Playing catch-up

Whaddaya know -- it's been three months since I started this blog, so I'm already a quarter of the way through my final year in New York City. Since I haven't written in a while (due to a confluence of factors as varied as cold weather, professional sports, and long work hours), here's a rundown of what's been happening in the last two weeks, starting with the most recent.

Friday, November 2: It's amazing how you can ignore certain things that are right under your nose. There's a restaurant just down the street from our apartment called The Kitchen Club, a cozy-looking corner joint that always looked a little too old and stuffy for our liking. But Sarah (who I'll begin to referring to as Sarah the Wife, unless she tells me not to) went there a couple of weeks ago and loved it! So we went back this Friday and everything was delicious, especially the duck-and-ginger dumpling appetizer. Unlike virtually every restaurant I've been to, the food at the Kitchen Club is under-seasoned, which delighted me to no end. One of my pet peeves is over-salted food, which I complained about in my entry on Babbo.

Tuesday and Wednesday, October 30-31: Halloween in New York is wild. For example, on my way to work on Wednesday, I walked by a woman dressed as a squid, talking nonchalantly to her friend, who was dressed in plainclothes. By then, I'd sort of had enough with Halloween, because the night before, the company had our annual Halloween Party, which, among other things, is an excuse to get drunk on a weeknight and then partake in what is simultaneously the best and the worst cultural activity in modern society: karaoke. But before things devolved so, I and four co-workers had to judge the group costume contest. Let's just say that the winning team beat out all others by sheer audacity and humor, in an NC-17 kind of way.

Thursday, October 25: I attended Black Ball 2007, a fundraising event held annually to honor people who've done significant work to battle AIDS and its effects in Africa. The only reason I got to go was because Anomaly does pro bono design and promotional work for Keep A Child Alive, the organizer of the event. I was not, unfortunately, one of the select few offered a seat at the $10,000-a-plate table, eating Korean spare-ribs just a few feet away from the likes of Bono, Gwen Stefani and Jay-Z. Most of us from the company were banished to the upstairs cocktail area, where we watched Alicia Keys duet with Sheryl Crow on stage, and reduced the open bar to their last bottle of vodka. But the real thrill was listening to Bono's speech, during which he imagined a world where a person's survival isn't dependent on where he is born. After five minutes listening to the guy, I understood his ability to sway rulers and rockers, policy-makers and proletariat: there is no discernible pretense in him.

Postscript: On the same night I was serenaded by Alicia Keys, Sarah the Wife bumped into celebrity chef Bobby Flay at a book signing, which explains why I now have a signed copy of Mesa Grill Cookbook. This was one ridiculous night.

Thursday, October 25: I had a long conversation with a cab driver. For the duration of my trip, which was between Madison Square Garden and my apartment at the corner of Mott and Houston, his meter refused to work, a consequence of those newfangled GPS systems that cabbies are now required to install. The broken meter was of no concern to me -- I'm well familiar with the route and his estimation of the fare was exactly what I'd had in mind. We chatted about the cabbie strike, and then about where he was from (El Salvador) and whether or not it was still lucrative to drive a cab in New York (it is decidedly not, due to higher maintenance and gas prices and stagnant ridership). He was the second cabbie I'd spoken to in two weeks who was seriously thinking about leaving New York and returning to his native country, which made me sort of sad. I tipped him extra.