Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Twelve Inches of Fun

We are under a blizzard of snow here in New York City. It’s not exactly twelve inches, but it’s a more significant amount of snowfall than the mid-Atlantic has become accustomed to getting this early in the season. I, for one, am not particularly excited by the sudden transition to sub-freezing temperatures, slush-filled sidewalks and skin-chapping, chilling winds, but I admit it was a lot of fun watching the dog frolic in the snowdrifts this morning — and yet another reminder of his recent anniversary in our household.

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October Backlog

With this past weekend’s trip to D.C. and the unrelenting workload at Behavior, the past week or so, it’s been hard to catch up on email and to find time to post to Subtraction.com. I’m hopefully going to be able to make some real headway on my to do list this week, but to clear out the backlog a bit here are things with which I’ve been preoccupied.

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Pain in Vain

YankeesYou can call me a fair weather fan, but when the home team is behind, I don’t think I’m constitutionally suited to watching baseball. This is the situation I find myself in this evening, watching the Yankees struggle against the Red Sox in the seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series.

The winner moves on to the World Series, and the loser spends the winter in ignominy — this kind of drama is the definition of good ball, but I find it’s a sort of drama both too excruciating and too superfluous for me to watch. That is, I am endlessly fascinated by the game but I find these moments of extreme competitive consequence to be too much, too engrossing and too demanding of my emotional energy. What’s more, I find something subliminally complicit in watching, as if I’m somehow partaking in my team’s progressive defeat. This is all completely irrational, I know… but with everything else going on in my life, I’d just as soon not watch these pivotal matches and thereby save myself the exhaustion. Anyway, go Yankees!

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World Won’t Listen…

Not feeling so great today about the following things: The very poor customer service at Circuit City, where my girlfriend and I have been trying to redeem a store credit for weeks without success. The broken CSS support in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which always seems to mangle pixel-perfect layouts that Safari and Mozilla seem to nail without a problem. The unyielding nature of the airline industry, which won’t allow my girlfriend and me to reschedule tickets we booked to Las Vegas in November without onerous penalties. The nagging effects of repetitive strain injury, which comes and goes for me but lately has been more and more persistent. And the fact that the Oakland A’s should have swept the Boston Red Sox on Saturday night, but instead blew their lead in game after game, until this evening’s painful fifth game.

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Tickets to Nowhere

Here’s a quick complaint about online ticket purchasing for highly popular events: it has a long way to go. Unable (and, by principle, unwilling) to camp out all night for post-season Yankees tickets, I decided to try and make an online purchase yesterday when tickets to the division and league championship series went on sale right at 12:30p sharp. I set an alarm on my computer to remind me to log in at the appointed time, and I was pleased to be able to secure a spot in the virtual queue right away — especially knowing that probably tens of thousands of other fans were trying to do the same thing either online, at Ticketmaster outlets, or at the stadium.

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Wake Up, It’s September

Apparently, this September inherited very little from July and August, and summer has left town. Weekend trips to the beach and vacations in New England are past, and now made to seem too swiftly squandered and insufficiently savored by today’s cold, wet introduction to autumn. When I left my apartment this morning for work, the sky was an underbelly of cloud cover and depressingly gray, and it promised soon there’d be morning commutes with no light at all.

It made me think of kids reluctantly, crankily returning to school for the first time today, and how this cold weather is an unfairly frank harbinger of a long schoolyear. Without a week or more of warm weather in September, to say nothing of an Indian summer, there’s no transition away from the luxury of summer vacation and into the grim schedule of the fall semester. Instead, there’s just a cold, wet abruption. What I mean to say is, today I’m glad I’m not a kid. Tomorrow might be different.

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The Puns of August

I’ll tell you one thing: August is a bad month for blogging, especially when one is setting up a new apartment, juggling too many projects at work and trying to go about the business of life all at once. I’ve been too frazzled to sit down and compose a decent post lately, so I will rattle off a few random thoughts that I’ve had over the past few days.

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Week in Review

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

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Fool’s Cold

April Fool’s DayMother Nature’s little April Fool’s Day joke for New York this year is unseasonably cold temperatures to follow the past week and a half of beautiful, moderate weather. It was 34º F when I walked to the office this morning! Crazy. In any event, one origin of April Fool’s Day asserts that the tradition is based on ridiculing those societies who continued to celebrate 01 Apr as the first day of the new year — as per the old Julian Calendar — long after the Gregorian Calendar, as it was implemented by the British, had designated that day as 01 Jan.

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Wounded Walking

While at the dog park this weekend, I took a bad spill on the unkind accumulation of ice and slush lingering from last week’s blizzard, and did something nasty to my ankle. Now, my walk has taken on a charming, hobbling quality and I can barely get from one end of the apartment to the other, much less across town to the office. Luckily the local kennel has a pick-up and drop off service, and Mister President goes wild for the place. In the meantime, I’ve spent most of the past two days re-watching DVDs (with a limp, I can’t even get to the video store to rent new flicks) ordering in food and browsing the Web.

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