new york

Wednesdaying it up

Today was a pretty average day. We had one of our regular “brown bag lunches” at work, where they invite a speaker and give us free food for attending, but I decided to skip this one. It was about “Meals Off the Clock: Tips for Cooking During the Work Week,” and going for a walk on my lunch break seemed like the better option. I don’t do a lot of cooking, to be honest. When I was single, living on my own, it often wasn’t much fun making a big production out of a meal for one person, and now that I live with my parents, dinner is usually more of a collaborative effort. I have been looking into moving out recently, in that hesitant oh-my-god-is-that-really-how-much-these-apartments-cost kind of way. So I could maybe use some tips for stretching a dollar and still eating well. But the weather was nice enough that a walk seemed like more fun. The lunches in general are a pretty mixed bag; some have been pretty great, some not so much, and you never know what you’re going to get until you’re trapped there for the hour or more.

Other than that, it was just a lot more of the same. All the trains out of Manhattan were delayed this evening, apparently because one hit a pedestrian in Kew Gardens. I haven’t been able to find out any more information since, but that’s what we were told over the PA system: police activity following an unauthorized person being hit by a train. Almost certainly a suicide attempt, and almost certainly a successful one, or at least that seems to be the consensus here, which is just a shame if it’s true. My own train was forty minutes late because of the delays, and I had to go pick up my mother in Hicksville. (She doesn’t work in Manhattan but had to go in today, and she got the wrong train coming home.)

And that was my Wednesday. I’m only working four days this week, so tomorrow is pretty much my Friday. I’m looking forward to that!

Thursday various

  • Go on, ask me anything.

  • This future of publishing ad — which I’m seeing re-posted everywhere — is clever. And sure, the whole “death of publishing” thing is all in how you look at it. But, at the same time — and watch the video before you read this — I found it a little too gimmicky. Maybe it’s the length, since it is a little too long to be a truly effective advertisement, or maybe it’s that they kind of had to cheat to make the trick of it work. It is clever, though, I won’t argue with that.

  • This isn’t new, but c’mon, how can you resist a headline like Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included? [via]

  • Manahatta: same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
  • And finally, John Seavey on George Lucas’ biggest mistake:

    But all that gets lost in the sheer awesomeness of the Jedi. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high–Yoda is a cool Wise Old Master with all the good bits in Episode Five, Qui-Gon Jinn is played by Liam Neeson and Mace Windu is Samuel Freaking Jackson, and the lightsaber is the coolest weapon in the history of film. Everyone takes Yoda’s words at face value–even the authorized sequels, which show Luke trying to re-establish the Jedi in the image of the old order. Everyone assumes that Luke narrowly won his struggle with the Dark Side at the end, but in fact, he did exactly what people do every day. He got upset, he channeled his anger constructively, and then he calmed down. Only the Manichean nutbags who run the Jedi and the Sith think that this is some kind of near-impossible achievement. The Jedi aren’t the heroes of the film, Luke is, for realizing that there’s something more than the false duality that trapped and ultimately destroyed his father.

    That’s the message of the Star Wars films, and it’s a shame that Lucas made it so hard for people to notice.

Kiss me, I’m Irish!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, everyone! Or, as we like to call it in New York, Drunk Tourists in the Street Before Lunchtime Day! Seriously, I can’t remember seeing this many obnoxious people in matching colors since my last home football game weekend at Penn State. I went for a walk around 12:30, since it was such a nice day outside, and I walked past several dozen bars with cheap shamrock decorations taped to the windows. I hadn’t had lunch yet and already some of these people — some who looked all of twelve or thirteen, I have to say — were can’t-get-up-off-the-ground or shout-random-things-at-strangers drunk. I suspect not a one of them was Irish.

For my (half-Irish on my mother’s side) part, I wore green today but didn’t even think to lift a pint. When I finally did have lunch, it was a slice of pizza and some fruit salad. I do drink on occasion, though almost never in the middle of the day — and then only in social situations — but I find the whole idea of taking the morning off to go binge drinking pretty depressing.

But beyond that, it was actually a really nice day. I sent a project I’m working on to our UK office, to get the ball rolling on a website we’re creating, and I put another manuscript into review. I also spent some time tracking down authors of some older books, with an eye towards developing new editions. So far, only one of them appears to have died since the previous edition, so that’s going well.

I did send out a bunch of rejection letters for Kaleidotrope, though, which is never fun. I noted earlier today on Twitter that when I read a story, I am looking for reasons to reject it. But, more than that, I’m looking for a story that doesn’t give me any reasons. I want to love every story, even if I don’t realistically have room for all of them, but in practice I’m going to love only a very small percentage. The number of stories I’ll hate is an even smaller percentage, of course, but that just means the vast number are somewhere in between. And it’s not that in-between stuff that I’m really looking for.

Anyway, that was my Wednesday. Right now, I think I need to take the dog out, and then I’m going to watch this new FX show Justified and go to bed.

Tuesday various

The city that never sleeps (though I do)

No weird sandwiches for lunch today, I’m afraid. At the office, we had one of our regular “brown bag lunch” talks, where they invite a guest speaker and give everybody free pizza or sandwiches. Today was a pizza day, which was okay, though I wish I could say the same about the talk. Ostensibly it was about New York, the love-hate relationship the rest of the nation (and New Yorkers) have with the city, and moreover how that relates to the current economic crisis. Wall Street fat cats, that sort of thing. And I guess it was that, but I just found it meandering and a little preachy, even when I agreed with some of the anti-corporate points the speaker was trying to make. In all, the free pizza was the best part of the deal.

This evening, though, I actually had a regular (albeit open-faced) Reuben for dinner. My mother and I picked my father up at the eye doctor’s — he’s doing well — and we had dinner at a pub/bistro around the corner. We actually just got home a little while ago, and I think I’m going to use this hour before bed to watch last night’s Lost. I tried watching it last night, but it just didn’t work out.