Returning to New York, my other home

I’m enjoying the wealth of time between two weeks of vacation and essentially two coming weeks of “garden leave” as I prepare to change jobs. This year has been A LOT, so it’s welcome and needed to have time to rest, recover, think, enjoy, spend time with friends, including both a return visit to NYC and time here in Valencia.

I love both NYC and Spain. I fell in love with Spain before I ever visited New York. I came to Spain to study for a semester at 19 in Toledo, and visited NYC for the first time on my return to the U.S. It’s funny that the two places I feel most at home now are two places that were very foreign to me (Spain literally a foreign country) when I first visited them, having grown up in Davenport, Iowa. I can still remember landing at JFK on my return from the semester in Spain (plus a month traveling around Europe on the Eurail and staying in hostels), being stunned and overwhelmed by the barrage of ads on giant billboards on the drive into Manhattan, eyes wide seeing the many skyscrapers. I had never been in a city as big as NYC, plus after five months in Europe, I was out of the habit of U.S. billboards and in-your-face advertising.

Two decades later, I feel ever so at home in both NYC and Spain (even though there are still moments where something in Spain catches me by surprise). I think this speaks a bit to how sometimes what is right for you in the long-term may be challenging to start with, or what will bring the most growth and perhaps even an easier path down the line will require huge effort and strain to start, whether in the form of learning a new language or adapting to life in a huge city like New York. 

I need this reminder. 

Probably almost all of us need this reminder.

The rewards don’t come all at once and the sweetest ones require a lot of work to get there. 

Spending 10 days back in NYC, where I lived for 12 years, felt like going home to my other home. Of course it was fantastic to catch up with so many friends, and to walk and run on the same streets I did for years, almost every block bringing up a memory from different moments in my life - with different friends, in different jobs, living in different apartments in different neighborhoods, with different people I dated, etc etc.

The best parts besides spending time with friends were:

*Being immersed once more in a city that is such an incredibly rich and diverse tapestry of peoples and cultures. Living there, I took it for granted, but to get on the subway and hear a host of languages and see the many styles of clothing was soul food. Nearly 40% of New Yorkers are immigrants, and that means the world comes together in a special way in NYC.

*The intellectual level of conversations. Absolutely these can happen anywhere around the world, but to move to NYC from elsewhere tends to denote a certain type of personality - ambitious, striver, seeking to “comerse el mundo” as they would say in Spain, confident, wanderer, unwilling to settle. That can be exhausting on a daily basis as well as exhilarating. Yet it also opens the door to even the most mundane interaction turning into a deep conversation.

*The warm welcome back from casual acquaintances and even people at restaurants or bars or neighborhood spots I frequented. This is part of the feeling of belonging and feeling that New York is really home and always will be, even if other places are as well.

Books - taking advantage of the combination of vacation and a sort of “garden leave” before my new job to read a lot, have been reading almost a book a day (I read really fast). Some highlights from the last couple of weeks

The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill - by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch - I had never heard of this assassination attempt on Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. Fascinating.

The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World - by Joe Keohane - I talk to strangers a lot, so I am on board with this, but even if you are more reticent to do so, or think people will be bothered by your talking to them, this book has evidence on why you should talk more to strangers and how it will benefit both you and the other party.

Who Can You Trust: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart - by Rachel Botsman - Really interesting read on the shift to distributed trust and how we can adapt to this new world, as well as some of the challenges within

The Kneeling Man - by Leta McCullough Seletzky - fascinating book by Leta McCullough Seletzky, whose father Mac (Merrell) was a spy (though she didn’t know it) who witnessed Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and was captured in a picture of the event.

The author knew little more than the unexplained picture, or that her dad (her parents were divorced) had been in the Army and a police officer before her birth and then worked for the government in an unexplained capacity

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America - by Clint Smith - A powerful book on on the legacy of slavery, and how many stories are hidden in plain view.

Articles

A must-read on the sadistic armies being built and used against immigrants fleeing their homelands by governors of red states such as Texas and Florida.

A heretical approach to venture capital, by Daniel Kimmerling of Deciens (h/t Àlex Johnson newsletter

The Money problem - I loved this read on getting caught doing things that don’t matter due to “golden handcuffs”

What’s next for Citibike

Dearth of public pools and how this leads to more drownings, by Mara Gay.

Tragic rise in child labor

On fatigue in long COVID

Bullshit model of AI by Carissa Veliz 

Movie: Barbie. Saw Barbie. I didn’t play w/Barbies as a kid b/c I saw them as girlie-girl, & I was into sports, books & astronomy. I thought the movie was excellent - showcasing how we all are steered into gender roles, incl an exaggerated but on point look at how women are blocked from power. It’s a movie and a satire, of course it’s not 100% accurate. Neither the Barbies or the Kens have freedom to do what they would like in the movie. The win for everyone is where we can all pursue our personal dreams without bias or restrictions.