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Goodbye, New York
Trains.
The first thing I think about when imagining a life without NYC is a life with far fewer trains. A life that feels physically less expansive. I can walk five minutes and get on a train line that will take me almost anywhere.
Knowing.
A sense of knowing where I live. Really knowing, feeling so comfy, so at home. I recognize things all the time, I know how to navigate, this city feels so safe, so easy to try something—make it work for me.
Dinners.
So many dinners. Chill dinners at home, the vast majority of my lifetime cooking has been in NYC. My cooking style has grown and developed from the needs of my life in NYC. I wasn't comfy cooking at scale when I moved here, and by golly now it's so chill. Dinners. People eating my food, people cooking for me.
1+1.
To some extent the single choice of mine that has had the largest impact on my social life here. Basically every friend I have made here can be traced back to that event. The learning process, the sadness of throwing an event where not a single person wants to show up. Grinding week after week, asking strangers to come to my weird dinner party. Learning how to host, learning what makes a good party and what doesn't matter. Meeting so many people. So many. Navigating hosting an open event where there would be people who I personally don't like in my house eating food that I made. Really fucking accomplishing my goal. Feeling so fucking good about the dinner party. Great food, great vibes, always oversubscribed, creating something that really felt like it made the world a better place. A thing that simply brought people together. So many people have gotten their friends and sometimes their start in NYC from that event. Getting absolutely blindsided by my co-conspirator, longest NYC friend, co-host.
People.
My house, the community. No more comfy evenings with people that I know so well, people that are the end result of so much. The people are to some extent a collection of my history here in this city, collected from various points of my life. They all fit together both within me and in relation to each other.
Growing.
Growing so much. I came here out of college straight into COVID. I was so young, so bright-eyed. Sometimes I miss that version of myself, everything was so exciting, so new, so novel. Wanting to know and be known. Slowly growing my social life from nothing. Who I am now is so different from when I moved here. When I moved here I didn't know what I wanted (not that I really know that now) so I just wanted to retire early, move to Dunedin, New Zealand (college town, self-sufficient in case of nuclear war, English-speaking, relatively cheap) and build a nice tower house to live in and maybe spend all of my time in the soon to be coming extremely high quality AI-powered video games.
Living alone in FiDi
then starting 1+1
“Both of us have felt like there aren't great ways for us to meet genuinely new people, so the hope is that we can curate an event that is both fun and brings together strangers drawn from a broad distribution. With each iteration of this event the pool of people should become wider; while I might know your +1, I almost certainly don't know your +1's +1's +1.”
From the first 1+1 email, October 2021
then moving into a new house with Mel
then moving into a larger house with aspirations of communal living, Zack and Exa moving in
then finally moving into an even larger house, Julia and Abby moving in.
September 2020 — March 2026