+1000 for your thematic username!

""Not being handy" is not a thing anymore"

Yesss! Take if from someone who grew up thinking I was "not handy," with a dad who got super stressed out by fixing things because he was always convinced he was going to fuck up. Being handy is not an innate trait and it makes no sense to write yourself off if you're not magically instantly good at it, any more than you would say "welp, I can't run 26 miles on my first run, guess I can't be a runner then."

Also, you don't need to be handy to clean or put away clutter!

I'm so excited for you to eat delicious things in NYC! I lived there for 6 years and mostly spent my time eating.

If you're there in late June, here are some free music events:
- Rad day of everyone making music June 21: http://makemusicny.org/
- Festival of free concerts starting June 19: http://www.rivertorivernyc.com/
- Concert series Wed. nights starting June 18 in Madison Square Park. While you're there eat frozen custard from Shake Shack, there will be a huge long line but if you only buy custard you can go in the much shorter line: http://www.madisonsquarepark.org/music

Lesser-known cool museums:
- NYC Transit museum in Brooklyn. You can sit in old subway cars from different eras!

Things to eat:
- Falafel at Taim!! Right in the West Village, and it's the best falafel in the city. They also have excellent smoothies.
- Pizza at Motorino (it's the wood-fired kind of pizza with dollops of fresh mozzarella, not NYC-style pizza by the slice).
- Murray's Cheese on Bleecker St, the cheese shop of all cheese shops. You can ask to try cheeses!
- Anything at Dessert Club Chikalicious (in the East Village). Everything there is good--the cookie eclair ice cream cone filled with vanilla bean soft serve, the cupcakes (and I don't even normally like cupcakes). Or if you feel like treating yourself to something fancy, go across the street to Chikalicious Dessert Bar, where you can get a fixed-price three-course dessert menu that will blow your mind. It's way cheaper than a fancy dinner, because it's just dessert, but it'll blow your mind just as much.
- Donuts at Donut Plant.
- Eat a kouign amann from Dominique Ansel bakery. It is expensive for its size, but it's still like $5 max and it tastes like pure butter and heaven.

OK I have to stop, have now reached critical levels of missing NYC food!

Best thing I've ever read. My new self-improvement project is learning to say all of these sentences.

The barn dances are real!! Here are some in NYC and the Bay Area:
http://www.lcfd.org/sf/about.html
<a href="http://www.brooklyncontra.wordpress.com" target="_blank">www.brooklyncontra.wordpress.com
<a href="http://www.lcfd.org/nyc/" target="_blank">www.lcfd.org/nyc/

YES, cars are properly horrifying death machines. PREACH IT! When I get into a car, I pretty much think, "I could kill someone with this." And I'm thirty, and I've had my driver's license since I was 17 (why yes I grew up in a small town).

I dunno, I'd sign up!

One of my mom's cats is Tino Martinez! Still, I think our family's best sports-related cat name was Clyde, for Clyde Drexler.

Dang, but all the things you touch on in this article are so fantastic and right in my wheelhouse. Balancing usefulness and communicating uncertainty! Trusting authors more when they are skeptical of their own results! Thinking about the stigma of invisible illnesses while you're doing quantitative research! Please could you write the entire NYTimes science/health section?

On the roaches, I'm not an expert of any kind, but I can tell you what I've done. We lived with a cat in the roach heaven that is NYC, and we used Combat Source Kill bait stations. They're small plastic puck-shaped things containing some roach-bane (Fipronil or Hydramethylnon), with a small slit that roaches can fit into and cats can't. The roaches supposedly carry the poison back to their nest. They worked well for us for roach control--they last for some months, and when we'd start seeing roaches again we'd just put out a new round of bait stations. I didn't check with a vet but the website says they're safe for pets: https://www.combatbugs.com/faq.

DO NOT trust your cat to kill roaches; she may be excellent at killing them, but--grossness warning-- she may still decide, one night while you're sleeping, to TAKE THE ROACH INTO YOUR BED SO SHE CAN KILL IT THERE RIGHT ON YOUR PILLOW.