I didn’t think we were supposed to get this much rain this weekend. A few sprinkles or the possibility of rain was forecast, but not such a washout like the kind of rain we had on Sunday. May is a busy month for outdoor events; it signals the start of the outdoor summer season and there was a lot going on in the city this weekend. The weather just wasn’t on our side. Some events, like the Brooklyn Flea and the annual street fair held in our neighborhood are rain or shine, but there was another big, 3 day event held in Prospect Park this weekend that was cancelled at the last minute on Sunday.

As an event goer, a cancellation or rain might be an inconvenience and derail weekend plans, but as a vendor, the weather can make or break us. When the festival at Prospect Park was cancelled, we immediately thought of all our food biz friends who had worked all week prepping food, only to be left with so much of it before the day even got started. It’s an expensive loss. As a business that relies on some of our income to be generated at outdoor markets, we know how frustrating it is when the weather doesn’t cooperate. As luck would have it, we sat out of our usual markets this weekend because of an event on Sunday where Mark was one of the participating Pastry Chefs (The Manhattan Cocktail Classic). But he was out there at the Flea last Saturday in cool, rain threatening weather himself until the clouds finally broke and he had to break down early. You just never know with the weather.
 
Despite the steady rain, the girls and I pulled on our rain boots and rain jackets to wander around the street fair that they look forward to every year. There were a lot less crowds and there were plenty of empty booth spaces that should have been filled as it is every year when the weather fares better. As a vendor of markets ourselves, it’s hard not to recognize the disappointed faces of vendors as we were walking around. On days like this, you hope that you break even and just cut your losses. Maybe you make a little money, but most likely not enough to cover material and labor costs for the days preceding the event. This would be the best case scenario, to break even. The girls and I did our best to support the vendors who were set up by spreading our money around – a grilled corn on a stick at this booth, a taco at that booth, a corn dog here, a bubble tea somewhere else. There will be other street fairs and outdoor events and while you might win at some, you might lose at others; we’re at the mercy of the weather. Hopefully it won’t rain on Saturday when Mark goes back to the Flea.

Did you know that we’re huge basketball fans? All of us, even the girls. It’s so entertaining to watch Knicks games with them because they get so nervous and chatty and they’re full of hilarious commentary. It’s almost like watching a game with cranky old ladies who can’t stop commenting about every play, much like those old Muppet guys sitting on the balcony of the Muppet Show (oh, did you know they have names?? Statler and Waldorf! I had no idea). Mark gets kind of annoyed because he rarely gets down time and when he sits down to watch a game, he just wants to watch the game in peace. Poor guy. He has to watch basketball games with 3 loud, nervous nellies who scream at the TV.

I grew up watching sports with my dad and my brother – the Knicks, the Mets & Yankees, hockey and the Olympics (I was never into football and still find it unwatchable). I was also obsessive about tennis in high school. Even though I was probably the least athletic kid ever, some of my biggest memories from my childhood involve sports, from watching games on TV to going to baseball games at Shea Stadium to playing those crude early Atari and Commodore 64 Olympic themed video games. Even if you’re not into sports, and even if you don’t like what it has come to represent these days (oh, you know…the egos, the celebrity worshipping, the endorsements and bloated contracts) you can’t deny that it has some strange power to illicit the most crazy and passionate emotions out of people. It also has the undeniable ability to generate city-wide pride in a way that few other things can.
 
If you grew up in NY in the 80s, then you’ll remember the year the Mets won the World Series in 1986, even if you didn’t care about baseball. The ’86 season was magical and the post-season playoffs were dramatic. That month of baseball in the Fall of ’86 is one of my fondest memories growing up. My family and I would sit in our basement family room glued to the TV as we watched the post-season unfold and the Mets win another series, and another, until they became World Champions in dramatic fashion. Truth be told, there wasn’t much bonding within our family back in those days, but we bonded and cheered over baseball.
 
I became particularly obsessive with basketball back in the late 90s during my grad school years. I was back in NY and the Knicks were surging. I’ll even admit that I scheduled my social life around Knicks games. Back in the days before Youtube, DVR or TiVO, if you wanted to watch the game, you had to catch it on live TV (well, I guess you could have programmed your VCR, but ours was rather wanky and never recorded things right). I was the worst kind of basketball fan too in that I would get too emotionally invested in the outcomes of the game. If the game itself was close, it would stress me out to the point that sometimes it would get too unbearable and I would have to turn it off. But after the Knicks started dismantling the core players that I fell in love with after losing in the finals in 1999, I fell out of love with basketball. The celebrity status of some of the players got too ridiculous, the money involved in sports were outrageous and the Knicks fell into a decade slumber.
 
So it came as a surprise when last season my interest in the Knicks got piqued again when I kept hearing about that Asian American player, Jeremy Lin. I know, I know, Lindsanity blah blah blah, but you have to understand even if you aren’t a sports fan, that those few months of basketball and the craziness surrounding it last year were unprecedented and remarkable, not only for what he did for basketball and a beat down Knicks franchise, but what he did for the economics of sports, for the city, and what he did for other Asians. It’s like the city woke up; basketball was exciting again and we had something to cheer about. Why was it such a big deal? The truth is, we don’t have a lot of Asian American role models in mainstream popular culture, in sports or really…anywhere. We didn’t have them growing up and we still don’t really have them now 20-30 years later. I mean think about it, and then think about how true that still is. So yeah, when an Asian American kid, and one who arguably fits into the typical Asian stereotype makes waves in pro sports, news and the media and becomes a household name to the point of oversaturation, you can bet that every Asian American person in the country is going to take notice because it just doesn’t happen very often.
 
A lot has been written over the past year about Jeremy’s rise (and “fall”) and some of the discrimination that he dealt with in his young career. My friends and I almost became like protective mother hens as we couldn’t quite imagine the pressure, the criticism and unrealistic expectations that was suddenly placed on his shoulders at such a young age as he became an icon for a whole race, but that’s what happens when there are so few before you. When the Knicks didn’t resign him because of off season contract follies, I was fuming for weeks. But you know, I’m a Knicks fan first, even though they are a team that hands its fans heartbreak over and over again and so I eventually moved on. A year later, we’re watching our team advance in the playoffs for the first time since I was last captivated by basketball 14 years ago, but I doubt that I would have been back to following basketball this closely if it wasn’t for the Lin story. I have to credit him for making me care about basketball again. And now we watch games as a family every night that games are on, sometimes watching live NBA games too at the newly built Barclay Center nearby (but we’ll never be Nets fans. Sports loyalty is weird and complicated like that), high-fiving and yelling at the TV just like I did with my family when I was a kid.

Cherry blossoms are now at its peak here in the city, and like thousands of other New Yorkers we flocked to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens to revel underneath fluffy pink and white blossoms. It was sandal weather too, and the girls and I walked a million miles over the weekend. Along our walks, they like to collect clusters of blossoms that have fallen off trees and bring them home to place in shallow bowls of water.

The blossoms will probably be gone in another week or two. After that, summer isn’t far behind. 2 more months of school left in the year. Time doesn’t stop for anyone, does it?

It was 82 degrees today.

And in that way that Spring sneaks up suddenly and then passes over entirely, we were in sandals and short sleeves. The trees that were bare just a few days ago had magnolia blossoms and the tiniest green buds that opened into leaves overnight.
 
I left the house early this morning, joining the early morning rush hour commuters into Manhattan after dropping the kids off to school and didn’t come back until after the kids got home. After a photoshoot for a client, I walked around Soho and had lunch with a friend out on a restaurant patio. I even wore a dress. I think I’m starting to emerge from the (self-imposed) confinement of winter, and now with a bit a time before my next project starts, I’m making plans and seeing friends.
 
I had a realization after talking with a few people recently and finally came to a bit of clarity on what I feel has been missing from my life. I’m missing art. Not the kind of creativity reserved for client work or even stuff that I’m creating for the business, but art for myself. This is surprising for a number of reasons, but mostly because I haven’t felt any desire to create art in a really long time. When I started giving it more thought, I questioned whether I ever made art for myself outside of maybe my childhood, despite the fact that I’ve been creative one way or another my whole life. There was always some sort of agenda or end goal – a school grade, a teacher’s critique, an art scholarship, or a client approval. I think taking up photography again in recent years was a step towards doing something creative just for the joy and exploration, but I haven’t pushed it far enough. I don’t know if I’m ready to bust out the paints or anything yet, but it’s time to do something.
 
I always latched onto this concept of paying yourself first when it comes to finances and saving. It’s guided the way I approach money and this philosophy has served us well over the years. I realized the other day that time can be as valuable a commodity as money and there’s no reason not to approach it the same way. So I’m challenging myself to pay myself first; instead of becoming frustrated with the lack of time to pursue my own projects, I’m going to pay myself in time each day, even if all I can manage to squeeze some days is 30 minutes. Let’s see what happens.

Something seems to have happened within the last year that makes me sort of hold my breath. I never really think about leaving New York, ever. We’re committed to raising the girls here all the way through college and beyond and I’m not done with this city yet. When I look back at my own NYC childhood and reflect on how the city has shaped me and how I see the world, I feel good about raising the girls here. I have a feeling that we’ll be in our current apartment for a good long while even though many of our neighbors are upgrading to bigger spaces or moving to the suburbs. But when I try to visualize our senior citizen selves living in this apartment, well…I’m not sure I can see it.

You know how you absentmindedly joke about something for awhile and then all of a sudden you start thinking that it might hold some truth? We used to joke about retiring in Washington, but while I’m sure Mark wouldn’t mind going back to his home state at any point in time, it was always something that I tossed around without much thought or seriousness, partly because it was so far into the future. But as you know, I’ve been thinking about the future a lot lately because the future is suddenly not so abstract and the more I think about it, the more I think it’s possible that I might be able to let go of New York.
 
It almost hurts me to think this.
 
But I’ve been through this before. When I got on a plane 21 years ago headed for Seattle, I didn’t think I was ever going to come back to New York; it wasn’t in my plans to move back. I was done with the city. Done. But the city has a way of getting under your skin and weaving nostalgia and memories into this undeniably luring web. After awhile, I became homesick for this crazy place – the characters, the food, the friction, the diversity. 5 years later, it was time to go home.
 
I do really believe that we are meant to be in specific places for certain stages in our lives. Sometimes it’s not apparent when you’re there at the moment, but when you can reflect back on a personal timeline and see it spread out in front of you, it often starts to make sense as you weave together the pieces. I was meant to be in the East Village in the late 80s and early 90s. I could argue that without that experience, my world and my mind would be tremendously smaller. In much the same way, I feel like I was meant to go to Washington in the early 90s to figure out who I was again after those years of experimentation and stepping out of every comfort zone I possibly could. It wasn’t that I wanted to go back to my high school self – no, not at all, but rather to find a compromise between the life that I was living at that point.
 
When I left the Northwest, I said good bye to the rain and I thought that I would be leaving for good; it felt so right to be back in New York and I didn’t ever want to leave again. But a funny thing happened. I don’t think that I would have ever predicted that I would again feel a similar sense of nostalgic longing about the place I once called home – a 5 year blip, really, in my life as a New Yorker. Through our yearly trips back to Seattle to visit family, however, I’ve come to realize that this feels like home too.
 
Who knows why we feel the pull towards some places while we feel nothing for others. I look at these 2 photos above and feel different things that draw upon memories from distinct periods in my life. Some of it is steeped in youthful dreams and fantasies before the realities of adult life and responsibilities take hold. Maybe it’s all based on nostalgia, but the point is, I feel something and they both pull at my hearstrings. And so we begin to talk about where we want to be in 20 years long after the girls are done with college. Maybe our parents will be gone by then too. And I think for the first time since I’ve moved back 17 years ago, I might be ready to be done with New York again.

It’s one of those Marches where winter won’t let go, no matter how many random sprinklings of Spring weather days we get. Yeah, it snowed again Saturday (actually, we haven’t really gotten that much snow fall in the last 2 years). None of it stuck and it was sort of pretty in that snow globe sort of way, but we’re over it. We’re patiently waiting for warmer days where we don’t have to bundle up with hats or gloves, feel the sun on our faces and not feel the least bit of chill when we’re outside. I think that groundhog pulled one over on us.