It's Up To You.

The restaurant was packed with a hipster brunch crowd of 25 to 35-year old people who looked like they had also just gotten off a plane from Athens. K took my bags and shoved them in a back hallway, and I elbowed my way to the bar, where I was served a fantastic cup of coffee and a tiny dish of fried dough balls (doughnut holes). I ordered eggs florentine and chatted a few minutes with the bartender, who I immediately liked.
After virtually inhaling my food and three cups of coffee, I went out for a stroll to kill some time while K finished up work. Having no real idea where I was going, I just started off in a general direction. It was cold - colder than I expected, and dirty. Walking under a highway overpass it brought to mind a specific corner where I regularly sat at a red light in my old neighborhood in Chicago. There is a specific bus emission/old urine smell that makes me just a bit nostalgic for the late nineties every time, and I was momentarily soaking in it, and it was good.
My phone rang in my pocket. I talked to the b.h. for a moment, remarking that very guy that passed my on the street looked like A.J. (obviously way ahead of his time, fashion-wise, that one), and then begging off the phone because I had left my gloves in my bag and I had to keep my hands in my pocket for fear of them falling off.
I walked about a mile all told, then headed quickly back to the restaurant for another cup of coffee.
By the time K was finished I was nearly vibrating from all of the caffeine. I stopped at the health food store next to the restaurant to replace my Burt's Bees lip balm (Never leave home without it!), which was marked at $4.49, but I was only charged three dollars and change. Sweet! We went back to K's house, where i dropped my bag on the floor in the kitchen in front of the stove. It remained there until I left. We changed clothes and headed out. I thought we were just going for a walk around the neighborhood, so I stopped at a polish bakery and bought some kolackys. We wound up going to dinner in Chinatown and then to drinks afterward, and I lugged those cookies all over town. Whoops. Ah well, they were great for breakfast.
We met several of K's friends for dinner. It was M's birthday. There were eight of us, all women, at a big round table downstairs in this restaurant. It was the beginning of Chinese New Year, so the restaurant was crowded and the whole neighborhood was very lively. One of the girls tried to warm up our waiter by speaking to him in mandarin. It didn't work. We all laughed. We ate a ton, and passed around bottles of bubbly. I was semi-successful in using chopsticks for the first time. I have tried many times over the years, and always wind up asking for a fork. We had already been quite late for our reservation due to a comedy of errors that involved getting on four different trains to get there, so I was afraid to piss of the waiter and opted instead to feed myself messily and awkwardly in a large group of total strangers.
After dinner several of us went for drinks at an over-priced and under-staffed (or perhaps just poorly staffed) bar in Brooklyn. I had a Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout. It was perfect.
After drinks we went back to K's, where I passed out promptly under a large pile of blankets on her air mattress, wearing two shirts, flannel jammy pants, socks, and a hat (her heat is not very reliable, nor are her landlords.) I slept like a baby.