Life in New York

I’ve got a couple posts floating around in my head, but I can’t make any of them come together right now. Not sure if it’s the heat or general distraction or what. So instead I’ll post about stuff I’ve been up to.

After Monday night at Hallo Berlin, there was bowling on Tuesday (company field trip fun – did you know there’s a bowling alley on the second floor of Port Authority?), and Avenue Q on Wednesday (also corporate-sponsored) (very fun musical, by the way – I enjoyed it a lot – “It sucks to be me” is a catchy song).

On Thursday, I had a little shindig, where about 15 people came over to my place for wine and cheese and conversation. I’d been meaning to do this for a while – I’ve got several sets of friends here in NYC (I later counted that there were four distinct social circles at the shindig), and I wanted them all to meet each other, and there were particular connections I wanted to make between pairs of people. And it was excellent – people showed up, there was good conversation all around, connections were made, etc.

The next morning I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed it so much (yes, I’m over-analytical). I like making connections. I like the fact that I have all of these different people in my life who are doing different things (a sampling of job descriptions of people who showed up: software consultant, intern at Goldman Sachs, publisher, language services coordinator, developmental geneticist, urban planner, and sailing instructor). I really enjoy being able to talk to them, and be able to understand a little bit about what they’re doing and explain it to others – the one time that Jofish and I took turns explaining each other’s work to strangers was a lot of fun. I need to figure out how to cultivate more of these sort of cross-connections in my life.

Somebody asked about cafes with wi-fi on the nextNY mailing list, and one person recommended the Housing Works Used Book Cafe. It’s a volunteer-run used book store/cafe where all proceeds go towards providing housing and other services for homeless New Yorkers. I went to go check it out this afternoon, and it’s a wonderful space. Their book selection isn’t that extensive, but they’ve got lots of chairs for browsing, plus the cafe in the back to chill at for a while. Highly recommended. I’m having thoughts of volunteering there. And, of course, I couldn’t resist buying several books despite having stacks of unread books already. I’m a hopeless addict.

In other wandering around news, I also wanted to go visit art galleries in Chelsea this afternoon, but they’re basically all closed on the weekends, either because their summer hours are weekday-only, or because they’re just closed in August. Good to know.

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