personal

Saturdazed

Just another Saturday that seems to have disappeared much too quick. Where does the time go? I think it’s at least partly the shorter days in winter, the early sunsets, of which I’ve never been a particular fan. At least we’re well past the solstice at this point.

I didn’t do a whole lot today besides potter around the house, around the internet, and around the town on a short afternoon walk. I spent the walk listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, one of my favorite podcasts. Their whole “Wonder of Physics” episode was fascinating, but I was especially intrigued by their interview with Mark Oliver Everett. Everett is the frontman of the indie rock band the Eels and, as it happens, the son of physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. (And who was, therefore and sadly, many decades ahead of his time.) The younger Everett recently worked on a documentary about his father for the BBC. “Everybody should be so lucky to get to make a documentary about their father,” he says. It looks like his is online at YouTube, so I may have to check it out in full.

I also listened to a segment of the Leonard Lopate Show, which I’d heard a little of last night as I waited in the car to pick my parents up at the train station. It’s an interview with neuroscientist Douglas Field about glial cells, which apparently makes up the vast bulk of our brains but, until recently, weren’t at all understood. I was especially struck last night by this exchange near the end of their conversation:

Lopate: In a passage of your book where you describe the way that glia interact with oxygen, you describe oxygen as lethal. Well, I thought oxygen was what gives us life.

Field: Yes, it is what gives us life, but for a biologist, we take a long view. I mean, oxygen is relatively new in this planet’s atmosphere and wasn’t there —

Lopate: It killed off a whole previous group of living organisms —

Field: It’s a byproduct of plants. It’s a toxic byproduct, and organisms who could not adjust to that didn’t survive.

I had never looked at it quite like that, and it’s why I went back and listened to the entire interview this afternoon.

All of which is considerably more exciting than the afternoon itself. I think now I’m just going to watch the premiere episode of Caprica and then do some late-night capping.

A quiet Friday

I think I know what happened to those hours I seemed to lose the other day. They somehow got added to this Friday morning and afternoon, which, for the longest time, just would not end. This evening, though, I’ve just been lying about the house, more or less dog-sitting, while my parents are seeing South Pacific on Broadway. I could joke that I only see Broadway productions starring Angela Lansbury, since in the past year I’ve managed to see her in both Blithe Spirit and A Little Night Music. But the truth is, I much preferred having a quiet night at home. I fried up some eggs and a little leftover Chinese food for dinner, read a few stories in Poe’s Children — having finished Interpreter of Maladies on my train ride home — and watched a couple episodes of The Mighty Boosh and In the Loop.

All in all, a very pleasant, albeit low-key, evening.

Right now, I’m lying here on the bed with the dog beside me, waiting for my parents to call if they need to be picked up at the train station. The dog seems a little miffed that a) they’re not home yet, and b) that he isn’t yet asleep. He does have a schedule to keep, after all.

Thursday night your stockings needed mending

Today was an awful lot like yesterday, just without the panic of waking up late. We had a team meeting at work, where we mostly discussed our frontlist (the books recently published and on slate for the coming year), and I worked on two or three other projects throughout the day. I did manage to spill water all over myself while eating lunch, but that actually turned out to be not such a big deal. I was presentably dry about 15-20 minutes later.

It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it was a pretty average Thursday.

Wednesday morning papers didn’t come

After all that talk yesterday about train schedules and sleeping in late, I guess it serves me right that I didn’t wake up until a little after 8 AM this morning. I had a panicked moment as I realized how late it was, then I resigned myself to getting the 8:30 train.

It wasn’t the last time that time would go a little wonky for me today. I completely lost the hour between 1 and 2 PM, for instance; one minute I’m eating my lunch (vegetarian chili over rice where they forgot the rice) and reading through revisions on a manuscript, and the next chance I have to look at the clock it’s well over an hour later. Even though I’m sure it couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Say what you will about a lot of work, it does make the day go by faster.

It also means there isn’t much of anything else to write about. I chipped away a little more at this short story I’ve been working on, and right now I’m going to try to watch a little more Doctor Who (“The Ambassadors of Death”) before bed. World on a string, have I!

There once was a day called Tuesday

I woke up this morning at 7, surprised it wasn’t an hour earlier — until I discovered I’d accidentally set my alarm for 6 PM. If I’d been smart, I would have stayed up and caught the 7:37 train into Manhattan. I don’t actually get up at 6 AM anyway; I just wake up briefly, reset my alarm for 7, and then go back to sleep. I read somewhere once that you can trick your body into feeling refreshed with an hour-long nap — sometimes even more refreshed than if you’d slept the whole seven or eight hours straight, and it does usually seems to work for me. Except, of course, this morning I wasn’t smart. I guess I decided I still needed that nap and I went back to sleep until about twenty to eight. As I’ve noted before, there’s an 8:15 train I can also catch if I decide to sleep in.

Except the train was painfully slow and late into Penn Station, and I’d have been a lot better off if I’d just forgotten about that nap altogether.

Then again, my train being about 15 minutes late is probably the most exciting thing that happened all day. Still, there’s always the consolation that, although felt very much like a Monday, it was in fact a Tuesday, and the work week is already almost half over. That’s something right?