work

We got movie sign

Last night, I watched How to Steal a Million, which, while enjoyably pleasant, was maybe less than you’d expect from a romantic heist movie set in Paris starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

This afternoon, I re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I haven’t seen in several years. It’s still quite stunning, and a hugely important work, but it’s a movie I probably admire more than I enjoy. (I’m sort of tempted to seek out the sequel, which I remember having something of the opposite problem.)

After that, I went for a walk, then came back and watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. I do think I like his earlier movies, like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo better, but there’s no denying this is much more epic and beautifully shot. Seriously, I could watch the castle attack — which this clip shows but doesn’t really do justice to — almost all day.

After that — I took a short break to go to the local diner with my parents for dinner — I watched John Carpenter’s The Ward, which I was just kind of waiting to be over. It’s really not very good, boring more than anything else, with a twist ending that almost seemed clever the first hundred times I’ve seen it in other movies. A couple of months ago, I watched Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which is at least interesting in its flaws. Weirdly, unshakably interesting. The Ward, on the other hand, isn’t even representative of Carpenter at his absolute, crazy worst (like the terrible In the Mouth of Madness). There’s nothing distinctive about it at all. It’s not even risibly bad; it just kind of is.

Which isn’t a great way to end the evening or a day spent mostly in movies. But there you have it.

It’s hard to believe the long weekend is almost over. There’s still tomorrow, and I don’t go back to the office on Monday, but it’ll be back to work for me soon. Of course, that’s only for a couple of weeks. When the heck did it become December already?

Fall down, go boom

I arrived at the train station this morning to discover a disabled train — I prefer to think of them as handi-capable — stuck on the track where my train is usually supposed to go. Plus a whole bunch of people walking up the stairs to the other platform, where our train had been redirected.

Because of the stuck train, the railroad was promising scattered 15 to 20-minute delays all morning, and my connecting train wasn’t even an option. I stayed on — standing, not sitting — to Penn Station and caught the subway from there. It’s the exact reverse of what I do in the evening, as I’ve probably mentioned here before, and it takes pretty much the same amount of time as my normal morning commute. It’s not my preferred way of getting there…

…although, come to think of it, maybe it should be. Going to Hunterspoint Avenue doesn’t save me much time, and no money, and it really narrows my options if the subway is delayed or isn’t running. Only the 7 train runs from Hunterspoint Avenue, on two tracks, one going into Manhattan and the other going away. And once I’m there, that’s my only option, since the Long Island Railroad won’t take me back where I need to go until sometime in the late afternoon. If I go to Penn Station, on the other hand, I’m already in Manhattan. If the 1 or 2 trains are having problems and can’t get me to Times Square (where I get the shuttle to Grand Central, then walk two blocks), I can in theory try the A, C, or E — less direct, but they’ll get me in the neighborhood — or even walk. (That takes half an hour — I’ve done it once before, in the evening — whereas walking from Hunterspoint is at least an hour over the Queensboro Bridge.)

This has been “Fred Ponders His Commute Options.” This is of only limited interest even to me.

Anyway, I got the subway from Penn Station, and though I just missed the first two trains and had to wait, everything seemed to be looking up. The delays hadn’t been so bad. I got to Times Square, then to Grand Central…and that’s where I tripped getting off the subway car and fell to the platform.

I was okay, maybe surprisingly so, and while it hurt — both my leg and my pride — I don’t appear to have done any significant or lasting damage. It was much more forgiving than a fall I took two years ago, which I’m not sure my knee ever completely recovered from. I didn’t enjoy falling, and it may have made me a few minutes late for work, but after that, how can things not start to look up?

I’m off again this Friday, so this has really felt like my Thursday, though I suspect it still is only Wednesday. The went by very quickly, since I have a lot of work to do, in a year that seems to be rapidly running out. I’ll be out for a lot of December, and next week I’m only in for two days thanks to…well, Thanksgiving. (Plus the Wednesday. I’m taking the Wednesday.) I’m having a difficult time believing 2013 is this close to over.

Some kind of weekend

So it’s been a couple of days. I wish I could say I did anything more productive than watch a couple of movies, fail to finish the Sunday crossword, read some comics, and go to my writing group, but that would probably be lying. Why is it that when I take off on Friday, I feel like I’m getting an extra Sunday, and not an extra Saturday? Believe me, I think I’d prefer the latter.

I did buy a new television, which was something. I don’t have cable, but the TV has an internet connection (for Netflix, YouTube, etc.), which I can combine with my Roku and Blu-Ray player and more than enough entertainment. I picked it up at the local Best Buy, which made me glad I hadn’t gone there to buy a PlayStation 4. They were answering phones with “Thanks for calling Best Buy. We’re all sold out of the PS4,” and lots of people with me in the long pick-up line were worried their own purchases wouldn’t be there.

If and when there’s a Portal 3, I’ll consider buying a gaming system — maybe for a new Bioshock — but I haven’t actually had one in years, the original Nintendo. I think I sold it at a garage sale, which is a shame. I never did figure out how to get that robot to work.

Anyway, the movies were Kiss the Girls and Jack Reacher. The former wasn’t great, and then was unbelievably bad in its last twenty minutes, while the latter was entertaining but very forgettable, with more talk about how amazing Tom Cruise’s character was — “Who the hell is Jack Reacher? Well…let me tell you…” — than action.

And then there was my writing group. I wrote this, from a few randomly chosen writing prompts:

In the past, I’ve tried to kill this woman. It was nothing personal, mostly politics; I was just a hired gun, doing a job, and most of the times our paths crossed her name could have easily been any of a hundred others. That doesn’t make it any easier, realizing in the heat of battle that you’re only there because some bureaucrat flagged her name a little higher on that week’s kill list — some Congressman wanted to make a point, or more likely just stumbled on her name at random — and I’m sure it wouldn’t have made her feel any better about the whole damn thing. My intentions were still the same. But it wasn’t built on anything specific, no personal feelings. If anything, I kept accepting the contracts because I respected her too much, respected her skills, wanted yet another chance to match them against mine. I could have walked, or let some other agent tangle with her for a change. Sometimes I wonder why nobody ever forced me to do that. A hundred times we must have met, squared off either face to face or across the divide of rifle scopes, and there we were, both of us still alive. There’s no honor among thieves, they say, but maybe there’s too much among assassins. Maybe you shouldn’t send one killer to kill another. Sometimes I wonder. They had super-soldiers and black ops programs that might have settled the account more quickly and completely than my own self-taught skills, but I guess no one in charge ever learned the power of no. Let’s just keep sending her out, these senators must have said — just as they must have been saying about her on the other side — and eventually it’ll sort itself out. Law of averages. That’s if they even thought about it that far. After all, these were the same men who’d built the Abomination Project — actually called it that, like that wasn’t just asking for trouble — then tried burying it and the evidence when it all went predictably south. I’d tied up a few of those messy loose ends for them myself. The pay was always good, and their checks cleared — you couldn’t always say that in this line of work — but thinking far ahead wasn’t exactly my employer’s strong suit. After all, they hadn’t told that this time me she would be…

And that was my weekend. I also spent some time on Friday coordinating a meeting for tomorrow morning at the office — is it good or bad that I can do work from my phone…on my day off…while on line? — which I’m not exactly looking forward to. But we’ll see.

Looney toons

A pretty ordinary Wednesday, all things considered.

We had a team meeting this morning, during which I got to briefly show off the book I recently had publish. Technical issues kept the UK half of our team from being heard for a good ten or fifteen minutes, which was weird. We could see them on the video conference screen and they could hear us, but IT had to be called in at their end. A coworker said it was like watching an aquarium, which it kind of was, although I don’t usually wonder if while I’m watching the fish they’re maybe talking about me.

Although maybe from now I will.

After that, there was one of our brown bag lunches, with guest speaker Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor for the New Yorker. He talked about the psychology of humor, how the magazine selects the cartoons it prints, and answered questions. He also confirmed something I’d often heard, namely that David Mamet has submitted cartoons to the magazine. (Discovering his Huffington Post cartoons, I can see why he’d previously been rejected.) Finally, Mankoff announced the winner of our office caption contest. I didn’t win, probably because I didn’t enter — I couldn’t think of caption by yesterday’s deadline — but the whole presentation was interesting and fun.

And you know, a free lunch. True, it was Subway sandwiches, which are to real sandwiches what David Mamet cartoons are to real ones, but that’s okay. I’m not complaining.

It was a pretty decent Wednesday.

Beware the broken glass

It snowed this morning, kind of a wet, rainy mess, and then afterward it was winter and cold.

I’m not sure I’m entirely okay with this. I just got used to it being autumn, and, true enough, it’s supposed to warm up again by the weekend, but still. I don’t think the seasons should just change like that over the course of a couple of hours. I may grumble about it here, and on Twitter, but I don’t dislike winter. I just feel like it snuck up on us this morning, and that’s dirty pool.

Meanwhile, the week is continuing pretty much as it ever does. Lots of reports at the office, broken glass to beware. It’s been that kind of week.

Is it Tuesday already/only?