NYC.

We had a date weekend to NYC, just me and Jeremy. Sumit had invited us to his 50th birthday party and it was going to be extravagant and we wanted to go and also see some friends from grad school. Lots of thanks to Ginny who cared for Edda this weekend and her son Seni who cared for Elka this weekend to allow us to go without worrying.

We left at about 3 pm on Friday afternoon, headed to Philly to spend the night with Bob and Katherine. It was nice to see them at their home with some late season native flowers blooming.

We had do so some car things, we sold our Civic to their community and we needed to snag the tags and transfer the title and such things. We also got to try out Bob and Katherine’s new Tesla. Jeremy and I have never been in a Tesla, though our street is rapidly becoming populated with them. So we were both eager to try out the car. The car is only about three weeks old, but when it was parked somewhere, someone sideswiped the bumper and scuffed the paint of on the corner of the car. At first, we thought that no one had left a note, and we were trying to figure out if one of the many cameras on the car had videoed the accident, but then we finally found the note tucked in deep under the windshield wipers which are not easily visible. The car is a lot of fun and I’m eagerly awaiting getting it or something like it – we are saving up for it.

We drove up to NYC on Saturday morning getting there by noon and met up with Dave who flew in earlier in the week and is staying with his sister. It was raining for most of the day – we went to the Tenement Museum (really interesting) for a 3:45 tour and walked around the neighborhood killing time before then which included snapping this photo in front of the Supreme store to send to Vince. (there was a line, we didn’t go in – NYC is full of lines and we did not go into any store/restaurant that had them).

We took a cab to the museum, but we hopped on the subway for the return trip back to our hotel. I love these tile mosaics.

We stayed at Pod51 which is like an upgraded hostel. Notice the bunk bed which features prominently later in the story. I’m a goofball and I still like these things, though I probably should be smarter and spend the extra $100 for a regular hotel room – even though it had a hostel vibe, it still wasn’t super cheap or anything. Dave and I and Jeremy hung out until the party which started at 7:30 and the texts we had received during the day told us to be there on time.

The backstory is that we met Sumit at Caltech in graduate school. At Caltech, he set us up on our first date. Our core group of friends would go see movies on Thursday nights and on a particular Thursday night, he called all our friends and told them not to go to the movies so that Jeremy and I would inadvertently go alone. But Dave didn’t get the message, so he was there on our first date. These are the main players of our early dating lives.

Sumit came to Caltech with very simple desires, he wanted to get rich, he wanted to buy a Corvette and he wanted to be Michael Jackson. We all hunted around to find him a jacket with all the zippers and he happily wore it around campus. He did not get a PhD at Caltech, rather he left with a masters and later went on to Harvard Business School. He has made good on his promise to himself and is now extremely wealthy, so what follows is a milestone party of the 1% in NYC. We had a fabulous time, but from Dave’s sister’s NYC estimate (she is finance-adjacent where she manages the 1%’s personal investment portfolios), it was about a half million dollar party. It was held in an event space at the Seagram Building.

We had only an inkling of what was to transpire at this party and it revealed itself slowly as the night went on. There were many hired acts including: a live jazz band, a magician, people dressed as plants who would tell you that you were amazing, an electric violinist, beautiful women in LED wings, or feathers, or dessert plates, a pair of silk ribbon acrobats, Apache Indian rapper (this was my favorite act where I danced a lot), and the cast of the Michael Jackson broadway show (who danced with all of us on the dance floor – professional dancers are a lot of fun to dance with – this is not surprising).

It was both amazing and dizzying the amount of money spent. Like every 30 minutes, a year of Vince’s college expenses rolled on by. We stayed up until about 12:15 and headed back to the hotel to sleep.

In the morning, though careful, I managed to fall out of the top bunk and hit my head on the floor. I got a bit dizzy and could feel a big goose egg forming on my skull. Honestly, this is what happens when you hit your head: you know you should go to the hospital, but mainly, you know you probably are going to be OK and if you go to the hospital, it’s going to take half the day. But I thought about what I would have wanted Vince to do, which was to go to the hospital, so we walked the 1 mile to the nearest ER at 7am. Jeremy’s like we are right be NY Presbyterian and I said – that’s perfectly fine and he said, but the ER got only 2 out of 5 stars on google and I said, they also misdiagnosed Edda all those years ago with cerebral palsy, so what could go wrong? so I we headed there.

I ended up getting a CT scan which said my head was fine and it was interesting to see the inside of a NYC ER. I saw a very tired intern who didn’t know his way to the CT scan room. There was the little old lady who was hard of hearing, there was the drug seeking frequent flyer, etc – all familiar things, but the people there seemed to enjoy working with each other and had the collegial banter that comes from working closely together in stressful situations. Jeremy asked if I miss being a nurse and I said, of course I miss it. Sometimes when I’m working as a patent examiner or any of my other engineer jobs, one can feel like you aren’t doing anything to help mankind. It all moves slowly or the project gets scrapped or you get pushed aside from the important project, but as a nurse, everyday, you know that you are helping people and helping your team. Like, if you weren’t there that day, people would miss you immediately and things would not get done.

Also, I have a very low resting heart rate because I run a lot, the ER doc said we need to do an EKG and I was like – but I’m always like this because of the running and he would not take no for an answer, so I had to wait for the EKG to be run. If I had known where the machine was, I could have run it myself, but Jeremy reminded me that I don’t have a staff login to scan into the machine. My heart looks great with a resting heart rate of 43.

We were supposed to spend the morning, not in the ER, rather with Dave, but instead, we met up for lunch and headed to Times square where Sumit had bought Broadway tickets for the out-of-town guests for the new musical Back to the Future which was the movie that inspired Sumit to come to the US. We finally had a moment to talk to some of Sumit’s friends before we went into the theatre. One would have thought we would have talked to them at the party, but the actual party was very, very loud. So we talked with no one which is how these parties often go.

After the Sunday matinee, we needed to head home to get back to Ginny/Edda/Seni and Elka. Dave stayed on for the evening drinks at a rooftop bar and sent us lovely sunset photos. On the way back to get our car, Jeremy took this photo of me under a little turnip sign. Cute. Time to go home.