Category Archives: Personal

Dangerous Sport

Baseball GloveSummer always makes me feel hazy, like I can’t quite get my brain into gear. When I went on vacation last week, I slept like champ, sometimes as much as 11 hours a day, all told. Since coming back to work, I’ve been relatively alert, able to focus on clients and learning all kinds of neat new tricks in Microsoft Excel and also on learning a lot about the numbers that make a business run. But it feels like a thousand years since I’ve sat down and engaged in any kind of hands on, creative activities for myself. Among these basically meaningless little blog posts that I’ve been producing lately, I can’t think of anything that I’ve written that I’m actually proud of — which is to say nothing of my occasionally stated intention to redesign this Web site.

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Back in Black

Vacations are supposed to recharge you, but I felt more exhausted than ever when I woke up this morning and got ready for my first day back at work. I spent four days enjoying breezes running through green leaves, grilling whole foods over charcoals, and listening to baseball games through the tinny squeal of AM radio, but it now feels more like we just blinked — the world of work was gone for half a moment, but now it’s back.

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Cape from New York

Cape CodWe’ve been in Cape Cod since late Thursday night, my girlfriend, my dog and me, having left New York City and driven north for a long weekend. It’s gorgeous here to begin with, but we’ve had sterling weather on top of it: cool enough to be comfortable, but warm enough to swim off the modest shores of the Cape. There’s a huge lawn behind the converted barnhouse where we’re staying, and we’ve been spending a lot of time lounging on it, enjoying the quiet and watching the dog delight in running around it like mad. At night you can see all the stars looking down at the Earth, not just the ones bright enough to make it through a city’s diffusion. I’m sure there must be some way to live like this all year long.

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Rumble in the Bronx

Subway SeriesAt yesterday’s opening game in the annual Yankees/Mets “subway series,” I realized that, in the twenty or so major league ballgames I’ve attended in my lifetime, I’ve probably only made it to the ballpark early enough for the first pitch perhaps once or twice. Yesterday was one of those days — we got there almost forty-five minutes early — and I found myself sitting through the pre-game ceremonies and wondering, “Is the beginning of every baseball game always so militaristic?”

There was an embarrassing pageant of military gung-ho on display, from an absurd, protracted series of daring-do landings by the U.S. Army’s parachute team to the presentation of colors by West Point cadets to — most egregiously — a noisy, ostentatious fly-over during the national anthem by a trio of F-11 fighter planes. There were more mini-ceremonies too, the details of which I didn’t catch, but all of which were received with vigorous enthusiasm by the crowd of 55,303 baseball fans.

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B Is for Business

I’ve been considering a television-like summer hiatus from blogging, what with all of the demands on my time that seem to have gotten more serious since the weather turned warm. My family was visiting from the West Coast last weekend, which wiped me out for the week, and now my girlfriend has friends visiting from Florida and Maryland and staying in our tiny, lower-Manhattan apartment. I’ve also been swamped at work, not just with projects, but with negotiating a hiring contract with a candidate to fill a major new position at Behavior.

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Teach a Man to Fish

Fish ClassMy day started very, very early this morning, thanks to a gift certificate that my girlfriend gave to me last December for a recreational class in cooking at the Institute of Culinary Education. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a one-time session called “Fulton Fish Market Tour and Cooking Class,” noting but not seriously considering the difficulty of its unseemly 05:30a start time.

So even before the sun could be bothered to begin its business, we took a taxi down to the southeastern tip of Manhattan, where the long-standing Fulton Fish Market operates until it relocates (reluctantly) to the Bronx in 2005. The instructor gave us a tour of the market and a quick primer on the varieties of fish sold and how to select them.

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Philadelphia First

I’m just back from a day trip to Philadelphia, the first time I’ve actually ever been to the city proper, though I’ve passed through it countless times on my way back and forth between New York and Washington, DC. I went for a business meeting, but afterwards I took a little time out and met up with an old friend from junior high school. We had a quick drink, shot some pool, and I had my first, authentic Philly cheesesteak. Though I took the late unreserved train back to Manhattan, on the way there this morning, I took the Acela for the first time. It was a pleasant experience, though I’m not sure I’d ever pay for it out of my own pocket, given that it actually felt more cramped than the less tony trains that Amtrak runs along the eastern seaboard. Anyway, the real highlight of traveling today was spending some time in the gorgeous confines of the restored 30th Street Station, an enduring testament to a time when cities, people and architects used to imagine public spaces as truly grand specimens of human achievement. I wish I hadn’t forgotten my camera at home.

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When I Grow Up

All I wanted to do when I got out of school was be a graphic designer, so in that respect, I’m pretty happy with my job. As I get older though, I wonder if perhaps I pursued that goal a bit too single-mindedly, too much to the exclusion of other career choices I could have made. I wanted to be a writer for a long time, and in self-indulgent moments — like when I’m writing these overlong and unnecessarily complicated blog posts — I still fantasize about renting a house in Saigon or Hanoi and writing a book. I also wonder sometimes if I should have pursued my adolescent goal of drawing comic books for real money, before id lost out to superego and I decided to pursue ostensibly more serious matters.

Lately, I’ve been mentally compiling a list of careers I might have pursued if I had the opportunity to magically return to, say, sixteen, and completely reconstruct myself from scratch. Almost all of these would strike anybody who knows me now to be pretty absurd, but here is an incomplete accounting of them: film director, television producer, comedian, professional baseball player, career officer in one of the military services, foreign correspondent for a cable news channel, Capitol Hill lobbyist, police officer. Some of these I take more seriously than others, of course, but for some of them, it wouldn’t be completely outside of the realm of possibility for me to suddenly take them up. But, here in my early thirties and deep into a job that is threatening to become my life’s work, I guess if I’m going to make a career change then the time is now.

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You Can Lead a Dog to Water

Mister PresidentThe ridiculously gorgeous weather of spring — the reward for months of crappy winter weather — is starting to visit the New York area now. Though it was overcast and raining today, it was gorgeous on Saturday, when my girlfriend and I took Mister President up to Fahnestock State Park, where we hiked about 6 miles, part of it along the Appalachian Trail. We made the trip as much for us as for the dog, who we let off the leash (probably at the risk of a fine from a park ranger) for the entirety of the four hours.

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Manual Dexterity

I found a little bit of old New York in the Flatiron building this morning, when I took my girlfriend’s malfunctioning Olivetti Lettera 35i typewriter to the Gramercy Office Equipment Company for repair. This 70+ year old business is run in a little hovel of an office on the eighth floor by an impeccably groomed, kindly gentleman with a pleasing Brooklyn accent and a preternatural understanding of what makes a typewriter, er, type. Every available surface in the office is stacked up with aging typewriters, office equipment and unfiled paperwork, and when I walked down the very narrow yard of floorspace with the Olivetti, he pulled out a small writing extension from a hulking old steel desk, slapped it with his palm and instructed me to “Set it there. That’s all the space I got.”

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