I went on an art date this weekend. I know it sounds corny, but art dates are something that came out of Morning Pages which is another corny concept, and I learned about these practices from an executive coach who encouraged me to sob during our sessions and dammit if she wasn’t right that all of that made it possible for me to find a more authentic version of myself in work. I make fun of boring people but I will never make fun of corny things so here I go being extra corny.

I was mostly on my own for the art date, but I invited a couple friends to join me in different parts of my excursion to New York City. In Part II I went to Dia:Chelsea with my old friend Nick, and I’ll talk more about that in another post. In Part I, the artist Nayland Blake joined me for Everything Everywhere All at Once, by the Daniels, and yo when I say you need to see this movie as soon as possible, I really mean it. What a joyful joyful film.

Afterward, Nayland and I got fried chicken meals and ate them outside at the 72nd street subway station at a park with a highly designed old fashioned eating booth, after failing to get seats anywhere in the Upper West Side at 10pm on a Saturday, when front of house staff all greeted us with the “please let us go home to our families” look.

“Wow, it’s as if these seats were set up just for us!” I said as we approached the station with our giant bag of takeout. Nayland said, “this is one of those things you see in the movies depicting New York and you think, c’mon, seriously? That can’t be real. But it is real.”

We sat at our theatrically, improbably appropriate dinner table and talked about our lives. It had been a while since I last saw Nayland so we were catching up on a lot. It occurs to me now that the last meal I had with them might have actually been in 2018 when I was seeking their advice on whether to take a job in nonprofit arts management—the job I now fully have and flourish in. A job that now defines so much of who I am.

We talked about intention.

Nayland says something that widens my perspective.

It’s interesting, you spend so much time trying to figure out what you want, but the important question is: what do you do once you know what that is? What do you do when you find out what you want?

What do I do?