauled ourselves out of the apartment to have an early dinner and get outside, even if just for a few hours, we found that the popular Thai restaurant walking distance from our apartment, which usually has an hour-long-plus wait no matter what time of the day you decide to show up, had multiple tables and bar seats open. That was NOT normal.

These are the times when you just want to hibernate and not go outside. But actually, for popular places that usually have a wait, if you really want to go, these are really the times to go and not have to deal with the senseless waits of regular days.

I’ve been living in Manhattan for 5.5 years now, but I still haven’t forgotten the difference in the plowed streets of this borough vs. the lack of plowed streets in Queens when I lived there my first four years in New York City. Some days, it felt like we had to dig our way out of the subway stations and on side walks and streets, and it seemed like the neglected land of the entire city. The streets were always quickly plowed on the Upper East Side as well as where we currently live now. From our street to the subway to get to work today, it was perfectly cleared out for me this morning. All the sidewalks were salted, and the snow was cleared away to walk on the streets.

I wonder what it looked like on my old street in Elmhurst this morning.