personal

The common cold

It was not lost on me that if today was, in fact, the coldest day in New York in six years — a factoid I heard repeated more than once leading up to the day, and then again later confirmed — then it was also the coldest day I’ve ever walked to work in Manhattan, since I started at my current place of employment in October of 2004, just a few months before that winter of 2005.

I have no trouble believing that today was the coldest day in several years, much less the coldest day so far of this year. It was bitterly cold in Manhattan, well around zero degrees all day, and made even more so thanks to the faulty heating in our office building. The heat wasn’t off, exactly, but it also wasn’t circulating much. We spent some time fondly remembering that one time, a couple of years ago, when it was the air conditioner that was busted, and the office was so hot they had to let us go home. And although I never thought I would be, I found myself strangely nostalgic for our old photocopiers. They weren’t very good, breaking down more often even than now our frequently-in-need-of-service current models, but they sure could pump out some heat. I think this, the last few hours that I’ve been home, is the first time I’ve been genuinely warm all day.

Though it could be worse, I suppose. Apparently I got out of Manhattan this evening shortly before a train stalled in one of the tunnels, causing all sorts of delays. I may have escaped the city mere minutes before the trouble started. My father, who usually works later than me, wasn’t so lucky — and he lost his scarf somewhere in the shuffle. And believe me, this is definitely scarf kind of weather.

It’s supposed to be considerably warmer tomorrow, but I think only because they’re predicting more snow.

Meanwhile, it is very cold outside…

Another pretty decent day, although I either pulled or slept poorly on my neck last night, and it’s been aching all day.

Looking back over that day, I don’t think I did a whole lot. I read, I worked on a surprisingly very easy Sunday crossword, and I went to my weekly writing group — where a forty-minute free-writing exercise of three random words produced this:

He was drunk off what was left of the wine — not a remarkable vintage, but a serviceable enough off-the-rack Merlot that complimented his serviceable, off-the-rack mood. Stacy had called it a Zenato ’96, but she had clearly misremembered, or else been duped into buying a bottle of this knock-off brand and never realized in the several years she had owned it. Brad knew even less about wine than she did, so he could only suppose it was an easy mistake. He could tell white wines from red, sweet fragrance from vinegar, but his prowess extended no further. Why should wine be any different than his life? He’d eyed the bottle Stacy’s note had offered — “there’s also beer in the fridge, some leftover Chinese” — as simply a means to an end. And though it was no great joy on the palette, and left him feeling like a bit of a lightweight, in that one respect it had not disappointed. He was well and truly drunk.

Though maybe “well and truly” was stretching things a bit. He was buzzed, and feeling pleasantly reckless, but not reckless enough to reach for the phone and get the whole sorry thing over with. There were limits even to supermarket red wine. Stacy probably wouldn’t even be in, now that he thought about it, or if she was, she’d be worried and want to know why he was calling. Had something happened to the apartment? Was Grace, her cat, okay? The very fact that he was thinking about this, and worrying himself that he’d be unable to explain why he’d picked up the phone at 5 a.m. her time and drunk-dialed, led him to suspect that he still wasn’t drunk enough to risk professing the truth. Nor did he have the necessary nerve to get that drunk.

He was looking after her apartment while she was away, assigned to work some sales conference in the United Kingdom, and staying here while his own place was being…well, he’d told her it was being repainted, but Brad knew that was only the first step before it was rented out to someone else. He and his landlord had spoken. The writing was on the soon to be repainted walls. It wasn’t so bad, though; Grace liked him, Stacy’s apartment was actually closer to the library where he worked, and how could you beat free wine and cold moo goo gai pan?

I really shouldn’t drink, he thought. It just makes me sad and even more than characteristically stupid.

More a character sketch than a story, but I had fun writing it, which is maybe the important thing.

“Very well, I’ll pause for thirty seconds while you cook up your alibis.”

I had a pretty nice day. I spent a good deal of it reading, finishing both Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, a couple of recent graphic novels I picked up at the local library this morning. I enjoyed them both, although I think I’m perhaps a little glad that Spiegelman’s (nevertheless wonderfully drawn) book about fall of the Twin Towers feels just slightly dated. And I did some writing — or maybe I should more accurately call it transcribing, piecing together a story I found in an old notebook, which I’d given up, at least temporarily, for lost. I’m not sure exactly why it stalled out on me the first time — my natural proclivity to let stories stall out on me, perhaps — but I like it, and I think I’d like to see where it’s headed.

After dinner this evening, I watched Green for Danger, a delightful British murder mystery from 1946 set in a World War II hospital. Honestly, how can you not like a movie with exchanges like this?

Barnes: I gave nitrous oxide at first, to get him under.

Cockrill: Oh yes, stuff the dentist gives you, hmmm — commonly known as “laughing gas.”

Barnes: Used to be — actually the impurities cause the laughs.

Cockrill: Oh, just the same as in our music halls.

Please don’t beat the Dutch.

It snowed again last night, though not enough to really cause much trouble with my morning commute. I was in at work by the not unreasonable hour of 8:30 a.m. And the day went by fairly quickly, especially right near the end, when all the steps involved in processing a countersigned book contract somehow made a couple of hours vanish right out from under me.

The bit of Forgotten English on my desk calendar today is “beats the Dutch,” meaning “something extraordinary.” The calendar goes on to inform me that “‘That beats the Dutch and the Dutch beats the Devil’ is the superlative.”

Today was really a Dutch-beating kind of day, but, amazingly enough, it’s the weekend again, so that’s nice.

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.