Work (As Much as I Can Tell You)
The frustrating thing about publishing is that I'm finally working with authors and getting these great stories, but I can't tell them here. At all, because I don't trust my blabberfingers to not type something that could give someone away.
But I guess I can say that I have been working with more authors lately, which is usually fun and is definitely teaching me a lot. I'm helping my boss organize meetings at the big Academy of Management conference coming up and I've just about finished ushering the first wave of authors I've worked with from the beginning through the contract stage. I was also able to connect our editorial director with an author who had a full draft of a very interesting-sounding book--they'd gotten in touch with me through a colleague who'd done a review.
I'm far enough into my job that the mistakes I made at the beginning are coming back to haunt me, but they've all been sorted out so far--nothing insurmountable, though there have been a few tangles that I've needed some help to unravel. But I come out the other side knowing how not to tangle the next thing in the first place, always a plus.
This has taken a little more time, though. I stayed late a couple nights last week, but that turned out to have benefits beyond getting me caught up. On Thursday, as I reached Union Square, a big group of some fifty musicians was setting up to play! They were the Columbia Summer Winds and they put on free concerts around the city during the summer. I was hungry and the wind was picking up, so I didn't stay long, but I did stay to hear "A Summer Breeze," which the program said was the Summer 2012 Outdoor Composition Contest winner. A very fun song - take a listen!
Friday
I had to get new shoes. I decided that three months was too long to live with only one pair of work-quality sandals...which were brown, and didn't exactly go with my tan pants (I think - Becky can correct me if I'm wrong). There's a Nordstrom Rack on Union Square, so I got me thither for some absolutely excruciating shopping. Fortunately, God smiled upon me and I managed to find a pair of shoes that were everything I needed and not too expensive (I'd begun to despair when I found one-color, two-material flip flops for over $100 in the sales section, but then I got lucky!).
Yes, shoe shopping is a remarkable enough experience to put in my blog. I hate it, and having to do it twice so far this year is plenty, thank you very much.
I was particularly lonely and bored last week, so I wanted to find more things to do. I started by signing up for another volunteer activity with New York Cares, this time to play games with kids during an evening program. I didn't realize it was all the way back up in Inwood again (where I volunteered to pull weeds in the park), so quite a haul! I ate half my dinner at 4:30 and the other half when I finally got home a little after 9:30, and the program itself was only two hours.
Inwood is quite a beautiful area. Lots of brownstones and big hold houses of similar style that are probably apartments now. There are also a lot of brick apartment buildings with art deco accents, so not the ugly projects you see down in the Lower East Side. I got up to Inwood about fifteen minutes early, since I didn't know if the train would get me there on time, and walked around a bit.
The kids' program was in a church basement. It was a bit awkward at first, as it usually is when you first walk into a room swarming with kids. Iron Man 3 was on in the back, though you could hardly hear it over the noise of boisterous kids making chess, mancala, Jenga, concentration, Connect-Four, and Twister as competitive as possible.
I got sucked into a massive game of Uno in which all the guys were trying to modify the rules every time their turn came around while an older girl and I tried to keep things moving, if not maintain the peace. Still, it was a lot of fun. Towards the end a couple girls asked if they could learn how to play, and since the game had devolved into sulking and arguing about how you win, I scooped up the cards and relocated with them. I felt kind of bad--one girl played round after round, desperately wanting to win but never once cheating (unlike a couple of the boys, who had tried and, mostly, failed to do just that), and even though I tried to give her some games, I kept working myself into corners where I had to win. I felt really bad about it, especially when she started crying when her mom came and said that she had to stop so they could go home.
As the kids started to clear out, the organizers roped me into a game of spades, which I lost spectacularly once while trying to play it like hearts, and lost significantly less badly the next time. I'll definitely be going back for round two in two weeks!
Saturday
So a month ago I made my spectacular entrance into the New York City Geek Adventurers MeetUp by showing up, being friendly, and then dashing away at the last minute to vomit. Fortunately no one knew the last bit, but they did remember my dramatic exit. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
The Geek Adventurers were having this month's hide-and-seek competition in Penn Station, so I signed up right away! However, the event started at 5 PM, which left me a lot of time.
I decided to go walk the High Line, something I've wanted to do since I moved here. I tried to get a few friends interested, but no dice. So I packed my usual lunch and set off, alone again, to explore.
I started at my apartment and walked east the whole way across Manhattan--not that far, really. Strolling and slightly lost once or twice, I did it in under an hour. It's amazing how distinct the neighborhoods really are; you can almost see them changing: LES to Bowery and the Village to Greenwich. And oh, my, is that last one lovely! Bits of Greenwich reminded me of Boston with its cobbled streets, short old buildings, and painted brick. Some of the cafe-lined roads were so narrow and, consequently, car-free that the area felt almost idyllic-European. I happened upon the gorgeous Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. Obviously I had to halt my hunt for the High Line to take a peek. I'd love to go write there at some point--nice and quiet with great places to sit! I'd also love to live in the building. Fantasizing about what it would be like to live in buildings with funky architecture is a guilty pleasure of mine.
At last I found the High Line--an old elevated train track once used to deliver food to New York City that has been converted into an overhead park. Kind of a shame--train seems like a great way to get into the city instead of clogging up roads with trucks! It's the kind of thing that you'd expect a kid to dream up and adults to dismiss, but it's real and it's beautiful. There are some parts where you can't see the city through the trees, bushes, and grasses (though you can, of course, always hear it). There are spots for food vendors and art sellers (I'm sure they're picky about who they let up there). Best of all, to me, were the places to sit and just enjoy the mix of green and city colors. There were a couple theater-style sitting areas where you could sit and watch the traffic pass below--and one of them had a very clever wheelchair ramp built in around the benches.
There were a few odd things, though. First of all, almost everyone there was either obviously a tourist or white. Mostly both. It was a bit disconcerting. I guess locals who need to get places know to avoid it--the High Line is a good place to stroll, which makes it an awful place to get anywhere fast. But still, it was a beautiful park, and I felt kind of bad that something so associated with New York but not obviously touristy was still so...distant. Second, the high line went through some incredibly expensive apartment blocks--new expensive, with fancy lofts with their own rooftop "back yards", gyms, and access to the High Line. It felt very elite, which made me as uncomfortable as the access to the High Line made me jealous.
I ended up on 30th Street, just a couple blocks shy of Penn Station. Unfortunately, I'd overestimated how much time the High Line would take me, so I had three hours to kill. I'd brought my book, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, my writing, and my phone, so I passed the time well enough between a quick call to the family and scratching unhappily at my story.
Five o'clock finally rolled around and I could see the hide-and-seek crew gathering in front of Penn Station. I remembered a few people and a few people remembered me--and one informed me that they'd talked about me, wondering where I'd got off to. Mixed blessing I suppose: on the one hand, this is a group that cares about the people who show up; on the other hand, not one of my finer moments...
To my delight, two of the people I'd hit off well with had started dating in the month between hide-and-seek games! There was quite a range of ages, though I was the second youngest after a 20-year-old student who'd be graduating college early. We geeked out about comics and science jokes, though she did eventually get too deep into funny physics for me to follow. Fortunately there was a physics-turned-philosophy major who got those jokes and they continued apace. There was an older set designer who worked on small movies (I'd thought theater until he handed out his card), another young editorial assistant to lives really close in SoHo (we traded info), and the MeetUp leader, who didn't look much older than me, turned out to be 37!
After establishing a strict "no running" rule, setting boundaries, and agreeing that if any of us caught security's attention, being arrested would not count as a win, we split up into two groups. Each group had Mardi Gras necklaces of the same color, to distinguish between the two. One team would go in and hide, and a few minutes later the next team would go look for them. Once you were found, you met back outside at "base". Anyone who hadn't been found at the end of fifteen minutes scored a point for their team.
Hiders got creative while seekers made silly mistakes. Someone hid by standing in line at a pretzel stand, someone else in line at the information desk. One of the guys held a book over the lower part of their necklace--not that it helped. One slight gal hid behind two security golf carts (and got away with it!). Hardly any one scored, but it was fun just people watching and hunting, chatting while we looked for the other team or commiserated at having been found so quickly.
After two rounds each in Penn Station proper, we decided to play a pair of lighting 10-minute rounds in the K-mart. I hid at the back of the store behind some racks, waited for to see someone on the other team go by, and ducked my way back toward the front of the store to dive into a rack of pajamas (I couldn't hide there right away since I knew everyone would check under the racks first). Sure enough, time ticked by and I wasn't found. I did have a bit of an awkward situation when there was someone looking at the clothes on the rack around me at exactly ten minutes, but they left soon enough and I was able to dart back out without anyone noticing.
We were all tired by the last round. Some people didn't even bother to hide, opting to shop instead. My search conveniently led me down the Lego aisle. It took a while for everyone to trickle back from their hiding spots and places in line, but we quickly agreed to head to dinner together at the Skylight Diner. I'd smelled bacon while seeking in Penn Station, so I got a bacon cheeseburger. Yum!
Over dinner I found out that the physics-turned-philosophy major was a student at the New School, which is right near Union Square, and he knew a bunch of great, inexpensive places to go in the area. The other editorial assistant and I pumped him for places we'd been looking for, like conversation bars with cheap but good drinks, places to dance without dealing with a bunch of drunk people, and--in my case--where to get a badly needed haircut.
After dinner, a few of us headed over to Midtown Comics, a place I'd wanted to go but always been a bit nervous about. I like graphic novels, but don't read many--did I have enough geek cred, or would they throw me out? Yeah, maybe I was one of the few people without a clever t-shirt, but I added quite a few titles to my to-read list, found Feynman for the science nerds I'd described it to, and they found From Hell (about Jack the Ripper) for this history/gothic horror nerd.
A walk in the perfect weather with physics-turned-philosophy down to 14th street capped off a great day.
Sunday
Not too much out of the ordinary here. Francis Xavier soup kitchen as usual, and it was back to the trays...with a couple fun twists:
1) We were understaffed, and tray washing always gets the fewest people even though there are only some 200 trays that we need to keep washing to feed over 1000 meals.
2) The dryer was broken, so we had to make one crate of towels last for two hours.
Amazingly, those of us at the dish washing station still managed to have a few good chats, even if we had to interrupt them for five minutes here or there to alleviate pileups. Since I was drying this week, I wasn't quote soaked from the knee down like I was last week...just damp. It was hot and sweaty work for all the water involved, and I was glad that I had a nice lunch out to look forward to.
Our group grew and shrunk--a few more people, but not everyone who had come last time was there this time. We went down to University Place to a great, inexpensive restaurant called Cafetasia. I got Thai iced tea (one of my favorite drinks), spring rolls, and a huge portion of green curry for about $10! Well fed and much later in the day than I expected, I wandered home, stopping in at East Village Books to ogle the drama collection.
This week's dinner: lasagna (eating dinner out twice means I still have some left) and then pesto pasta with chicken, broccoli, and red peppers. And carrots. Because I have carrots...
This week's desire: a hedgehog. A nice, small pet that doesn't require direct sunlight (I'm sorry, Edna!).
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