Life
I spent most of October in NYC, beginning to form a routine to my new life as I settled into my apartment and as work became more rhythmic. I started going to the office a couple times per week to ‘switch things up’, found a long street block not far from home good for running, and explored the hole-in-wall cash-only places around for food.
At the end of October, we had a week long new-hire consulting training in Chicago. I leveraged this opportunity to visit Oklahoma City the weekend before, adding Oklahoma to my list. I didn’t really have a plan of what to do until I got there, and it turns out there really isn’t much to do. Oklahoma City is the kind of place where if you tell someone you’re here for tourism, they look at you pleasantly surprised. I ticked off the top three attractions according to TripAdvisor: visiting the National Cowboy Museum, walking around the rather underwhelming Bricktown (the downtown entertainment district), and learning about the Oklahoma City Bombing in painstaking detail at the Oklahoma City National Memorial.
I also saw No Time to Die while I was in OKC, which was 2 entire dollars cheaper than had I seen it in New York. In addition, for just 7 dollars, I went to see a Thunders game that wasn’t ever really competitive. The most hype the crowd got was when a fan made a shot from half court and won 20,000 dollars. However, my highlight in OKC was completely unplanned for: I was passing through the city’s ‘rich’ neighborhood while walking from lunch to the memorial, and stumbled upon the annual Heritage Hills Historical Homes Tour. For a weekend every year, a bunch of rich people open up their houses for us commoners to admire, and charge 20$ for the experience – a weird way to flex I suppose. Nonetheless, it was an experiential version of flipping through a picture-perfect interior design magazine; the amount of detail put in to balance creativity, history, and livability was inspiring. I felt I got a slice of what (high socioeconomic status) life in Oklahoma was like.