Day: January 20, 2011

9 to 5, give or take

I’ve been trying to piece together the thought process that led me to be at the office this morning at 8 o’clock. The actual process isn’t terrifically complicated — I woke up earlier; I caught an earlier train — but I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to do that, or what I thought I would accomplish by being half an hour earlier than I am on even my earliest mornings.

Heaven knows I went to sleep earlier again last night, and by the time I woke up in earnest, there wasn’t a lot of time left to do anything but catch a train into Manhattan. I had to be in to work this morning by 9, thanks to a meeting with our sales reps from Kentucky, and that meant I had to be in by 8:30, thanks to the way my local train schedule works. I think I had this idea that I wouldn’t necessarily go to the office straight away, that I would have time to grab a bite to eat for breakfast. But the train was a little late getting in to Penn Station, lurching its way through the tunnel, and by the time I walked uptown I figured, hey, I’m already here. I might as well have the satisfaction of being here before practically anybody else.

There’s not a lot of satisfaction in that, and that first half hour actually goes by pretty fast. The whole day went by really fast, in fact, even though in the end I stayed until 4:30 (instead of leaving half an hour early at 4), and even though I didn’t leave the office for lunch (since that was provided, as part of the meeting). It wasn’t a particularly exciting day, but for an unusually long one, it felt unusually short.

Thursday various

  • I don’t know why I find this particularly interesting, but I do:

    The post office ignores the return address for Netflix DVDs and sorts them separately for a Netflix truck to pick them up early in the morning for processing.

    Discs are shipped back to the nearest processing facility, regardless of the address on the return envelope; that address is there just for legal reasons, apparently. This seems like something I maybe sort of already knew, but it’s a reminder of the volume they (and by extension the post office) have to process.

  • John Seavey’s Open Letter to Zombie Story Writers:

    In essence, the human body is a machine, like an automobile. You are trying to describe the ways this machine can malfunction to produce a specific effect, and that’s good, but please stop explaining to me how it keeps going without wheels, gasoline, or a functioning engine.

    He raises some interesting points, although I don’t think they apply to the “zombies” in films like 28 Days Later, as he seems to. At least from my recollection — and I re-watched the movie pretty recently — the infected population there a) don’t act at all like George Romeroesque zombies (i.e., no human flesh, no brains), and b) don’t continue acting beyond physically believable limits. Beyond normal pain tolerances, sure — there’s the one guy who keeps running even though he’s literally on fire — but into the realm of sheer impossibility.

  • “What is, come with me if you want to live, Alex?” So you may have heard: a computer has won at Jeopardy. (There goes that Weird Al remix idea!) I’m still looking forward to the televised rematch next month, though perhaps not so much to the subsequent robot apocalypse.
  • It’s worth it for Goodnight Dune alone: Five Sci-Fi Children’s Books. [via]
  • And finally, Jeff VanderMeer on Everything You Need to Know to be a Fiction Writer.