#168. Reactivated (Friday, June 17, 2022)
What was your best day…of feeling something again?
My standards had been thrown so out of whack by the past twenty-seven months of isolation that by end of this day, I was sure its place on the top twenty-five of the main list (if not higher) was secure. It was only a tiny bit of retrospective, and one key additional piece of information, that dropped it down all the way here.
My return to normality post-COVID had been relatively delayed. While #120 a year ago had signaled the return of semi-regular social activities (albeit mostly alcohol-enhanced and mostly with my brother and Jerry Qing, #120), the return too office had remained firmly optional.1 Until the start of this month, when the institution finally established a soft four-days-a-month rule guidance, just to get us to start reconnecting in person again.
It worked. My first week back, I was out late two separate times: once with the traders on my team David Nemetz and Abdul Atakan (visiting from Calgary) at a premium Japanese restaurant, and once with half the department for James Williams’s goodbye party. And midway through this week second, I run into market structure researcher Dylan Cirillo who tells me Happy Hour is back on. And based on last week, it is fully back on.
And he’s right. On Friday, I step into Happy Hour at The Office pub with at least twenty people there. Half of whom I know, including my old research mentor Neerad Bhandari (#24), pseudo-life mentor (and later LA road trip buddy, #90) Kai Ho, and Carter Hladnik who’s especially happy to see me for the first time in long time2 Then a bunch of new people who had joined our institution in the previous two and a half years: a bunch of research assistants and new PhD hires, our department’s goalie star Adrian Williams (#80),3, and a girl sitting at a table with him and Dylan who I don’t recognize.
When I start talking with them (after the customary Kai Ho reunion), I find out her name is Liana Fischer; and she’s from our equivalent institution in Switzerland and is here for four months working on a research project in payments. Shortly after, Dylan departs and Adrian joins another table, and I end up talking with her for at least thirty minutes. Liana seems genuinely interested in my work in foreign reserves and my eternally in-progress novel4 And I’m interested in her stuff as well namely–namely, her recently creating a new package for the statistics package R—though that tends to be the case with everyone at Happy Hour. What’s new here is that I find her quite attractive.
Eventually, I make my way to another table with Neerad and Carter and some others. Neerad is particularly boisterous today, and it feels like a genuine return to old times (and then some). Partway through that, Liana comes up and says she’s leaving and she’ll see me around, specifically to me. This is not lost of Neerad, who (right after Liana exits) makes an “ohhhhh” joke about it to the table—in the way preteen boys would when they find out someone has a crush.
And yeah, thanks to the events of this night (as well as her adding me on LinkedIn first thing Saturday), this thing with Liana quickly became a crush. And a real one, not a theoretical one (#34), this time. (Note that I hadn’t had an even theoretical crush on anyone since 2017.)
But once Happy Hour is over, the night is not done for me. I make the forty-minute trek to the high-end Cineplex at Lansdowne to watch Lightyear (on its opening night) with 3-D glasses. Then take an Uber to Byward Market to have my customary pre-clubbing fajita feast at Lone Star Texas Grill, before heading over to the busiest nightclub in the city, The Show (rebranded a few years back from Tequila Jack’s, #24). And just like every other repressed social entity and phenomenon I’d seen in these past two weeks, clubbing was back.
It’s not long before I re-normalize to this world and see this night for what it is. The first night of many like that, and not some rare, one-of-a-kind special occasion like it felt like then. Also, during one of the several coffee chats I have with Liana in the months following before her return to Switzerland, I find out that she has a boyfriend back home. So that’s the end of that.
But on its own, it was still pretty nice to feel all these things again.
- And hence, despite me being pretty tired of work-for-home at this point, the in-office presence had not yet attained the economies of scale for me to be worth the one-hour commute from Barrhaven.
- I find out soon after that he’s moved to Barrhaven, about eight blocks away from me (close in Barrhaven terms), and his new wife—like my family—is from Shanghai. We carpool from Happy Hour sometimes, but not tonight.
- Who I actually first meet at James William’s goodbye a week before. Apparently, he was something like the second cousin of another Williams that we worked with in foreign reserves, who was the third cousin of James, but he and James were not related.
- Which inevitably comes up in every Happy Hour conversation, since it’s one of the only semi-interesting non-work things I have to talk about.