🐠 Introducing Cichlidia 🐟

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is New Arrival, by Tito Puente's Golden Latin Jazz All Stars. 🎵

Those who are close to me know that I've been a distracted mess for the past few months. Life Events have been happening, folks: Karen and I bought a house.

A little more than a year after moving into Brooklyn, we bought here, in Fort Greene. Karen and I are lucky to work in tech, and specifically at the companies we've worked at, such that we were able to make a down payment and get a mortgage.

We're calling the house Cichlidia, and I've made a little homepage for it. Like any other fish, keep an eye on it, it's gonna grow!

Cichlidia?

A cichlid (pronounced "sick-lid") is a broad category of freshwater fish, extremely popular for aquarium keepers. Of particular note are African cichlids, which are brilliantly colorful, and often chasing each other around playfully, in and out of rock formations.

(they're not actually chasing each other playfully: they're aggressive and territorial as all hell. but it looks like they're having fun!)

The vision for Cichlidia is similar: it's got 4 apartments, and while Karen and I live in one, we're aiming for something like a group house. If you're bored, you can go to someone else's apartment, with a good chance adventure is happening somewhere in the house 😎

So it's full of people you like?!

We're halfway there! It's got us, with our absolutely fantastic roommate, and some friends in one of the other apartments. We've got tenants in the other two apartments until November, carrying over a lease from the previous owners.

The Dream

Starting next Tuesday, (June 11), we'll be hosting Tuesdays at Cichlidia, a weekly evening gathering for anyone who cares to join. We'll have cheese spreads, jams, and jellies. There'll ostensibly be some event attached (a viewing of an 80's German movie? a talk on dog training? collective playwriting?), participation will be optional, and it'll be chill.

The idea is for great folks we know in NY to know they can see us, maybe meet other people they like, maybe have their brain stimulated. If you don't have a plan that week, the dream is you can at least count on Cichlidia.

And, me being back on my bullshit, I hope to have some fun with its digital presence. I want to be pablo@cichlidia.house. I'd like to set up the Discourse instance such that folks post interesting stuff in NY and check it.

Community is work

There's a good chance this takes a few revisions! Karen and I are at extremely young startups that are demanding a lot of our time and energy. This is more ambitious than anything else like this we've done. But we love the people in our life and want this greatly, so I'm confident we'll finish this marathon, even if we have to take breaks. 😛

if it sounds fun and like something you'd like to help us build, reach out!