The cadence of life is a little different now that I live in Brooklyn and work from home. In my 12 years in New York City, I have:

  • lived in Brooklyn and worked in Brooklyn
  • lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan (the worst overall)
  • lived in Manhattan and worked in Manhattan
  • lived in Manhattan and worked from home
  • lived in Brooklyn and worked from home

and the one that feels most like not working at all is living in Brooklyn and working from home. The only thing is that, as always, the psychological barrier to completing inter-borough travel on a weekday evening feels insurmountable, even though it’s a subway ride that’s all of 15 minutes.

Yesterday, I logged off around 5 pm, and had a beer on the patio of the corner bar and read a book, decided I had a craving for dumplings, and made mental moves to make physical moves to the dumpling shop a few doors down, marveling at how lucky I am to have all these nice things within my radius of a few blocks. But then I was thinking about how the dumpling wrappers at this particular shop are thicker than I prefer1, and that the train ride to some of the best dumplings I’ve ever had is too short to use it as an excuse, and how when I used to work at the hospital one of my co-residents who lived literally next door to the hospital explained it by saying “I’d rather commute to fun” and how that has stuck with me, and essentially ended up overthinking this decision to the point where I almost just decided to go home and eat leftovers.

Anyway, I did end up going to Manhattan, and the trip was a lot less dramatic than I made it out to be in my head, and enjoyed the best wonton soup, and then came back to Brooklyn at a reasonable hour and was in bed by 9:30. Success!

Colorful hand-painted mural in Manhattan Chinatown depicting various animals in the Chinese zodiac eating dim sum

Division street, Manhattan Chinatown

  1. I would say that for any carb-based-vehicle-with-a-filling type of food, whether it’s a sandwich, a dumpling, a taco, a samosa, etc, I prefer a moderately high ratio of filling to carb-based vehicle, with the exception of banh mi, whose baguette should ideally have a crusty outer layer and a soft, fluffy inner layer regardless of thickness (and thicker is okay by me, but for this use case only). ↩︎