Thirty Stories Up

Many apologies for the sporadic posting; my new responsibilities at work have this nasty habit of being both important and pressing, which means my time at home relaxing is cut short, and something has had to give way.

All sorts of interesting things going on lately; visited the Water Club (30th St., at the East River) for the first time.  It’s your basic fine dining experience, with a fairly spectacular view across the river.  On a Friday evening, it was nice, with helicopters taking off and landing at the nearby helipad, a seaplane coming in for a touch-and-go, and the occasional boat taking a leisurely evening cruise by.  I can see how the outside traffic might not be nearly so good-looking for a weekday lunchtime, however.  The food was excellent;  I started with a lobster bisque, went on to have the veal, and finished with the creme brulee.  It was a memorable occasion to share with others, though the price dictates that I won’t be able to return often.

In more interesting dining news, I’ve heard about a place called the Barcelona Bar.  Now, I have to maintain a healthy skepticism about ’shot bars’, but this one looks a bit too good to let pass by, if only because my family brought me up with a healthy tolerance for being able to not take myself seriously all the time.  Note to prospective bar owners: themed bars, by and large, suck.  But bars about themed shots, well, there’s a business plan for you.  I’ll no doubt be the one ordering a Full Metal Jacket (which involves, if I have this correct, donning an Army helmet, downing two shots of Wild Turkey, and then dropping for push-ups).  In fact, that may be the best exercise I’ll get this summer apart from the J.P. Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge (that’s JPMCCC to those of us in the know, which I assure you that you are not).

For those of you craving a return to articles, don’t worry, I have several in the works, including another science book review, a few philosophy entries, and perhaps (if you’re all very good), some NYC history.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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My writing habits and my running habits have an unfortunately large number of things in common; this, of course, is debilitating to any aspirations I’d ever have to do either one seriously.  My running habits over the past year can be summed up as such:

• May 2005: I should start running, now that finals are over.
• June 2005: Oh, my new employer does the J.P. Morgan Chase Challenge.  Well, that’s a chance to get 5 miles and some bonding with co-workers in.
• July 2005: I should build on that momentum… later.
• August 2005: Well, maybe when I get back to school I’ll start running.
• January 2006: Home for break!  Can’t dodge running with the family… once.
• June 2006: Hmm… my employer is doing the J.P. Morgan Chase Challenge again….

And so, around and around it goes.  The same is true of my writing habits; I write prolifically for a short period of time (typically encompassing a span of a good ten minutes at a shot), and then figuratively hit the ’snooze’ button and roll over and go back to sleep every time I’m tempted to start writing again.

Okay, sometimes it’s not so figurative.

Deadlines are the worst in both cases, because one miss, and inertia becomes that much harder to get going.  Part of the reason I delayed a few days between the last post and this one was deliberate; I need to know I can tell myself I’ll do something tomorrow, and have some trust that I’ll actually get around to doing it.  Every day that passes after a deadline just makes the initial step, whether it’s tying on those running shoes or opening up that blog editor, that much harder.

I suspect this is why cartoonists go on sabbatical; outside of the business consideration of whether readers would stick around for two weeks of repeats every year, what cartoonist would want to stop, let two weeks go by, and then start again?  I suspect the minimum length of time needed for the absence of a necessary task to truly start kicking in is around six months, if you’re the kind of person who dreads doing something even a little late.  When I miss an update, I dread even checking someone else’s blog, let alone looking at my own.  Let’s see if we can’t kick this procrastinating habit.

I’ll start by kicking off my shoes right here at work, and tying on a pair of running shoes.  There’s 5 miles of bonding with co-workers that needs my attention.

Filed under: Column
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Yes, occasionally something falls so firmly in the [WTF] category of the world that I cannot help but share it. Today’s vignette, lovingly related to us by CNN.com, is the story of a man who allegedly (Attn. Aspiring Bloggers: ‘allegedly’ is vital. Always allege, facts are anathema to postmodern blogging.) was ‘involved in’ his wife’s death. That phrase always struck me as interesting, when referring to an apparent simple murder; it suggests a plot of grander complexity and richer texture than that of a man hacking a person apart. Unfortunately, while this one certainly has texture, it’s the texture of a French art-house horror flick rather than that of, say, a French art-house drama flick (does referring to these as ‘flicks’ horribly malign honest cinema?).

Apparently, for today’s modern psychopath, hacking up alone is no longer de rigeur. No, this psychopath obviously had something a little grander in mind. Unfortunately for humanity, whatever it was involved hacking his wife’s head clean off (another interesting linguistic digression; I imagine this was anything but a clean endeavor). What came next will surprise few who are so close, so intimately involved with the Boise mindset as I am: he took the head, and got in his pickup truck. Driving erratically, he eventually and inevitably slammed into oncoming traffic, killing two people and spilling the severed head onto the road, to the horror of the entire non-jaded human race, not to mention whoever got to open the door to his home to find the rest of his wife’s body.

Humanity, answer for this: what is wrong with us? Do people really just snap like this? Was there warning? Will his neighbors claim he was ‘quiet’ and ‘reserved’, and that they just can’t believe this could happen? Are we doomed to have guys in trucks escape horrific accidents (in the truest sense of the word ‘horrific’, not the schmaltzy ‘oh-too-bad’ news media usage) unhurt, while innocent people die? Is it the human condition, is it the society we live in, or is it just plain bizarre random chance, tossing out a bad hand (and head) to all involved?

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I have become the old man I never thought I’d be.

Aside from the obvious factor of my semi-chronic back pain (which has miraculously gone away, now that I’m sleeping on a real bed and not just a mattress on the floor - go figure), I’ve suddenly, and of all things, actually become obsessed with sports.

My geek upbringing is screaming with all of its might that this cannot be a healthy development.  When I was growing up, I’d hit the Washington Post every morning in the same order; comics, Bob Levy’s column, front page, Style section.  The sports section was reserved for other people, people with frightening obsessions with numbers that fluctuate seemingly by random chance.  Football was for people who didn’t know a better way to spend a Sunday, baseball was a great sport to fall asleep to on the radio, hockey was (up until I came to my senses) fun to play, not so much to watch.  My total sports consumption for the week came to the combined 30 minutes or so that the sports was on NBC4 News at 6, and mostly only because of the blooper reel.

Over the years, this managed to hit a reasonable balance.  As I became a hockey fan and learned more, the games became watchable, though I never sought them out explicitly.  As I got to college, learning a bit about football became obligatory, and so I watched a game or two every couple of Sundays.  Nothing excessive, nothing that interfered with my (riveting) social life, just a few games.

In the past two weeks, my sports viewing is well up over 16 hours.  I’ve watched every single World Cup game I’ve been able to get my hands on, every single Cup playoff game since the semifinals, the Arena Bowl, even some tennis.  What is wrong with me, that I’d rather sit in my comfortable chair with a beer and watch the drama of… some horrible commentator trying to compare the World Cup with the World Series?  Ugh.  It’s like an affliction; I can now approximate OPS in my head, criticize the hustle of the Oilers in the 3rd period, and expound at length on why Trinidad and Tobago should not have used a 4-5-1 formation today.

Combined sports-to-gaming ratio over two weeks: approximately 8:1.

Well, at least my back feels better now.

Filed under: Column
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As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly normal for people to go on vacation to the Poconos, post a picture, and then disappear for 8 months or so.

Anyway, the gauntlet has been thrown, shenanigans have been called, and all sorts of other things have been verbed in passive voice, so here I am. I could certainly call the break an ‘unannounced sabbatical’, I could call it irony, considering what’s gotten me most of my hits, and the eventual apparent fate of my writing. I could quite handily call it a lot of things, none of them justifiable, so I’ll just call it bygone and pretend it never happened.

Still, it’s fascinating to come back after all this time and observe what’s left to pick up. I saw the spam notices piling up in my inbox, figuring that anytime I wanted to begin posting again, I’d have to struggle under the weight of that… fortunately, WordPress has some mass comment edit capabilities, so I think I got most of the spam out of the comments with minimal collateral damage. Everything still seems to work, although there are a few dust bunnies here and there (hopefully taken care of by updates to the software involved).

So, the prime question on everyone’s mind by now: just where the hell have I been? ‘Around’ would suffice, I suppose. School is school, and with a year left, I’m fighting off early graduation by taking an unusually lax schedule this coming semester. I’m also trying to dust off my (admittedly rusty) writing skills a bit, as I’ve been unforgivably lax in that department for quite a while.

Secondary questions, hopefully answered: Yes, I still work for the blog’s namesake, at the same consulting firm on the 30th floor of a midtown Manhattan office building. Yes, I’m still an intern, although my duties have evolved considerably, my responsibilities have expanded, and my horizons have broadened. Yes, I’m still at SJU, enjoying my college education considerably. No, I’m not still 20, a birthday fortunately intervened somewhere in the last 12 months and pushed me past the ‘beer-after-work’ threshold, though finances haven’t colluded with said birthday to make such drinks a common occurrence. No, I don’t still live in Ridgewood; for the summer, it’s glorious, luxurious Forest Hills, Queens, for me. Yes, I love it there. Yes, the rent sucks.

There’s plenty I’d like to write about, and I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually. But for now, I’ll just be shaking the dust off of my RSS aggregators, carefully opening my yellowed, aged notebooks, and fixing things up about the place a little, and then attacking things in a (hopefully somewhat organized) way.

Filed under: Column
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