Two Buttons

I reached for the door handle. The sign is still there:

“ICE is not welcome here. No warrant, no entry.”

It’s taped to the inside of the glass, directly beside the city’s Top Five Restaurants award.

For the record, they’re ranked #2.

I love the food here. It’s a hop, skip, and a jump from my front door, serves the best homemade pesto, and makes unique cocktails that justify walking home instead of driving.

Oddly enough, I’ve never been to the #1 restaurant in town. No reason, really. I did, however, recently take my man to a restaurant that, at one point in time, boasted #1 in the neighboring town, and it was one of those meals that I will never forget. The wagyu was sublime.

Just after I settled onto my barstool, the bartender wandered over and flipped the vinyl. Hall & Oates. Not the compilation I’ve been listening to lately, but close enough that it felt less like coincidence and more like being followed by an exceptionally smooth private eye.

Every so often a song comes on and my heart genuinely skips. You’d think repeated exposure would dull that feeling, but it never seems to. I wish I knew how to dance properly. Maybe listening closely is enough.

Who am I kidding? It’s never enough.

Dinner, per usual, was excellent.

Dessert drinks, however, required relocating to another establishment, where the ambiance suffered a catastrophic systems failure.

The decor appeared to have been assembled by several people who had never met one another. Industrial fixtures. Victorian wallpaper. Neon signs. Distressed wood. Taxidermy. Glitter. Something on canvas that may have been blood. It was giving Hell’s Kitchen.

I’ve never understood the appeal of Hell’s Kitchen. Whenever a work happy hour lands there, I begin looking for scheduling conflicts. I don’t consider myself particularly picky, but I’d prefer my dinner not be accompanied by gory haunted farmhouse wall hangings. It tends to diminish my appetite.

Still. You never know until you try something. At least an honest attempt was made.

There seems to be a lot of “new” things lately. I’m trying to stay flexible. Positive. Healthy. I’ve also been remarkably tired. I think it’s because I’ve finally given myself permission to be.

For a long time, everything felt like survival. There wasn’t much choice besides putting one foot in front of the other and continuing to grind. I suspect my body simply banked all that exhaustion somewhere, silently accruing interest. Then a few stressors disappeared. Apparently my nervous system interpreted that as, “Excellent. We may now collapse.” It’s a strange phenomenon. But I am recovering. And easing my way out of a caffeine addiction.

Last week disappeared almost as quickly as my ambition to save money on coffee.

I carefully ground beans last Tuesday morning, filled my thermos, and congratulated myself on my fiscal responsibility. Halfway to the office, while walking past the park, my phone buzzed.

Reminder: Coffee with a friend.

So much for that.

I slipped my phone back into my bag and nodded “hello” to the fast-approaching shirtless man wearing a Bane mask while riding a motorized minibike down the sidewalk.

He nodded back.

Then, perhaps out of mutual respect, or shame, he rolled off the sidewalk and merged into the bike lane.

I’m still not convinced minibikes belong in bike lanes. Around here, even electric bicycles have become surprisingly controversial as complaints and injuries increase. Personally, my chief complaint is that they insist on blasting past me at humiliating speed while I’m clawing my way uphill.

I’d like to believe I’m building character. They, meanwhile, are getting effortless salon quality blowouts courtesy of 750 watts.

Anyway.

A few hours after arriving at the office my friend and I were sitting over coffee, discussing our deeply burdensome first-world problems and debating whether working in digital product development has permanently altered how we think about relationships.

We spend our days identifying friction, gathering evidence, testing assumptions, iterating solutions, and searching for root causes. We don’t entirely agree on whether that’s a gift or a liability. Or both.

But I’ll spare us additional introspection here.

Speaking of product development, that labor-intensive project I worked on back in March is finally being presented to New York. Implementation is nigh:

two buttons are changing.

Months of research. Dozens of conversations. Presentations. Stakeholders. Documentation. Meetings. Two buttons.

A large ship doesn’t change course quickly. One of the interesting aspects in my field is that we simultaneously celebrate careful, meaningful, methodical change while preaching rapid experimentation, fail-fast-and-learn agility, bi-weekly sprint iteration, perfection is the enemy, and so on. We’re constantly trying to move quickly while making absolutely certain we don’t move too quickly.

Now that I think about it… perhaps product development has influenced my neural programming for better or worse.

Well, after our coffee date I decided to skip therapy and earned myself an $85 cancellation fee. Perhaps it was money well spent.