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Monday, September 1st, 2008
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1:55 pm
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We ditched our halfhearted get-out-of-town-for-Labor-Day-Weekend plans in favor of some good old-fashioned hanging out at home, which has been relatively neglected this summer. While I have loved spending time at the beach and planning elaborate cookouts, I am relieved to be spending three days reading, watching tennis and hurricane updates, and catching up on miscellany like downloading old journals and figuring out how the camcorder works.
Last night I took the bus uptown to see "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" with Michelle, which was entertaining if a bit artificial. Afterward we chattered on the sidewalk, enjoying the warm night, until it started to feel late and we headed off in opposite directions.
Last day of the weekend. I should go outside and play.
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| Thursday, August 21st, 2008
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7:33 pm - late August mellowness
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These are the lazy days of late August, when work gets slow and it seems all things are possible. I've been catching up on items way at the bottom of my to-do list and daydreaming. The work day ends at a shockingly reasonable hour and I actually LEAVE and reconnect with old friends and pastimes. Today I had both lunch AND dinner plans (unheard of!). Lunch was sushi and a catch-up with a visiting ex-coworker, happy and smiling in big sunglasses with her move to Miami and impending engagement. Dinner tonight is Cookshop with my friend Michelle, who lives in town but must be booked for get-togethers weeks in advance due to her ridiculous work travel schedule.
Wow, it's been something like six months since I've written here (but then again, I've rarely been very consistent with this). Hm, what's happened? I started, then quit, then re-started yoga. I switched from one position to another at work (yay promotion) and worked really, really, really hard during the interim period when I was essentially doing both. I went to LA, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, Wisconsin, the Jersey Shore, the Netherlands, Pennsylvania twice, and Orange County three times. I joined a book club. I have considered moving many, many times but remain in the tiny Chelsea apartment with the husband and the cat. I am working on making the perfect mojito. And I finally paid off my ancient library fines and have library books! And a list of books on reserve at the library!
Not sure how long this quiet period will last but I intend to enjoy it...
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| Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
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3:20 pm
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It's been a muddy, mucky mental week, for no discernible reasons other than I'm on the verge of some changes at work and also, the weather. After six weeks of happily productive gym-going, healthy-eating, to-do-list-checking, book-reading, and friend-contacting, I basically now just want to nap. I'm not depressed, just awfully lazy. I'm alternating couch nests and cheese sandwiches with things that might shake me awake - last night's party, fortification with giant cups of tea, posting to livejournal even when there seems to be nothing to post about. Oh well. Time to try diving into a stack of books.
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| Saturday, January 26th, 2008
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6:41 pm - brr
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Miami, though uneventful (well, except for the fact we had to go to the cheesiest bar on South Beach), was at least warm enough to occasion the wearing of sandals. Back home again now and I'm chilly!
Last night we watched Darkon, and now The Fellowship of the Rings is on. Thinking about the two, I wonder if the continued rise of gaming is preventing future great works of art by serving as an easy creative outlet/procrastination tool for people who might otherwise be writing or making films or paintings... or if it's saving us all from lots of bad works of art by serving as an outlet for people without talent who might otherwise be writing or making films or paintings. :)
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| Sunday, January 20th, 2008
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7:51 pm
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I do not think it is fair to somehow "forget" that you like to watch football on TV and then "remember" again four years into a six-year relationship. I thought we had a mutual commitment to just goofing around on Sundays. Now here I am, trying to ignore the Giants game. Zero degrees in Green Bay, 21 degrees in New York. I would say hooray for the fact that I'm headed for Miami for work tomorrow, but the forecast there looks pretty full of showers and thunderstorms.
In warmer news, it seems that Brian D'Amato has a new book coming out this spring. He wrote one thriller novel, fifteen years ago, full of early-90's Soho art scene and sci-fi and deconstructionist references, and then he sort of disappeared off the face of the earth. Now he's apparently written a trilogy about Mayans and game theory and the year 2012, and I'm intrigued. His website is frozen in time - despite a few updates about the new book, the structure remains do-it-yourself HTML. Flashback!
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| Friday, April 28th, 2006
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5:11 pm
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I thought the jury duty notice in the mail was a mistake, so I dug around self-righteously until I found my last proof of service. Year: 2000. (How could they have considered me an appropriate candidate to pass judgement on criminals back then? I was but wee.) Whoops. Due again.
So, a couple of days at 111 Centre Street. I heard Anna Wintour was called at the same time, but she must have been in a different room.
I sat through two rounds of jury questioning the first day. The whole court experience has been fictionalized so much that I had a hard time believing I was quite in real life. The lawyers were so... lawyery. Prosecution: "Do you believe in the right of everyone to have a trial, no matter how OVERWHELMING THE EVIDENCE IS against him?" Defense: "Do you believe that just because someone is sitting in that box, swearing on a stack of Bibles that they are telling the truth, that they are telling the truth? Do you think THEY MIGHT NOT BE TELLING THE TRUTH?"
Something in me demanded that I spend quite a lot of money on lunch each day, battling the tedium of containment in the Building of Justice and Early 80's Technology (wooden inboxes for our jury ballots, elevators that appeared to be run by turtles on treadmills).
It was a slow week in crime, so I spent the whole second day reading in the waiting room. At one point, the guy who ran the room looked out at all of us, slouched in uncomfortable chairs, doing crosswords in back issues of "Jury Pool News", and napping with open mouths. He turned on the microphone and said, "While you are sitting there, just remember you are the one thing standing between civilization and anarchy. Keep up the good work."
Awesome.
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| Monday, April 24th, 2006
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6:19 pm - remembering stuff...
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Today I remembered a lot of things. I remembered last.fm and made a loopy station based on the Beastie Boys, Firewater, Jane's Addiction, Mary J. Blige, Morphine, Neko Case, Nick Cave, Prince, and Tom Waits. I remembered that Miranda July had kept a blog for a couple of months after the release of "Me and You and Everyone We Know", and read through it. I remembered that there are a whole bunch of forgotten shades of lipstick in my makeup box, and put on some "Watermelon". (This one probably should have remained forgotten, but it smells yummy.) I remembered to sit up nice and straight at my desk. I remembered I have jury duty this week which is either going to be terrible or like a strange kind of City Hall vacation. I remembered to buy some tulips. I remembered I have this livejournal.
current mood: cheerful
current music: Soul Coughing, "Circles" (last.fm)
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| Saturday, January 28th, 2006
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5:58 pm
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This month is "the busy month" at work, which translates mostly into a lot of meetings and a lot of moving around back and forth between New York and Connecticut. It's nowhere near as busy as my old job could get, but just busy enough to torpedo a few of my resolutions: not nearly enough reading/writing, no museums, not enough trips to the gym.
Riding Metro North makes me feel like a character out of a John Updike story, catching the 8:04 home. People on the train work on laptops, sleep, watch DVDs, read newspapers and leave them behind on their seats. In the evenings, they visit the bar car and hang Heinekens from the shelves. Connecticut looks quiet and pretty in high speed. Sometimes spouses wait at the train station to pick up returning commuters - apparently station parking passes are treasured commodities north of the city.
Tomorrow I am flying to Miami. It's a devil's bargain trip, promising resort sunshine but more likely delivering long days in conference rooms. Still, I'm packing some books and notebooks - with luck, I'll get SOMETHING out of this.
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| Saturday, January 7th, 2006
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5:15 pm
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The first e-mail I got on my birthday was from one of my closest friends, announcing to everyone she knew that she is looking for someone to take over the lease on her apartment because she has decided to move to New Orleans sometime in the next month (no job, no apartment, new guy). And as soon as I walked into the office, I was pulled into a conference call involving semi-extensive reworks to something we'd thought we'd finished the night before. Happy biiiiirthday toooo meeee.
But it got better, with a gift delivery from Amazon and a buzzing cell phone and a bottle of champagne and pink roses when I got home. And an voluptuous birthday dinner at the cozy and inviting Harrison, with biscuits and gravy and duck and warm pear crisp that had a single birthday candle in it. Tonight it's an art opening followed by drinks with friends and then more drinks with other friends.
Another year older. S'okay.
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| Thursday, January 5th, 2006
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9:44 pm
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An evening when I leave work unabashedly on time (but before almost everyone else) without sneaking out the back way, without deciding to fake a little more work so that I'm visible for another half-hour, is a damn good thing indeed.
Our front door buzzer was broken so we asked the restaurant to have the delivery guy call up on his cell phone when he got here. "Open door please?" he said twenty minutes later, and I came downstairs to no one. Looked up the street, looked down the street - there was no man carrying a plastic bag of dinner. I called the restaurant. They sounded perplexed and asked me to wait a while, he should be there any minute. A half hour later I called back, and they sounded surprised. The delivery had been made and paid for - but not to me.
So now, I'm trying to imagine the situation. A lost delivery guy covering his tracks? Or someone on this block, feeling peckish, too lazy to pick up the phone, seeing this guy and deciding, "hey! I'll take my chances on what he's got!" Could that possibly have worked out?
(They sent out another order.)
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6:41 pm - '06 goals
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The gym: packed. The vitamin store: packed. Must be New Year's.
I rolled my eyes at all the eager resolutioneers, but yeah, I think about goals this time of year. My birthday's this week too, which makes all of that "new year" stuff feel kind of personal.
So, ( here's what I'm thinking... )
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| Sunday, January 1st, 2006
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10:20 pm - 2005
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| Thursday, December 29th, 2005
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4:59 pm - mmmm, chocolate martinis and pie
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Eight holiday days in the bosom of various families is a little too relaxing. Movies and shopping in big-box stores squidge up the mind; chocolate martinis and pie squidge up the body. After eight days, it seems entirely possible and tempting to fill life with a whole lot of Things That Feel Good But Have No Actual Reward. While such things definitely have their place (and I have no plans to give up my weekly dose of Project Runway), it's nice to be back in good old high-pressure, demanding New York City, where wasting time makes me feel a bit too much like an asshole for comfort.
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| Saturday, December 10th, 2005
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7:35 pm
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| Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
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4:46 pm
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My time in London was a bit ( improvised )
Other miscellany:
... while I hate hate hate seeing shows at Joe's Pub, Neko Case was phenomental enough to make up for it.
... Chip Kidd's new book looks interesting.
... visiting G's friend in Red Bank, I developed a nagging jealousy of his study: a room devoted to perfectly curated bookshelves, a wide comfortable chair, and an angled reading lamp. Impossible in Manhattan... sigh.
... tonight, U2!!! Tomorrow, Jersey.
Happy Thanksgiving, Americans...
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| Monday, November 7th, 2005
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3:32 pm
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| Friday, November 4th, 2005
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9:46 pm
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This morning, as I walked through Grand Central Station for the third morning in a row, feeling run-down, overworked, and depressed, I looked up at the big blue ceiling of the Grand Concourse and wished that the crowded station was more like that scene in The Fisher King where all the grim commuters suddenly start waltzing under that ceiling full of stars.
This evening, as I came home through Grand Central, I saw a guy down on one knee, and a girl crying and saying "yes", and then they just hugged and hugged while grim commuters swarmed all around them. Not quite a waltz, but a charming start to the long-awaited weekend nonetheless.
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| Tuesday, November 1st, 2005
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7:27 am
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This costume is called "put on stuff from the back of the closet and hope no one asks you what you are."
Next year, more planning.
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| Saturday, October 29th, 2005
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12:19 pm - vegas
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Las Vegas is fantasmagorical on the screen and in the mind, but seems to have difficulty maintaining its sparkle in the up-close. The airport whets the appetite: all blinking lights, ads for clubs and restaurants, and videos of Cirque du Soleil. Ten minutes off the plane, I was making plans to return without work compatriots, possibly for New Year's Eve -- but, four days later, I'm so very glad to be far away from there.
Maybe it's because I was with work compatriots, and because we spent our days in conference rooms in the bowels of worn-out Harrah's and our nights with the faintly artificial, Guinness-fueld goal of "team bonding". Maybe it's because, as it turns out, I find myself simply made irritable by the whole casino atmosphere. Maybe it's because, though I won $3 in the slots, I spent $4 to get cash out of the ATM.
I've been there twice before - once with an addled date, once with other work colleagues - and each time the best moments of the trip were found out in the desert rather than under the lights of the Strip. Is there any glam or glitz in Vegas anymore? I hate to write such a legendary place off entirely.
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| Sunday, October 16th, 2005
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2:06 pm
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Made silly by yesterday's sunshine, I forgot one of the primary rules required to maintain sanity in this city: never go to Soho on a nice Saturday. "Oh, I'll just stop by American Apparel," I thought to myself after my haircut. Ha ha ha ha ha. People everywhere, swarming the sidewalks, stopping to chat with each other or with people at the other end of cell phones, brushing past me in store aisles. I managed to buy a T-shirt and get out of there without giving anyone the pointy elbow, which is, I think, quite commendable.
My dreams lately have been full of abandonment and righteous anger, and I've been waking up sleepy. My subconscious seems to have it in for me. It had better get its act together before my busy fall kicks into gear - trips to Vegas and London, two baby showers, new nephew, Neko Case live, U2 live. All parts of the brain, get on board.
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