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it's labor day weekend, which means the weekend isn't over yet!

man… i love not laboring.

earlier this evening, danny and i joined a few of our co-op neighbors for a dinner potluck in our building courtyard. i had been on the fence about going, feeling precious about my evening and wanting to preserve a large stretch of free time, but i decided to go last minute and it ended up being very lovely.

we have a pretty eclectic mix of people in our building. the five neighbors at this particular potluck were all older folks in their late 60s and 70s, most of whom have lived here for decades. we talked about different eras of the building, times when the co-op was more social. lee said that they used to have a dinner club, monthly or something, where a different person would host and make the main course and others would bring side dishes. someone named bill lived here who was 85 and a poet, and sometimes he would invite people over and they would all read poetry. this must have been decades ago, from the timeline i pieced together.

there was a social lull at the time we moved in. i thought that was how things had always been, but after hearing various anecdotes over the years i started to realize that things had been different before. in the past year or so, some neighbors have made more of an effort to hang out. it's funny though: some people have major beef with other neighbors, so they'll invite a curated group of neighbors via email instead of posting on the building-wide listserv. other people are more magnanimous or they just don't care, and send out a public invite, like lee did for the dinner tonight. generally it's the younger people who are more cliquey and the older people who are more open and invite everyone. i am striving to be a younger person who breaks out of that cliquey mold.

i get the cliqueiness though. there are one or two people in the building who are genuinely unpleasant, and i think other neighbors have had worse personal experiences with those people than i have. i totally get why you would not invite someone you deeply dislike to your home. i'm lucky in that i don't have any personal vendettas (yet), and i find myself wanting to push past disliking certain people and trying to contribute to a community-feeling in the building that includes everyone. i've learned a lot from boshi's over the years, and one big learning is that being in community means tolerating and accepting the most annoying, grating, cringe people (up to a certain point, as long as they're not causing harm). in general i find there's at least one thing to like about every person, even if i need to dig a little deeper to find it.

i wanted to write a bit more about boshi beach day (which happened yesterday) and pratishta's 25-miles-swum pool party (which happened last week) but i have run out of writing stamina and want to go to bed. both were sites of great community-feeling and i felt especially inspired by meeting pratishta's swim friends and getting a glimpse into the astoria pool community! i also felt inspired by pratishta's invite website.

other things of note

things that are upcoming