It's Andy Fish!

We are complicated, we humans are, and it’s not always easy to explain some things.

I’ll always love New York City– it’s filthy, it’s crime ridden, it smells like pee or garbage (and sometimes both) in the Summer and the Subway is a place I’ll never set foot in again. It’s a place where you accidently step off a curb to cross a street because that’s how you’ve done it where you come from and thanks to the mercy of a fellow pedestrian who grabs your belt and pulls you back you are not killed by a speeding dump truck that literally passes inches from your face (true story, and I’ve returned the favor a number of times).

It’s also got some of the greatest restaurants, musuems and jazz clubs on Earth and there really is no other place like it. It’s not my favorite city in the world– that honor goes to Tokyo, but it’s the place I got to know my wife, it’s the place where we got engaged, and it’s a place with so many happy memories it can never fully tarnish.

Speaking of my wife; she’s the ONLY Italian woman I’ve ever met (okay she’s half Italian/half British) who is not SO Italian that we actually never eat pasta (she dislikes it) or red sauce on a regular basis. It’s far more likely she’s making a recipe from Pakistan or India than something from Italy– that doesn’t mean she isn’t proud of her heritage, she is, but she’s not defined by it. Her British side goes back to the Mayflower and her great great great grandfather’s have been things like Governors, major league baseball players, judges and town founders– there are statues to many of these men and streets named after them all through New England. That Statue in the center of Salem, MA that you thought was a man in a witche’s hat when you went on a school trip– yeah that’s one of her ancestor’s.

My family has a less amazing history, someday maybe I’ll get into it. Someday maybe I’ll get into a lot of things, but for right now I sit and I pontificate how the world works, how we humans think, and how interesting all of the juxtapositions are.