NY Year 2 Update.

A year ago, I wrote an update recounting my first year back in New York. It had been a difficult year to give any particulars about, because quite honestly, not much of anything felt like an accomplishment. It was a very personal year. It was a year of reconnecting with my past, and being grateful for it.

This year was a bit different.

To start: I travelled. Not for work, but for friends, family, art, and even vacation! I visited art museums in eight different cities (nine, if you count Brooklyn as a distinct city, as I do). I’m not even going to attempt to tabulate how many plays and musicals I attended this year. I also experienced two incredible ballets this year and an opera. I even trekked out to the Hamptons to hear the Shabbat services of one of the world’s preeminent cantors. I helped throw a 40th birthday party in Chicago for Leah Jones.

On the local front, I had a four year old tour guide take me all around the New York ferries, bridges, subways, and parks.

An entrepreneur gave me some free advice while I was on an unscheduled 36 hour stopover in Miami after my trip to Colombia with my friend Jonathan. He told me to “focus on one thing”. I didn’t take him literally, of course, but I took it to heart about the startup I was working on to help reduce stress in the workplace.

In the weeks after, I completely redesigned the entire concept for the app. With the help of Marcelo and his team, we are looking to implement the initial stage of our new solution, the Debrief App, with our first clients by end of Q1/2018.

(In short, with the Debrief app, employees will be able to quickly, privately, and securely record their sentiments about meetings, phone calls and other interpersonal interactions. Beyond the personal psychological feedback for each employee, the companies will receive anonymized aggregated information about select negative patterns, and the ability to run micro-experiments to see if it helps alleviate the issue. In other words, the bosses will know that 65% of the company is consistently stressed the Monday morning all-hands meeting and moving it to a new time may help make everyone happier.)

While I have had a wide variety of clients this past year, 10/10 Optics has really become my home, in a myriad of ways. (Not my literal home; I moved into a 1BR apartment, with hardwood floors and exposed brick, a mere 5 minute walk away.) Over the past year, I helped relaunch two websites with Ruth Domber, her incredible team and Mike Allen. The friendship and gratitude that I feel toward Ruth grows deeper each day, and I’m truly grateful for all the opportunities I’ve gotten because of it.

But my life can’t be easily split into the “professional” and “personal”. There needs to be a third category, “creative”.

For example, after an overpriced drink with my friend Ned Ehrbar, we created a recurring comedy night called “Bad Pitches” (along with Carol Hartsell and Sean Crespo).

At Bad Pitches, comedians pitch their worst ideas for television shows, and the judges and audience pretend to be “studio executives” that give horrible feedback in an attempt to make the horrendous ideas even worse. We had four events at the (now-closed) Jimmy’s No. 43, with a raucous standing room only crowd. Over the next quarter, we are looking to rework it a bit and bring it to a new stage with some old and new contenders.

One day, I was chatting with Danny Ross, who told me “I want to write a musical.” I responded, “I’ve seen a bunch of musicals and I know how to write words.” After a few meetings (and waking up at 4:30am on day while under deadline and having a random burst of inspiration), we came up with a concept for a non-magical modern retelling of the Snow White story from the point of view of the dwarves, entitled “Snow”.

It took months, but we now have the first draft of the book (thank you to all the people who read/criticized/critiqued it) and a few initial songs. We are currently revising it and excited to see where the project goes from here.

In 2015, I wrote a tweet about a illustrated book I wanted to write called “How To Be A Cog”. One day a few months back, I just started writing it. It became “The Little Cog Who Thought He Was Special”, which goes extremely macabre and is not suitable for children at all.

Unfortunately, my insanely talented friend Edward Heinrich was one of the people to whom I related the story, over a coffee in Silver Lake. He told me that he wanted to illustrate it for me. Then I sent him draft after draft in an attempt to dissuade him, and he still wanted to illustrate it. So that’s happening.

And finally, a few weeks ago, I tweeted about another book I wanted to write called “The Elephants Upstairs” based on my current living situation. After seeing a draft, Edward sent me an email informing me that he would be illustrating this, quite dark, book as well.

(Not all my friends were as enthusiastic. One of my closest friends, whose opinion I usually value, dryly opined “it needs humor.”)

I guess one of the things I learned this year is about the importance of creative partners. Bad Pitches would have never happened without Ned. The Debrief App would be a pipe dream without Marcelo. Snow would have never been imagined without Danny. The books would be nothing without Edward’s feedback and contribution.

This year was replete with new friends and strengthening friendships. I could not imagine the past year without some people who, while I may have known them casually a year ago, transformed my year in ways I cannot describe. I’m particularly grateful to Duvi Stahler for being Duvi Stahler.

I also started going to Equinox. (I figured I should put that somewhere in here.)

I’m not going to pretend that this year was all perfect. There was the month I lived in a hotel. There was the text I accidentally sent to the person the text was about. There was some really horrible theatre. There were failed and stalled projects, lost clients, and unrequited feelings. I started working on my graduate thesis again, for myself, and then I stopped.

I worked on creating an anthology of sorts called “Ethics of the Mothers” but was entrenched in too many things at the time to make it a reality. I have regrets about a project I did not undertake four years ago, namely a renewable energy company built for island nations, in order to help them maintain power in the aftermath of tropical storms. And I still want to build a gluten-free fortune cookie company.

I feel like I’m on the right path, and can’t wait to see where this next year brings me.