qedestrian

Hello! It’s been a while. Since the last time I wrote here, I have eaten at several trillion more restaurants, finished a helluva a lot of crosswords, and not set eyes on Manhattan for what is quickly becoming a record number of days.

I recently read this article about the importance of weak social ties–not your best friends for life but your colleagues, your bartenders, the person in your apartment building you exchange greetings with when you walk in the door. Studies show that people are happier when they engage in this kind of social contact, even with strangers.

Of course, these days weak ties are hard to come by. And that’s what I’ve found really hard about social life in these pandemic times. My previous life was absolutely awash in weak ties. First, take the workplace. Last year I moved from a job in a large office to a much smaller one. Turned out the job was not a good fit for me in large part since I missed working on a team. At my old job, to which I returned just before the whole office started working from home, I felt like the mayor himself. No matter the kind of day I was having, I would inevitably engage in some sort of interesting conversation, with good friends, acquaintances, or people I’d never met before. It was like being back in college, or what I imagine the full-time grad school experience would have been like. A lot of good work as well as good morale arose from this happy circumstance, and I was excited to be back. I am so glad to be working with my colleagues remotely now, but of course it’s not the same.

Or take restaurants and bars. Many a time I have felt miserable and grumpy and dragged myself out to one of my regular spots, or somewhere I’ve never been, and method acted my way back into being a human by engaging in conversation with bartenders, waiters, chatty strangers. Hell, I had a lovely exchange with strangers last year where we all tried tastes of one another’s drinks. That’s not the world we live in anymore, to put it mildly. But even just saying hello, please, thank you to other people is a good way to feel more connected.

Now all these opportunities are gone, and with them, the way I used to understand and move through the world. I am pretty damn lucky, I think, even now. I am not an extrovert but I get along with a lot of people (not everyone, of course; who among us). I have a partner, and family, and some friends I talk to on quite a regular basis. But everything feels so different now since so much of my social life, and a part I had not realized was so valuable, is lost. The way that people interact now is not my forte. I don’t really relish the idea of one-on-one videochatting. The groups of people I have virtually hung out with, while lovely, are not who I would necessarily spend time with normally. Most of my favorite social interactions did not used to be parties or large get-togethers. I miss running into my colleagues in the elevator, saying hello to my bartender at Hunky Dory or Oxalis or the Owl Farm, showing up at a political meeting, and low-key days hanging out with a variety of people.

On the flip side, I have done a better job at talking to my strong-tie friends who are farther afield, since we’re all everywhere and nowhere right now. I’ve been on a trivia team with a friend in California, played a board game with people in Pennsylvania and Arkansas, and emailed and talked with friends in all corners of the country.

But I miss the way things used to be. So, hello. With this blog post I’ve tried to take up a few of the suggestions the authors of the article made to better maintain weak ties. I know things are hard but if you’re reading this please know I’m glad you’re out there.

I can’t find it for the life of me but I recently read a delightfully snarky tweet saying something like: the only things we need to read about Hudson Yards are takedowns of the architecture and details of all the food.

This cut a little too close to home. And so I found myself at Hudson Yards on this fine Saturday to check out the black-and-white sandwich and the egg kimbap at Peach Mart and basically avoid the weird new dumb statue that someone (Dave Colon?) called a giant bedbug, an apt comparison. (Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous statue for tourists that you’re maybe not supposed to take photos of?)

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of impersonal malls (the Oculus, the nearest impersonal mall I encounter on a regular basis, drives me crazy since it’s a transit hub but impossible to navigate through). And I loved Alexandra Schwartz’s recent takedown of this one (“a plaza that bears the same relation to New York City as a police-sketch artist’s drawing does to a face”!). However, I also find Vanishing New York’s brand of nostalgia for a grittier New York pretty tiresome, and would have to admit that I had a pretty good time (for sort of serendipitous reasons, more than from the Yards per se, but I’ll take it).

I do like how near Hudson Yards is to the subway (even though the station itself is so far from everything else; I usually just think of it as the place I’d rather avoid by taking the Bolt Bus from Grand St). And it was striking how popular it is–Jon Orcutt’s observation about how people like car-free space, regardless of how you feel about this particular one, is spot on. I wish we had greener, more centrally located places where people could hang out, instead of having to wait on lines to ascend the bedbug, or wander around the mall looking for the food. But if you do wander around the mall looking for food, it can be pretty tasty.

Happily, my navigation instincts were good, and I found the David Chang corner of 20 Hudson Yards pretty fast. It turns out Peach Mart’s black-and-white was pretty forgettable, to be honest, while the kimbap was pretty good (and came with a delightful tiny pig-shaped bottle of soy sauce). But I didn’t find that out for a while since I impulse went into Kawi, the fancy Chang-affiliated restaurant next door (chef Eunjo Kim used to work at another of his restaurants), which was delicious and fed me so much that I would not be able to even consider my Peach Mart loot for hours. First off, a refreshing sake, fino sherry, ginger, salted apple concoction (served in a too-adorable cat mug). Then, to apologize for a long wait for my main course (an issue with the rice cooker) some chicken wings…brought to me by someone I know! We had a nice conversation, and he said he’d give me too much food again next time I come back. (I always seem to run into people I know when I go somewhere on impulse; I like to imagine that the whole city is just full of these encounters if I could only break my routine.)

My main course lived up to the wait: egg yolk and grilled avocado rice, plus a crispy vegetable pancake with dipping sauce, another spicier sauce, some almost-sweet and refreshing kimchi, soup, and an elegant bite of tofu cake. Washed it down with a sour salty plum beer from Hudson Valley, my favorite of breweries, and felt like I’d had a tiny resort vacation all the way on the city’s west coast.

Still can’t pay me to contemplate the Vessel for long, though.

 

 

Once upon a time, I planned a yearlong project where I took a picture of the torii at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden every week. Somehow, four years have passed and visiting the garden has slipped from a project into a routine (more like a biweekly one at this point). I still find it a magical experience, even in the dead of winter, even when the pond has been drained for months while they improve the water flow. In fact, I almost prefer visiting in the off times, when there’s snow on the ground and you can walk through the whole place barely seeing another person. But today the air felt sweeter than it has in ages and I admit to being a sap who welcomes spring just as much as anyone else. Looking forward to some warmer weather; maybe I’ll meet some more avian friends.

I often feel that vacationing is a form of conspicuous consumption,* a feeling which doubtless is not shared by the many people I know who flaunt their lovely vacation photos at every opportunity. Still, I’m sure I take things too far in the other direction since I hardly ever go anywhere. Which means I hardly ever take any time off (which is not great, I’m working on it), since why would I use hard-earned vacation days to sit around at home?

Sometimes, however, I do manage to plan a nice sort of day (a staycation, if you will, but I won’t, it makes me grimace for some reason), as I did today, as a combo recovery-from-being-sick-for-like-a-month and getting-ready-for-a-busy-work-season respite. I doubt anywhere I went fell more than a mile from anywhere else, and it was all quite reachable from home. Or should have been, minus the emergency repairs on my train line today.

After waking up at an ungodly late hour and working around the train by waiting for a bus for a very long time (I should have probably taken a different bus, or walked to the express train stop, but such is life), I headed out on what was largely a food-based day, as will no doubt shock you. So below please enjoy my own conspicuous consumption:

First stop, Babydudes, where I got a nice, fruity iced coffee and the world’s most lovingly made sourdough waffle, and read The Reign of the Kingfisher, which I think I like but don’t quite love yet (it’s a sort of mystery novel wrapped up in superhero trappings). Perhaps I should have taken notes on the waffle; maybe one day I’ll try making one myself. [I dunno why the picture is so blurry, oops, but I didn’t want Babydudes to be left out of the ensuing photographic parade.]

Next, the lovely Hunky Dory, which I’ve already told you I quite like. I had 2 of the world’s tiniest pancakes, along with tea eggs and a smoothly drinkable Bad Penny, made of sweet-potato bourbon, sweet vermouth, and orange-y wine (HD’s descriptor; it was delicious).

Then I hung out in the botanic garden for a couple hours, and chatted with my best buddy in Miami on the phone, a dying art, and she had to go exactly when I arrived at my final destination, MeMe’s Diner, where the cake is so good I preemptively ordered a slice to go and the hospitality is a part of the mission (my server complimented me on reserving the cake, saying a lot of orders were coming in and it could disappear at any moment). While I admired the light in the sky, I ate a leisurely dinner of the world’s most instagrammable (and delicious) salad, bright pops of purple cauliflower and yellow raisins, underpinned by tahini and spice. And then home again not so many hours later than I started out, a little fortified for the busy coming days.

 

*At least, the kind of vacation that involves flying to far-flung locations. Man, flying is really bad for the environment. Please don’t hate me for my crankiness.

You may have noticed I have a lot of opinions about food and drink. Though I usually become a regular at places I find especially delicious, I’ve allowed myself one exception. Despite my indifference to its beer selection, I lived a decent chunk of the last 7 or 8 years inside Pacific Standard’s doors, and I do not regret it.

I don’t even remember why I first rolled into Pacific Standard with some friends. I think we were just looking for somewhere to hang out. I fell in love with its living room atmosphere, which soon became for me that ultimate cliche, a home away from home. I wrote my grad school application on one of its couches. I learned to care about football while watching the Giants play the 49ers (an ill-advised choice as a new Giants fan at a California-themed bar) and go on to beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl. I trash talked my way through many a cooperative card game.  But most important of all was the ritual of pub quiz.

I’d always thought it’d be nice to have a pub quiz team, even though I am not especially great at trivia. It seemed like the sort of thing cool grown-ups would do to hang out (or, well, like having Friends-type friends, but for nerds). It took a while for my team to cohere but it did, with four core members, along with many guests putting in appearances through the years, including a couple of notable ringers who’d join us at finals time. (We return the favor up in Williamsburg.)

My boyfriend is the quiz expert (one legendary tiebreaker round he wrote down about 30 New York counties in a minute), but I had my moments (food, subways, identifying pictures of dog breeds). Our two regular teammates also have their areas of expertise, particularly movies–a category my household is comically ill-equipped to contemplate–and a devotion to current events and the world around us (the quizmaster had an especial fondness for asking about meteor showers). Almost every Sunday, as easy as breathing, working, sleeping, we’d show up, get a table, spend a couple hours answering questions, play some board games, gird ourselves for the work week with some friendly faces. (I called one team our fremeses, since one of them used to work at one of my publishers and we developed a jovially insulting friendship of sorts; it turned out one of my current coworkers was also a quiz devotee.) Attending quiz was so much our default mode that lots of weeks we might not even bother to ask if anyone was showing up, since we knew they were unless we heard otherwise.

My team and its train portmanteau names (The Love Song of Jay Street–MetroTech our flagship) were pretty darn successful, generally coming in the top 3 each season once our lineup cohered. We rolled on through all sorts of stresses and joys, through endless summer walks and begrudging winter Lyft rides, fancy dinners and bar quesadillas, other friendships made and lost. Even when I wasn’t in a very good mood, I was grateful for the opportunity to keep in regular touch with my teammates, and to not give in to ennui and self-pity on otherwise dead-end Sunday nights. Most everyone I care about passed through Pacific Standard at some point or other, whether to play trivia for a night or a year or four, or just to help us drink away our winners’ bar tab or, one glorious time, our chosen keg of Berliner weisse.

I can’t believe it’s over. I keep reflexively trying to plan my weekends around it. I’m sure I’m forgetting a hundred things about it that I want to tell you. If you have any leads for the endless future of Sunday nights, let me know.

Note: I was inspired to write this since one of our competitors wrote a lovely article for Grub Street encapsulating what made the bar, and especially the trivia, so great; I encourage you to read it.

Many things about the present me would puzzle my past self, but perhaps the most surprising is that I go to the gym. I have in fact been so diligent in my gym-going habits that I have made other people feel bad in comparison. Gotta admit, this is really not a part of my self-concept. But it seems to be true.

By gym, I mean I go to the flagship McBurney Y on 14th St, ideally 3x a week, to walk and swim in the water. (I also do a quazillion stretches every day but won’t get into that.) Before I psyched myself up to first breach the Y’s doors in October of 2017, I probably hadn’t been swimming for 10 years. Happily, it’s like the proverbial bicycle and I’m back at it. It’s nice to move around without my knees complaining quite as loud. And to see such a wide range of other people move through the pool and the rest of the building, living their lives. (Sure beats a Tribeca Equinox.) And while I don’t quite feel the need to make friends at the Y, I do appreciate the familiar faces I encounter: the woman who used to try to get me to go to aqua aerobics class; the man I see many mornings who, when I once asked how are you, said something along the lines of, I’m good, and it takes a lot of effort!

Ah yes, another shocking fact. Sometimes (more than half the time, these days) I even go to the gym before work. *Youth self pulls the covers over her head, goes back to bed, while current self extols the virtues of early-morning exercise like a goddamn Y testimonial.*

Just as gratifying, though different, are the days when I hit the pool in the evening (it’s open ’til 11, after all). Like maybe it’s Friday and I am a grown-up now so I can go sit at a hotel speakeasy with a fancy spritz then hop the train down to the Y (“the train is not your friend!” I overheard; I disagree) and revel in the relative emptiness. Not totally empty though; late Y nights are not a secret. Someone must be reading all the testimonials.

 

 

When you are sick and exhausted and have a massive to-do list (see: burnout), sometimes you just want to escape for an hour or two. And sometimes a brand-new restaurant is just the place.

I first encountered Hunky Dory on a sort of extra vacation day I had right at the start of the year, when it obligingly opened up for coffee and pastries right as I was looking for a destination. I ate a beautiful decadent bowl of oatmeal with poached pear, along with a hot cup of coffee, as I watched the owners work toward putting the finishing touches on the space. (Perfect fuel for a January day in the Botanic Garden, where you might encounter my old friend the torii, also working on some personal growth and r&r.)

Hunky Dory’s location on Franklin Avenue around Park Place makes it easy for me to drop by–it’s loosely on my way to the garden, home from work, to other fine establishments in the neighborhood that I frequent. So last weekend I found myself impulse buying a tastier banana chocolate chip muffin than I had any right to expect.

And tonight I nabbed a seat at the bar; some delightful cod tots; a ham, beans, rice, and egg confection; and a warm chocolate chip sesame cookie: a perfect three-course meal in bites. Perhaps even more enticing than the food were the drinks (chosen from a shortened, second-day-of-opening menu): a cocktail with oolong tea, whey, and meyer lemon, with whispers of new components weaving through each sip, and a nonalcoholic concoction mostly hibiscusy with an edge of toasted rice. Sitting and reading a pretty Brooklyn essay collection and coughing merrily to myself, I got to luxuriate in a brief escape from everything awful. Everything besides the restaurant wasn’t quite hunky dory, but, maybe, like SEPTA, getting there?

 

 

 

 

 

 

(PS: This post was apparently brought to you by hyperlinks! Who can say why or where they’ll go.)

When a friend gave me a sourdough starter a year or so ago, I didn’t know it would alter my life in a small but lasting way. I’ve always enjoyed homemade bread (on one ill-advised occasion, after a three-course dinner, I ate most of a loaf at another friend’s house) but somehow it never occurred to me that I could make it myself, not having much experience in that realm. (Other than one surreal attempt at making the New York Times‘s no-knead bread for a college seminar. I mostly remember yet a third breadly friend telling me to turn the bread, toss it, take it out in the moonlight and sing to it, or some such similarly mysterious tiny adjustments over many hours; I also remember, upon seeing the result, declaring with astonishment, This looks like bread! What did you expect, my friend asked. I don’t know, surely not that, though.) And even if I could manage to make bread once or twice, could I manage not to kill the starter, which needs to be fed, every week, like an undemanding yet persistent pet?

Happily, the bread is a success. I make a loaf on average every couple of weeks. It’s a process–typically I start feeding the starter on Thursday or Friday night, prep the dough the next day (this takes a couple of hours though not a lot of active work on my part), and tear into a loaf with fancy butter and/or cheese the following afternoon. The bread is certainly best when it’s freshest; luckily, it doesn’t really last long enough to get stale. In fact, in my humble opinion, freshness is really the determining factor for how good bread is. I’d just as soon eat my own bread hot out of the oven than trust the professionals. (Though I love you, L’Imprimerie!)

Man, isn’t it great to have a fun, unique activity? Except that here, too, as with so many other things, I am a millennial cliche. Bread is so hot right now that the New Yorker is talking about it. There are think pieces about how we are turning to anxiety baking in these stressful times. And, of course, tech bros are trying to optimize bread.

While I don’t think my bread is optimized (I haven’t tried too many variations, and am mostly just pleased that the dough is pretty forgiving of the vagaries of kitchen scale and timing) I do recognize myself in these pieces. It’s satisfying to be able to make my own food (my significant other does so much more of the cooking, generally). l appreciate having a routine in the midst of political and personal stress–the bread is a nice backdrop to board gaming, knee stretching, internetting, and other cool things one does around the house on a Friday night, plus I like going to the library and the food co-op on Saturday morning to pick up reading material and bread fixins. (As for politics, my starter has good vibes; he came to life when Doug Jones was elected.) And it’s nice to share my creations with friends, assuming they last that long: bread is a good centerpiece for a gaming afternoon, and, maybe even better, giving starter to friends so they can make their own bread or pancakes is its own reward.

As you probably know if you’re reading this, I virtually never see movies. It’s basically a personality trait of mine at this point. And yet, 2 of my 3 most recent posts are now movie reviews. Go figure.

Not too long ago, I was tempted away from my anti-movie baseline to see The World Before Your Feet, a documentary about Matt Green, who’s walking every block of New York City. Other people have done this before, but Green’s doing it a bit more intensely—he’s including destinations like parks and cemeteries. In fact, it turns out the whole project ultimately takes on a Zeno’s paradox aspect; it’s not clear that Green’s gotten any closer to finishing his travels by the movie’s end.

I especially enjoyed this movie because I went on a couple of walks with Green once upon a time, when he used to lead groups on all sorts of adventures. Once we admired window decorations in Bay Ridge then trekked all the way down to Coney Island, including some waterfront adventures; the other time, we walked on the beach along Sheepshead Bay, saw some model planes and semi-abandoned hangars at Floyd Bennett Field, and crossed the Marine Parkway Bridge to the Rockaways. (Green intended to keep going onward to Breezy Point and back; my companion and I begged off, having already walked miles in the double digits.)

Watching the movie was a bittersweet experience. I loved seeing how Green had kept up with his mission all these years, and the movie has lots of great moments of humor and even drama. It acknowledges the quixotic nature of Green’s quest, but doesn’t make (too much) light of it. Parts of the movie touch upon the privileges Green has that facilitate his project (he crashes with friends and doesn’t have to spend much money; as a white man, he has not found himself in the sorts of threating situations that, say, Garnette Cadogan experiences walking while black. And there are times when Green’s interpersonal relationships strain under the pressure of his desire to walk; for example, a former girlfriend discusses how he never wanted to do things she was interested in, like going to the movies, preferring to walk instead. I can relate. As a counterpoint to these more serious issues, though Green doesn’t consider himself a people person, or his walk to be a social activity, there are some great moments of connection between him and the people he encounters on his way. Plus he does some great research as he goes; perhaps this is the project more than the walking itself.

At the same time, sitting in the movie theater with my sore back and knees was so frustrating. I envy Green’s ability to just take off and go wherever he wants; this feeling is a constant low-level ache behind everything I do these days, which the movie only exacerbated. (I appreciate that Green doesn’t take it for granted: he survived a serious crash as a cyclist and his family has had some other health scares; the movie suggests that his project arose in response.) Get out there and walk while you can, friends. I myself am going to leave you to take a spin around the block now.

So there are various reasons why I quit blogging and various reasons why I might start again, but let’s simplify and say: burnout.

I used to be the world’s most proactive person. I finished everything way ahead of schedule, sometimes to the annoyance of teachers and bosses. But after years of working and going to school at night and some constant low-level health woes, a funny thing happened. I learned to procrastinate. Need to send documentation of physical therapy to an insurance company? Maybe tomorrow. Teeny-tiny task that could be done no sooner than I could snap my fingers (if I could snap my fingers)? Eh, I’ll get to it eventually. Blog post that I could write but no one might read? Yeah, guess how that turned out.

It’s hard not to view this state of affairs as a personal failing, even though I can see how it arose out of years being busy and miserable and diligent. So it was fortuitous that I read Anne Helen Petersen’s article about millennial burnout, and I would encourage you to do the same. (Seriously; it’s way better and more comprehensive than anything I say here. I’ll wait.)

Did the article resonate with me? I can’t even count the ways. First of all, over the course of an evening I kept trying to read it and things intervened (chatting friends, knee stretches, a really urgent crossword puzzle). This inability to complete a simple task in itself is indicative of burnout. Petersen talks about the wave of articles criticizing millennials for putting off basic life tasks like mailing letters, registering to vote, doing the laundry—all while often managing larger endeavors like holding a job or going to school. Why are millennials so damn lazy?

Well, maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe our sense that we are constantly on call both professionally (got any outstanding work emails?) and personally (have you uploaded a glamorous shot to Instagram today or made a clever tweet?) is burning us out.

What is burnout exactly? Petersen discusses the common millennial belief that if we follow the right path—get good grades, work hard, get a good job—we will succeed. For a lot of structural reasons which she gets into and I will gloss over here, but which I’m sure you can imagine (student loans and financial crises are a couple), that isn’t really the case. We get caught up in a cycle of working ever harder and, rather than this increased productivity leading to more leisure time, we’re never able to take a break for fear of falling behind.

This cycle results in burnout, a psychological diagnosis Petersen explains was originally applied by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” Burnout isn’t just a brief state of exhaustion; it’s the culmination of pushing and pushing for ages, while never feeling you’ve completed anything sufficiently to take a break. Know the feeling?

I know I do. I can recognize it in what I’ve always glibly described as “learning to procrastinate.” I recognize it when I feel overwhelmed by the list of tickets and reservations in my inbox, even though they’re for fun things; when I spend weekend mornings “catching up on” the internet, as if that is an achievable goal; when I sign up to help out with a political group because I want to be involved, only to feel paralyzed by not being able to finish even a simple task while I wait for other volunteers to get back to me.

As Petersen puts it: “That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial.”

I suspect that I, like Petersen, have been too good at being a millennial. Like her, I do not know how to solve burnout, or think that it’s solvable, really. But I appreciate knowing I’m not alone, and having a new way to think about the dread I feel when faced with my backlog of Times crosswords. I hope you will as well.

PS: I spent about a week trying to come up with a good inaugural topic. Once I realized I’d told about six people to read the burnout article, I decided I might have more to say about it. And I like the trick of attempting to counteract my creative burnout by writing about it. I hope something sparks.