"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Today was a Monday, and boy was it ever!
Although it did get down to about 70 degrees, which was nice after the past few days of the sun trying to kill us where we stand. That didn’t make the subway cars I took to and from work today any less uncomfortably crowded, however.
But I had an idea for a short story and started working on it tonight. I’m not sure if the fact that the deadline for submitting it is August 1 is a good or a bad thing. It got me motivated last time, so we’ll see.
Not a very exciting Sunday. I did the crossword puzzle, I went to see the new (and solidly entertaining) Captain America movie, and I wrote this, whatever it is:
“The world you know doesn’t exist,” said Sergeant Bearney to the troops lined up just outside the mess hall. “Not anymore.”
It was his standard spiel; Marcus and I had both heard it a dozen times, and there was no point in hanging around now to guess at which of the recruits would be the first to argue with him, or break formation, or just plain break down. Somebody always would. God knows Marcus had. I tried not to kid him too much about it anymore — it could have been anybody in that month’s batch of recruits, myself included — but I knew he was glad to finally be out from under Bearney’s thumb and into the comparative ease of daily combat. The Vargash will rip you to shreds, color the ground with your blood, but those two weeks with Bearney, those were hell. After that, fighting the invaders is like a walk in the park.
Not that there’s any such thing as parks anymore.
We didn’t have time to stand around gawking, though. If any of these recruits wanted to argue the point with Bearney, wanted to act all homesick for a world that had been burned away while we were all in deep freeze, so be it. Let the bastard deal with it like he always had. “I lived through the invasion, you maggots,” he’d tell them, maybe even briefly show them the deep curling scars along his midsection that the Vargash weapons had left him in the first failed counter-assault. “Some of us didn’t get to sleep through it in cryo, so quit your bawlin’.” And then he would get on with the process of turning these newly awakened rubes into soldiers. Eight months into the program now, a new group of conscripts every couple of weeks, whatever the cryo facilities could supply, and he hadn’t lost a single one. Every one he trained went on to die someplace else.
Well, except for me and Marcus, I guess, but we were different. Even Bearney would have had to reluctantly admit it. We’d been in that first group, before they had worked all the kinks out of resuscitation, and not everything had gone according to plan.
Right now, we were supposed to be meeting with Kincaid in the mess hall to discuss the…
I didn’t quite get to finish, even that sentence, before our standard forty minutes of free-writing were up and we had to go see the movie.
Anyway, that was Sunday.
A couple of weeks ago, my father asked my mother and me if we’d like to go see How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway. It’s the Tony Award-winning new revival starring Daniel Radcliffe and John Larroquette, and he had an offer for discounted tickets through work. So we went, and it was terrific fun, even if it is still about a thousand and ten degrees in the city.
We had dinner downtown afterward and then came home on an early-evening train. My sister and her husband are visiting for a friend’s thirtieth birthday party, so we came home to two barking dogs (ours, my sister’s), both of whom needed to go out.
Then I watched the latest episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I liked this episode in that the plot seems to be developing, but I’m not really sure I liked it a lot beyond that. I really do think the move to America and expansion to ten episodes for a single, contained story is working against the show. At times, it feels like it’s trying to replicate the urgency (and success) of Children of Earth — to the point where they even recycle one of COE‘s main plot devices — but doing so with the lack of finesse (and explicit but not very titillating sex) of the show’s first season. There’s enough, still, to like about it to keep watching — and heaven knows, I’ll almost certainly keep watching to the very end — but I’m not enjoying it as much as the Torchwood miniseries before it.
That was Saturday.
It was hot today. Very, very hot. Some reports had temperatures in the city as high as 110°F, and it easily reached triple digits by mid-morning. Any thought that I might sneak into work early, ahead of the heat, was thrown out the window pretty early. Even at 8 am, Manhattan was a hazy, sweaty mess. By mid-afternoon, when I ventured as far as across the street for lunch, it was like walking into a wall of heat, like swimming in an oven. And the heat is supposed to keep up over the weekend, too, so that should be fun.
On the plus side, of course, there was air conditioning on my train and there again wasn’t any toilet water on the floor. So that’s good.
I kept my bag, which I liberally sprayed yesterday with disinfectant, securely in my lap today, on both my morning and evening commute. There was no sign, in either direction, of another toilet-overflow disaster, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
Other than that, it was a pretty average — albeit ridiculously hot — day.