NY trip, Maybe Happy Ending, etc.

It's not so hard to let somebody in
Just think how long it's been
Since somebody made you smile

....we're back.  We done good...it was a good trip.

There are many things and I don't think a full-on report is in order, but I'll try to touch on the highlights, at least.

I was staying in Manhattan for a relative's wedding.  Was initially thinking that I'd do what I normally do and stay at somewhat modern airbnb for 1-2 people and cook for myself and have a peaceful time, but ended up not doing any cooking actually; maybe if I had a bit less plans like I have during some of my other trips to the East Coast...

The food I did have was real good for the most part though!  Wasn't exactly sure what to expect but actually just a striking concentration of good ethnic food (is it a faux pas to use "ethnic" in this context?  I  know using "ethnic" as an instrument category is definitely iffy...).  Had some okay ramen (alright, not the best, I'm sure there was better, but it was close by), went to a nice Izakaya place.  Had some palak paneer at an Indian place, I actually like mine better hehe.  It's pretty interesting seeing how different the general palak / saag dishes can be, this one was quite on the creamy/liquid side but I've had them that were more coarsely blended / had more texture and a deeper flavor as well.

Probably the most exciting meal was when I had green pepper mao xue yang at a sichuan restaurant, what a surprise to find that!  Duck blood, eel, beef tripe / throat, bean sprouts...wish I had like 3 other people so that we could split it and also order something else to feel like a more balanced meal, but I also just kinda felt like I had to get it, just because...

The wedding itself was fun!  I made some conversation with some strangers, ordered a tequila sunrise (which prompted multiple people to ask me what it was and order one too), did some glowsticking, etc etc.  The food at the wedding was tasty too, I enjoyed it!

I went to see "Maybe Happy Ending", a seemingly not-well-known yet also widely lauded (weird...) musical that I'd sum up in one word as being about "love", I guess in two words I'd sum it up as the title of one of the numbers, "Why Love?"  I don't think I care to overanalyze the work or anything, but it came to me at a pretty relevant time in my life I guess -- I don't mean because love is in my life, I mean just more generally because I think I've "been around the block" at least once when it comes to love...I think it's pretty clear that MHE explores different sides of love, and different kinds of love too.  Romance, sure, but also heartbreak.  And the "honeymoon period" not just as it applies to a romantic partner but perhaps also to life, and perhaps how the question of "why love" ends up having different answers once that is over.

I don't think MHE plays in that much the same space as Princess Kaguya, but they tangentially touch on this same idea of "life (or love, attachment, whichever)" leading to inevitable sadness.  Love ends, life ends too, there's that whole idea of "life being ephemeral" with the fleeting sakura blossoms and all.  And yet we find ourselves investing anyways.  Maybe Happy Ending I think posits a much different flavor of answers to "why love", I feel like Princess Kaguya doesn't really "answer" the question per se, because it didn't really have to -- it just showed me that I =already= believed in life and all it had to do really was "remind" me of that.

Maybe Happy Ending was both subtle and intimate yet also intense and wrenching.  It's on the shorter side yet also made me think about it for a while.  It's this interesting little thing, almost paradoxical to me when I think about it too much.  Like, I thought it was somewhat predictable yet not stale at all.  Somewhat cheesy but...actually not, like it felt really real too!  I'm not sure exactly how to talk about it other than I sure appreciated being able to see it.  It's not like when I talked about Tunic and I was like OKAY GUYS here is why I felt incredibly moved by this ahhhhhhhhhh.  I was touched by Maybe Happy Ending too, I think it's just a less grandiose sort of thing for me personally, but still just as important.

Helen Shen (Claire)'s songs really did a lot of the emotional heavy lifting for me, though honestly I think a good handful of the songs in general really did have something very resonant in them for me personally.  Like I said, it was a nice time for me to encounter it.

Speaking of nice things!  The other big highlight of the trip was going to drink tea!  This is my first time going out to find tea shops on my own while traveling and it was the best thing ever!  I definitely overcaffeinated myself and got tea drunk/high after spending like 5 hours across two different tea shops.  It was so lovely, I felt totally at home and so content that I could find such a nice and peaceful experience even in an unfamiliar city.  I was so grateful for the quiet time I shared...

I didn't get a ton of "work" done during the trip, but wasn't really intending to, anyways.  I recorded a bunch of input files for my alttpr timings/videos, so I'll have to go through and leverage those once I'm back at home proper.  Also did some actual practicing on just boots movement and strats, and three casual boots seeds -- one where I FFed out after screwing up and dying in GT, one that I didn't finish due to the flight ending, but the third one I did on the return flight back home and that one felt great -- did it without a tracker and performed admirably for where I'm at!

I did some more game theory number crunching / programming for that as well, just to kind of appease my own curiosity with the whole "how aggressively do I want to play", and it seems like "skip EVERYTHING" isn't necessarily the answer all the time, but it's more of a sliding scale based on all of the different variables that we as rando players already track in our heads.  So I think I'm back to thinking that I should play kind of how I was playing before I started thinking I should just skip ALL slow checks.  But this whole exercise has given me better understandings of like, what checks =should= I look to skip and how much do they cost me?  Etc.  In any case, the one race I'm going to put on is something where I'm a little more incentivized to skip aggressively because the more people there are in the race the more you want to be aggressive because you're not going to come in first as often otherwise. 

But that stuff is for another day.  For today, we can do a little bit of patting ourselves on the back.  I think we did okay.  The next thing coming up is Fanime, and then the Mentor tournament (and JaSmix planning.....).  I'm feeling not the greatest about the JaSmix stuff, I'm going to have to remind myself to take it easy with that and just take it step by step.  Mentor tournament should be fun though, I'm looking forward to that for sure!  And Rhythm Quest will just have to take a backseat to it all as usual.  That's fine...it's life.  It's =my= life, at that.

So far so good......