It’s been a rainy week in New York. I used to dread the rain growing up in Georgia because I often had to walk home from school carrying a heavy backpack and a giant art portfolio–one of the struggles of having immigrant parents who couldn’t give their kids rides.

Now as an adult I’ve come to appreciate it more–I relish the comfort that comes from watching raindrops fall and create ripples on puddles from inside. Plus, rain waters the earth and subdues the pollen, which I don’t mind because the spring allergies are hitting me harder this year.

The rainy week began with a visit to the New York Botanical Garden with a friend on Sunday. We almost canceled due to the forecast—rain was expected when we planned to be at the garden—but we went anyway. We talked and walked nonchalantly through the grand estate. My friend said something that keeps echoing in my mind: responding radically to an increasingly isolating and individualistic society. Her radical response is being part of communal living. That got me thinking about my way of challenging the norm and being “rad”—I started blogging again instead of oversharing on social media. After all, living is not a solo act but a dance between self and others.

We ended our tour at the Native Plant Garden where we saw a duck sitting by the water fountain. It was so still and steady like an object that I had to come up close to check if it was real—indeed it was, alive and wondrous. Steady as this bird, rocks, and the rain. It reminded me of a song by Dolly Parton in her Bluegrass album The Grass is Blue that goes, “Steady as the rain they fall/ And my tears keep falling down / As steady the rain.” Ingenious. I highly recommend the whole album, one of my all-time favorites by Dolly. [Cue angelic chorus with light beams shooting out from Dolly the Saint]

It’s raining again as I finish writing this newsletter. Later today I will be going to my mom’s new apartment in Sunnyside, a quaint and charming neighborhood in Queens. It’s full of delicious food spots—we’re eating our way through them. I will write separately about the food scenes of Queens. Soon I will be celebrating my sixth year of living in New York, yet I still feel new to this colorful, vibrant, and strange city.

Perhaps that’s what this season is teaching me—how to stay steady like the rain in a city that never stops moving (for the most part).

What I’ve been reading and listening to lately…

• Book: QualityLand by Marc-Uwe Kling for the Human Code, an AI book club that I launched at the beginning of the year. It’s a quirky dystopian satire that pokes fun at overconsumption and Capitalism–Pixar’s Wall-E meets Kurt Vonnegut. A Bong Joon-ho film adaptation, maybe?
• Music: A self-curated Spotify playlist called Spring 25 that consists of Jazz, Pop, and Baroque (hello, Vivaldi and Bach!). I don’t have a scientific explanation for how Bach and Billie Eilish made it in the same place.
• Podcast: Hidden Brain just finished a series called Relationships 2.0, which includes an episode on romantic love–mainly how to stay in love.