In my continued effort to be social, I would like to invite any and all in the New York area to a few events.
Tomorrow I will be giving a toast at the Girls in Tech New York Launch Party. I attended the launch party for this group last year in San Francisco and I am honored that I was asked to speak briefly at the New York launch tomorrow. I have no idea what I am going to say yet but hopefully I will come up with something witty and inspiring to fill my allotted three minutes by tomorrow night.
The second event is one that I have been anticipating for nearly two months now. The lovely Amber Mac and I will be hosting a Meet-up here in Manhattan. Amber and I became friends over the summer and this gathering was her brilliant idea. I am flattered to be on the ticket with her. I’m her Sarah Palin! Details of the event are here. I hope you can come! I can’t exactly offer to buy a round but since we will be at an Irish bar, I can try to prepare a limerick. (Disclaimer: That’s a lie. Under no circumstance will I recite a limerick.)
I just got adjusted to East Coast time but now I’m being shipped back to the West Coast this weekend to cover DEMO. Don’t give me any grief for not attending TechCrunch50! I just go where I’m told. The lovely Kara Tsuboi will be covering TechCrunch50 for CNET TV.
The last time I covered DEMO, it was in 2006 and I was a staff writer for PC Magazine. I was duped by the fake Bono, which marked my first ever Valleywag appearance. I spent the rest of the conference looking for battery power for my Lenovo (I was a PC user back then), and hiding out in my hotel room ordering room service. Come to think of it, that time zone adjustment was worse because I had just returned from a vacation in Italy the day before. This time should be easier. Plus, I intend to make friends! I have been told by the powers that be here at CNET that I must attend the mixers. No room service for me!
You can find my coverage of the event on CNET TV starting on Monday but if you’re going to DEMO in person, be sure to say hello to me. I’m trying to be social, remember?
I am back from my vacation and being ricocheted around my apartment. I am unable to walk in a straight line after last night’s red eye from San Francisco to New York. I took a nap but I truncated it at just two hours because I want to try to readjust to East Coast time. I’m tired and discombobulated so please use those facts to forgive the emotive nature of this blog post.
In going through my RSS reader, (which I forced myself not to check while I was on vacation), I found a video post by my friend Kevin Pereira, host of G4TV’s Attack of the Show. Kevin spent the weekend exploring the lovely city of Philadelphia. I casually follow the random ramblings of his blog and Twitter posts but in this particular video, he said something that made me think:
“I sort of have a foreign oil-esque dependence on companionship that I need to shed.”
I haven’t spoken to Kevin in a few months so I’m not sure exactly what this means for his life but as I leave behind my San Francisco friends and family once again, I am left thinking about what it means for mine. I spend so much time on my career that companionship is something that usually falls by the wayside. I am typically able to convince myself that it is an acceptable trade off at this juncture in my life but the truth remains that I don’t have a “foreign oil-esque dependence on companionship.” In fact, I may have quite the opposite. So who is better off? Kevin and his over-dependency or me and my over-independency? What if Barbra Streisand is right? What if people who need people really are the luckiest people in the world? If that is true, I’m hosed.
But I turned 30 three days ago. I am older and trying like mad to become wiser. I was so darn happy to be around my family and friends in San Francisco this week and I realized that I do need people. I spent 10 days with my loved ones and we miraculously did not kill each other! On the contrary, we enjoyed each other immensely. Of course, there was plenty of flowing wine to help that cause, not to mention far too many birthday events: wine tasting, water skiing, cooking, spa days, barbecuing, happy hours, and an overabundance of Mexican food, which should tide me over for a while now that I’m back in New York where there is just no such thing. You can find the Flickr album of my birthday week here.
I can’t take “my people” with me to New York and I’m not ready to move back to San Francisco yet but I can learn a lesson from the insightful, albeit hungover, thoughts of my friend Kevin. Over-depedence on companionship: bad. Under-dependence on companionship: equally bad. In my thirties, I will strive to find the Goldie Locks balance for my social life and let people in a little. But not today. Today I’m holed up in my apartment. I’ll be open to companionship tomorrow.
