New (York) to my life
One of the things I’ve been thinking about more and more post-grad is how simultaneously fast and slow the days seem to fly by. I would have always characterized myself as a restless individual, but I now often find myself laying in bed on a Saturday morning feeling guilty for not seizing the day. If I do eventually haul myself up, without a plan in mind I will find myself wandering around town aimlessly, tempted yet reluctant to eat and shop my way through the city.
Long story short, I have discovered that I am a person who requires constant attention and enrichment, much the same way dogs are meant to spend time trying to break into clever contraptions to discover hidden treats.
As expected, MIT produces its fair share of tech bros, many of whom eventually do move to the city. Trying climbing was an inevitable outcome that I could only delay for so long. My friend has a monthly membership to Central Rock Gym (CRG), and he gets one or two guest passes every month to spread the climbing agenda. Finding time when the both of us were free and in town was a journey in and of itself, but that’s a different story, and I am grateful that he thought of me of a worthy receiver of the climbing propoganda.
There’s actually a sort of funny story attached to this experience. The day we had planned to meet up, the sun was shining and a cool breeze that finally did not smell of garbage was blowing through Midtown, so I thought “Ah, what the heck, I’ll take a walk through Central Park before going to CRG”. The CRG is located four or five avenues west of Columbus Circle, and I naively thought I would walk north for a bit through Central Park, then meander my way back down to the gym. Alas, the good weather had already been taken advantage of by the United half-marathon runners, and the entire west border of Central Park had been fenced off. The further north I walked, the more futile I realized my attempts would be to find an exit, so I spent the second half hour of my walk retracing my exact steps back to south Central Park. When I at last arrived to the CRG, I discovered that I was, in fact, 3 minutes early, which I thought uncharacteristic of myself and thus immediately decided to take a trip into the cafe next door, so I texted my friend my location and hoped that he was running late.
My friend was indeed running late, but a minute later I received a confusing text informing me that I was in the wrong location. Now, my friend and I had gone on a spring break trip to Europe way back in junior year, and I had just left my location on afterwards (clearly with the foresight that it would come in handy in this exact situation). With this handy tidbit of information, it dawned on me that there were in fact two Central Rock Gyms in Manhattan, and I had foolishly made my assumptions and gone to the one in uptown when my friend, who notably lives in Chelsea, had told me to meet him at the downtown location. So I would be late after all. I hurriedly found the nearest bus station and ashamedly ate my croffle (croissant waffle!) and matcha latte I had since obtained from the cafe.
There was another nice lady at the station who confirmed that I was standing in the correct location, but after waiting for over 10 minutes with no sign of salvation I considered the possibility that our bus was not on its way towards us and had instead decided to take a detour to Mars. With this possibility in mind, I gave up and called a Lyft. The lady standing at the station had been there much longer than me, and we had chatted a bit while waiting. She was a home care assistant, and her story was much more deserving of a reader’s empathy: not only was she was coming back from an overnight shift, she was fasting, her phone was about to die, and she was just hoping to get home so she could get some rest. If she was waiting for the same bus, I figured her destination was somewhere downtown and invited her to join my Lyft. Luckily, the Lyft driver had an iPhone charger and she was able to put some juice back into her phone before we parted ways.
So that story ended up taking up more text than I initially anticipated. Back to my original intention of discussing climbing — I actually had been meaning to try it for a while, and after watching several Instagram reels, in my mind I thought I would be able to do a V4 right off the bat (it just looks so easy). I am but a weak spaghetti noodle, however, and climbing proved to be much more difficult than I could have ever imagined. I had never had much upper body strength, but since I stopped playing tennis on a regular basis, things had really deteriorated. My arms shook on even the simplest of holds, so I quickly tired myself out, but watching my friend transform into a monkey on the wall was extremely entertaining and impressive.
The MIT arts department offers pottery wheel classes on a quarterly basis, but I did not discover this until there was only one quarter left before graduation and sadly one can only receive positive karma so many times, so the ceramics gods did not grant me a spot. Ceramics is also one of those things that looks easier the better people get at doing it, so I once again grew an unfounded confidence for pottery wheel. I rallied some troops into a Sunday morning ceramics class at Choplet Ceramic Studio (pronounced “schop-lay”, as the French do), and we each made our own little deformed bowls.
I ended up with clay all over my clothes but also a great deal of satisfaction for someone who had admittedly accomplished very little. I think, in the end, we’re all tactile creatures who need to be doing things with our hands once in a while (outside of the typey-typey). At the end of April, I will be partaking in an 8-week course with Choplet, which should get me out of bed on Sunday mornings a little more effectively than whatever I was doing before.
A week ago, I went to a hot yoga class at Heatwise on the back of a BOGO deal for a class. Yoga is something I had spent a few months in 2021 self-learning while cooped up my dorm room, and I remember enjoying how yoga was a little bit of strength-building, a little bit of balance, and a little bit of flexibility. We had free Downward Dog student subscriptions, and with not much else to do during COVID, it was easy to get into the habit of doing 20-minute practices every other day. I thought that Corepower Yoga would also be like this, and my second summer interning in New York, I signed up with a few friends for a random hot yoga “workout” class. Little did I know that my life would be altered forever. The Thursday evening prior, a number of coworkers had begun to complain of stomach issues, which led us to believe a possible food poisoning epidemic was underway. I, however, believed myself above all the babble and felt no issues. But that fateful Thursday lunch would come for me, eventually. By Saturday my tummy was rumbling, but I braved onwards towards Sunday morning yoga.
Yoga was not yoga that day. It was a HIIT class disguised as yoga that went on for 2 hours in a 98-degree Fahrenheit studio which began to reek of the bodily sweat of 20 individuals ill-prepared for burpees as a part of their practice. As you might imagine, burpees were not an exercise my stomach would have be fond of at the time. I was already exhausted by the end of the first hour, and then by an hour and a half I had the strongest feeling that something terrible would happen if I did not exit the room right away. I made a beeline for the bathroom and spent the last 20 minutes of the class there. The trauma of this experience sat with me for a great deal of time, so I was indeed initially quite hesitant to sign up for another “hot yoga” class.
Heatwise was a much more pleasant experience, though. The room did not feel that hot as first, but as we progressed through the class, my yoga mat became more of a slip-n-slide. There was sweat coming out of every possible pore in my body. The moves and positions we held were all decidely yoga-like, and not once did I have to grab weights or do jumping jacks. I felt incredible afterwards.
I had never much enjoyed cooking before, but since starting work I’ve spent very little time eating home-cooked food, and it’s made me realize that sometimes when you’re craving something uber-specific, not even Uber Eats can solve your problem. I had some amazing udon at Udon St. Mark’s, and after that I couldn’t stop thinking about the udon my mom used to make at home. It was nothing really fancy, but it tasted warm and savory and most importantly, not too salty (an issue I tend to have with restaurant noodles). I eventually concluded that I could surely reproduce an udon with similar qualities, and spam-ordered several ingredients from Weee!, an Asian grocery site I enjoyed. The resulting udon was something that did not have much resemblance to my mother’s udon, but was special and good in its own way.
I still don’t cook much, but I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of making myself food a little more. I still think the time ratio of prep vs. eating is simply too high, but if I have something I want to eat in mind, I don’t think of my lack of cooking skills as so much of a barrier anymore. There are so many recipes online, and worst case if I still manage to mess it up, I’ll learn something new for next time.
Has anyone ever played Throw Throw Burrito before? Actually, before I start with that tidbit, I want to preface that I think adults should play board games way more than they do. As a general principle, I think the idea of “playdates” is just such a fabulous concept only children can partake in, and nowadays the activity of choice is mostly meals, movies, etc. These are fantastic activities that one cannot participate in independently as a 10-year old, but since then where has the concept of play gone? Since we’ve established the soundness of my argument, I will now share that I hosted a board game sesh at my apartment a month or so ago, and I was recommended the game Throw Throw Burrito, which is as the name suggests, a game involving throwing burritos. It sounded pretty silly when I heard about it, but as it would happen, I saw it at a Target the night before and couldn’t resist the burrito squishies looking at me in such a yearning manner.
The burritos called out to me with good reason. Throw Throw Burrito is a silly game, but in a somewhat whimsical and hilarious manner. This game devolved into a bit of chaos at the end, in which the cards were abandoned and the long hallway of my apartment became the perfect battleground for burrito duels. Our glorified game of dodgeball ended with me collapsing onto the ground behind the coach as a last-ditch attempt to avoid the burrito.
As great as New York can be, I do think there’s a lot of value in getting out of town every now and then. Winter in New York was tough for me. It got dark quite early every evening, and with the poor weather it was hard to want to get out and do things. I went out of town twice to go snowboarding, and I remember those two weekends brought me a lot of happiness, the source of which was equal parts being able to spend time with friends and being able to experience a wide open sky and a new environment.
I also got to spent Easter Weekend near DC, where I also saw my first hockey game. I had a hot dog in the first third, then got hungry and ate poutine fries in the last third (totally irrelevant to the rest of the experience, but I was just an eating machine that day). I also had the chance to go to a driving range and swing a golf club a few times. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: golf is such a great stress reliever because the crack of the driver against a golf ball on good contact is one of the most satisfying sounds to ever exist.
I thought as I started this post that it would be more of a collection of things to do in New York that weren’t eating or shopping, but it became more of a little diary of random moments in life that have stuck to the back of my mind.
