extra pickles

october was fine..

• 1-year anniversary with my apartment and with new york
• made the switch from vodka tonic to vodka soda.  huge life change, i know.  in dc it’s standard that you’ll get tonic with a lime and soda with a lemon.  in new york both come with lime.  odd right?  lemon is much more preferable with soda.
• the occupy movement passed through washington square as i was also passing through.  so many soap boxes, so little soap.
• went on a bit of a pho kick (not shocking), trying out three places in chinatown.  conclusion?  the yuppie place right by my apartment is the best.  cong ly is pretty good too.  maybe there are places farther away (queens?) that are good too?
• potbelly opened in rockefeller center.  rightfully so, lunch lines are long.
• tyler and bryan both had parties one saturday night at their places.  i quite enjoy my apartment.. but the amount of space one gets in brooklyn makes me want to move.  but just a little—i like it enough where i am.
• the morning after their parties i headed to chicago for a quick trip.  it was such a gorgeous day when i got there—legitimately hot in mid-October.  unfortunately i had messed up my IT band pretty badly a few days before (a problem that would plague me for a way too many weeks following) and walking sucked.  thankfully arjun has a scooter that we rode around on for a minute—that was a trip.  chicago is pretty great—sometimes i need to be reminded.  (though one gets spoiled by new york’s public transportation—“13 minute wait for the next purple line to evanston?!”)
• let saturday, october 15 be remembered as the day tyler sent the text i never thought i’d get from him.
• i joined a sunday bowling league with my buddy brian!!  it’s done now and was really fun.  ain’t no bowling at the white house, but who likes a location dropper.
• john and jeff and keith were all here the weekend of october 21.  what a hoot.  they and stephen and a few others all came to my apartment on saturday before going out—i miss that, having an apartment that’s an attraction.
• tompkins square park halloween dog parade the weekend before halloween.  “occupy woof street” (complete with iphone) was one of my favorites.  (remember this one from last year?)
• john and i got food on sunday (the chocolate milk was memorable) then walked along the highline (it was again pretty nice outside).  we walked by a topless women.  just totally topless walking around like nothing was off.  almost an hour later we saw her again in the west village.  so john posed with her in the background.
• vaughn came to town for halloween!  god i miss her.  the weather turned disgustingly snowy that last weekend of october—made dressing for halloween problematic.  us and josh went to one of those cherly parties—it was a lot more fun than the first one we went to months ago.  i’d go back.

solid month..

..i think at least?  feelings get a bit lost when relying on iphone pics and foursquare history to recall events a while back.  like.. thinking about it harder, i was sick on two separate occasions in october.  that wasn’t fun.  and thinking about it more, i was in a really anxious mood most of the time vaughn was here because of some uncertain on a project at work.

oh well.  i suppose if they aren’t emotions that you can actively recall a few weeks/months later, they must not be that important anyway.

september..

• there’s a cool open staircase at MoMA connecting maybe the fifth and fourth floors—i forget exactly.  it’s not hidden or anything but is surprisingly difficult to find—david was not happy in april when i dragged him in several circles searching for it.  but it was worth it because there was a big calder mobile hanging above it.  well, in september the mobile was removed!  how disappointing.  i hope they bring it back.  or at least fill the space with something.
• i wore a pink t-shirt one saturday and a lady cop told me “you look nice in your pink!”  thanks lady cop.
• ha and as i write this, i realize i ended up going back to my apartment and changing out of that pink shirt—sorry lady cop :-/ because then…
•  …i went to the US open!!  man that is always so fun.  labor day weekend crowds are a pain but it’s the best time to go—plenty of matches to watch and lots of big names still in the draw.  i prefer to skip the giant main stadium where you’d see the likes of venus/serena or roddick or federer or nadal play—the seats you get for a reasonable price are just so far away.  i much more enjoyed watching mardy fish up close on louis armstrong and tsonga/verdasco even closer in the grandstand.
• stephen moved here in august/september and i went to his hood after the US open.  andrew was in town visiting too.  good to see them and have a shot and a beer.  and stephen and i have both resolved to make more efforts to hang out in 2012!
• sent my mom a text that i did not intend to send her!!
• went to the whitney for the first time saturday the 10th.  i’d say it’s one of my more favorite museums (wonder how it’ll be when it moves..).  it was the last day of that cory arcangel exhibit, which was silly but very entertaining—giant screens of bowling video games, a reel of every seinfeld clip related to kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables, some other funny crap.
• kurt’s birthday that night.  i need to resolve to see the high school crew more in 2012.
• brooklyn botanic garden.  sort of meh.  i suppose spring might be a better time to go, duh.
• tyler turned 28 and i felt so youthful for 3 more months before joining him!
• saturday, september 17: the night i FINALLY won the ticket lottery for book of mormon!!  i must’ve entered 30+ times.  unfortunately i only got box seats and not front row, and the view was a bit obstructed, but i won’t complain too much.  i thought it was good.  over-hyped and some of the “let’s be vulgar to be vulgar” attempts at funniness didn’t go over well with me, but it was still good!
• there was this bmw guggenheim lab thing on houston over the summer.  the structure was really cool, but the content/programming left something to be desired (at least the day i showed up).  and the mobile roberta’s restaurant didn’t have pizza capabilities..
• after bmw guggenheim i walked across the brooklyn bridge and made this post.  i like that picture.  if i convert to “timeline” on facebook maybe i’d make it my “cover” photo.
• i’m out of room for pictures :-/ the rest of the month was just silly art/museum things anyway: affordable art fair (not that affordable), MoMA again for the de kooning retrospective (breezed through it too quickly, oops), and the rubin (eastern religious art) and the intrepid (giant aircraft carrier) for free thanks to smithsonian museum day.

..only 3 more months!

alright alright let’s start 2012 by trying to knock out the last four months of 2011 (good luck, right?).

adam and soni got married on august 27!  gorgeous outdoor setting at a vineyard in sebastopol (which meant i had an excuse to spend a good chunk of time at home the week before), and an equally impressive rehearsal dinner venue the night prior.  we stayed in a big woodsy house for the weekend, complete with what the owner called a “fairy ring” (a fire pit).  i don’t think all of us from willard had been back together since college.  (willard is where i lived freshman year.  ties run deep—randomly ran into a floormate just last night who i don’t think i ever even talked to, but we effortlessly carried on about our 10-year-old social overlap within the dorm.)

and not that i’m counting, but it marked the fourth wedding i’ve been in.  because, you know, i’m such a good friend.  (when is everyone in new york gonna realize that?)

they live in the bay area now, adam and soni.  the bay is great and they’re happy there certainly, but i miss them!  it was so nice having adam on the east coast since college and in particular having him in new york when i moved here.  i haven’t been to grimaldi’s since they left.

i’ve never considered myself to be someone who is really really on the hunt to be in a relationship.  my answer to that okcupid question about “what do you think about falling in love?” (you know the one) is the “i just let it happen” choice, not the “i want it very much to happen” option.  that’s true.  there’s something about winter and my so-so peripheral social situation, though, that has me longing a bit more than my historical norm for companionship with a side of intimacy.

back from home original, sitting on my couch in home current.

on the way flew over a home past—chicagoland.  at the nighttime high altitude it was spectacular to see both the city’s density of lights and the metro area’s continuing sprawl.

looking south i put my camera phone up to the window and later did some photo editor button-mashing.  turned out the ever-ambiguous “interesting,” if nothing else—can’t be a mile deep at all crafts, heh.

adam and soni got married on saturday, august 27!  first, though, some other summer happenings from where we left off..

friday, july 29: all of the young people at work visited our other coworker/buddy who a few weeks prior went through a rough accident.  now five months later you look at him and would never know anything happened.  which is a good thing, recovery—props to him for getting better.  i met out-of-towners josh and enzo that night at a friend of a friend’s apartment, the largest apartment i’d ever seen in new york—oh to have space.  tyler helped organize this big gay wedding ceremony that saturday—pop up chapel.  it was cool to see and tyler was really into it so friends are supposed to support friends, right?  i also met his now-boyfriend for the first time there, and then dave holmes bought us all beers.  how 5 months can be both a short time (“wow your accident was just 5 months ago?  you seem great.”) and a long time (“wow you’ve been dating daniel for 5 months now?  it seems like only last weekend you were [redacted] with that [redacted] at [redacted].”).

friday, august 5: we had a going-away party for aydin at work—inside park at st. bart’s is a fun little outdoor venue for the warmer months.  the office saw six people leave in my first year—25% attrition sounds high but i think that’s par for the consulting course.  at the book of mormon ticket lottery the next afternoon i met two strangers.  none of us won tickets so we decided to spend the rest of the day together.  that was a nice data point to support my romanticism of meeting people organically.  of course, though, both were just visiting new york and outside of facebook i’ll never see them again.

thursday, august 11: the office goes on an annual boat cruise around new york.  it’s one of those touristy-sounding things that ends up being very cool.  camera phone pictures do absolutely no justice to the views, particularly of lower manhattan at dusk.  that weekend mike came to town.  a bunch of his friends from home were around so i tagged along.  lots of places i had never been—the randolph (meh), peels (meh brunch but great homemade ketchup and cool little drinks), the beer garden under the north end of the high line (the bro watching was extraordinary), red bench (the darkest bar ever), and blue ribbon sushi (good though the highlight was after dinner finding a four-foot african-type wood carving in the trash outside).

oops, no more space for adam and soni..

christmas 1987.

home for christmas.  just me and my parents, our (their?) 15-year-old bird, lots of time in the kitchen and dinners on the table.  no brothers or sisters-in-law, no nieces or nephews.  eight under one roof is a lot of people (and personality), but it’s enjoyable.  alas, gone are the days where all three boys coming home is a sure thing.  (i’d be lying, though, if i didn’t say the calmer-than-usual atmosphere is a bit pleasant.)