A New Adventure

So, it's been a long time, faithful followers of Ari's Adventure, but I am checking back in. Thank you for sharing my adventure in France. It was amazing, as you have read, or seen, in my pictures. I still think often about my life in Nice, and how different it was from the life I am living now. No longer do I go to the beach and lie on the pebbles and listen to the waves (or my iPod) for an indeterminate amount of time, my only reason to leave being that I am hungry. The time for pondering life's bigger questions is amazingly short - and not a priority - at the moment.

So, what am I up to, you ask? A lot of you already know - I am in New York City. I presaged this landing in some ways, but in other ways, the whole process of getting here and staying here seems serendipitous in hindsight. When I left Nice in August, I was pretty sure I was going back to work at Fannie Mae. A colleague had contacted me in France, asked if I would come in to interview for a job when I got back to the States. And that's exactly what I did. One of my interviewers, a man I had worked with during our Restatement days at Fannie, wanted to know, why, exactly, did I want to come back to Fannie? There were some good reasons, but I also admitted to him I had wanted to find a job in New York City.

The day that I was offered and accepted a job at Fannie Mae, I was in Easthampton, Long Island, vacationing at the beach with my friend Jeff. (Can it be called vacationing if you don't really have a job you are taking a vacation from? I guess I was "at the beach.") I wasn't too pleased with the compensation they were offering that day, but Fannie Mae was a different place from the corporation I had left. It was now overseen by the government, with different restrictions in place, and different guidelines for everything. (One of the roles I would have played at Fannie Mae was a compliance function, making sure that all the employees on a particular project were following government restrictions.) I accepted the job, thinking that I was lucky to have a job in the financial industry that had taken such a hit since the crisis that had erupted just after I left the country last August.

That night, Jeff and I hosted Jeff's sister in law to a birthday dinner in Southampton, since her husband (Jeff's twin brother), was out of town. Jeff had wanted me to meet Cathy, thinking that she would be a good contact in the financial services industry for me - he had been hopeful that I would find a job in Manhattan - since we had reconnected last December, we found we were very much enjoying our friendship, which he hoped to continue a little more close at hand.

It was a nice dinner in the warm breezes of late August at a sidewalk French cafe. Very nice. We had a good conversation during dinner, and Cathy and I talked a little shop during the dinner. As we were winding down the evening, Cathy said to me, Why don't you come work for me? Later, Jeff admitted, he was shocked by her offer. He had no idea she might say something like that. I said, Why didn't you ask me that yesterday, before I had accepted a job at Fannie Mae? She said, Come in and talk to my team. See if you like them.

So I did. Later that week I went into Manhattan for a few days and met a few members of Cathy's Operational Risk Management Team. I liked them. The job was new to me - I told Cathy, I had never done this before - she said, not a problem. I called my new boss at Fannie, and told him, in all honesty, that I was exploring another job option. I asked for a week to finalize my paperwork with Fannie. HR was fine with that. And by the deadline for sending in the paperwork, I had decided I really wanted to work in Manhattan. The job at Barclays would not be offered for another three weeks, but I had made up my mind. My adventure would continue not in Washington, DC, but in the Big Apple. I was going to start anew.

And here I am. In the Big Apple. I left NYC in 1986, when I moved to DC to attend GW Law School. Being here now, it doesn't feel like I was ever really gone from New York, and given that I have kept up with friends, my brother - who lived here from 1986 to 20002, and worked here on and off for the better part of six years while I was a consultant, as a matter fact, I really wasn't ever very far in spirit.

I am working at Barclays Capital Markets, the investment bank of the British Bank, which seems fitting after my year abroad. I am looking forward to some trips across the Pond in my future, as I regularly work closely with my colleagues in London. I am learning quite a bit about operational risk, but find that much of my research work over the last year around systemic risk and other areas of the financial collapse are directly relevant to the work I am doing now.

And I am living in Manhattan. In an absolutely gorgeous luxury apartment building in downtown Manhattan, around the corner from Ground Zero and Century 21 - there's a Starbucks across the street, the Post Office down the street, and Whole Foods several blocks away. A great bagelry in walking distance, and the Hudson bike/running path nearby. I am on the 41st floor, looking northward to midtown, and I get a great view of the Empire State Building every night (when the clouds don't obscure it!). The building has a gym and a pool - I am in heaven. Life doesn't get much better than this.

The adventure continues.