Dinner with a stranger

I had dinner with Raymond from Substack tonight at Kings Co Imperial, a pretty cool Chinese restaurant that sits comfortably among the many cool Williamsburg Chinese restaurants. The food was pretty good; I ended up eating a couple of different dishes (oyster mushrooms, salt and pepper tofu) with identical seasonings.

Raymond is an interesting guy, in that he’s an early 20s software engineer who wants nothing more than to do anything else. He has a desire for a creative life, doing interesting things and is pursuing this desire with the clothing brand he started. I appreciate this feeling in him, knowing that I feel something similar, but not as intense. I daydream about a life where I can dedicate all of my time to something that feels fully creative and expressive to some degree.

What that would be is incomprehensible to me these days. I know I want to make videos of some sort to connect to my love of film and video, but I don’t know whether that would drive me any closer to a goal of a different life. Things are largely pretty good, but I hold an unceasing unease within my chest. It motivates me to take action more than usual, but I’m not enjoying my day-to-day as often as I have in the past. Yet, I had a wonderful day on Sunday, so maybe I’m blinded by recency bias.

Talking with Raymond makes me want to lean more into the creative stuff that I’ve already been moving towards. Talking to friends in general make my world feel bigger. When I chatted with Daniel last week in San Francisco, I emerged interested in pitching articles and wanting to run book clubs with my girlfriend. These conversations are propulsive, expansive. My brain works in ways that it normally wouldn’t, the possibilities in my life expand. I need to remember this, to not forget to see my friends regularly and just talk.