work

Twenty-twelve

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why. – Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”

So, 2012…that was a year, huh?

At the start of it, I declared — half in jest — that it would be the Year of the Meeting. Had I only known how true that prediction was going to turn out to be…

At the start of January, a number of changes were already underway at work, with my boss’ boss having taken retirement at the end of 2011 and some of the organization in the company changing in the wake of that. Things

wouldn’t really change for my group until early March, however…and that, of course, is when the cold that I’d been fighting for the past few weeks was diagnosed as being a little pneumonia.

I spent a week at home, I suppose you could say convalescing, at my doctor’s recommendation, and at what turned out to be a very strange time for doing that. While I was out, two other people on the team were let go, which I got to hear about via e-mail, and then in a very odd teleconference call discussing the changes and the reasons for them. Shortly after I returned to the office, I learned that I still had a job…but that it would soon be as part of different group, with a different boss, on the opposite side of the building.

The new job, which I’ve had officially since the start of April, is probably a better fit. I’m still a development editor, working on textbooks, but I’m much more involved in the process, and slowly but surely working on projects beyond the narrow borders of psychology. (Which is where I’d been working exclusively before.) I like the people I work with, and for, even if that too has changed slightly since mid-year. And while it has meant a lot more work — many more irons in the fire, as it were — I’m in a good position for going forward. I miss the people I used to work with — I don’t even see them very often, and there have been a lot of other changes there, too — but I’m getting more of a chance to do the sort of development work I was hired to do.

Sometime in March, I also found time to go to my cousin’s wedding. It was a really busy month for me this year. It’s little wonder that I didn’t have much time or inclination to reflect on my also turning thirty-five.

The rest of the year has seemed almost dull by comparison.

I published four issues of Kaleidotrope this year. I’m still figuring it out as I go, but I think the zine has benefited from being published more often in a year, and from moving from print to online. I miss some of the physicality of print layout — let’s put this photo here, let’s put a little Easter egg in the margins there, etc. — but I don’t miss the costly and time-consuming photocopies, or the hours spent addressing envelopes and standing in line at the post office. The whole thing is probably just as much a money-losing operation for me as it ever was, probably even more so, since I traded those costs for upping my pay to authors. (To the still-far-below-professional rate of a cent a word for fiction.) In 2013, for instance, I will spend an estimated $2,000 putting out another four issues of the zine, which is, admittedly, a little expensive as far as hobbies go. It’s why I’ve re-added a donation link to the site. I’m going to try to lower my costs a little going forward, although that’s mainly going to be by accepting less. I’ve already decided that next year I’ll only be open to submissions from January to March, and even then I’m going to have to be even more choosy than usual. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m edging up to a $1,000 already for 2014.

This is at least part of the reason I don’t go on vacation very often. My parents went on vacation to Italy, my sister and her husband to Turkey. I went on a work trip to the University of Maryland, Towson, and, a month ago, to Hofstra, maybe ten minutes away by car. Oh, exciting times!

We did take my father fishing for Father’s Day, and that was fun.

And then, of course, there was Hurricane Sandy, many months later. There was the week of work that I lost to that, the power outages, the awfulness of the commute in the weeks that followed.

Yeah… 2012 sure was a year.

I’m looking forward to 2013, just a change — although hopefully not as much of a change as this year, this past March in particular, turned out to be. I would like to move out, to an apartment of my own, maybe sometime in the spring, but that remains to be seen. Beyond that, I’m not really making any resolutions. I want to — I have to — write more. (I have a membership in the Online Writing Workshop that would be wasted if I didn’t.) But beyond that, I’m just going to take it as it comes.

Hard at work, or…

I’m going to make a bold statement here and suggest that excess consumption of alcohol, particularly in the middle of the afternoon and on an empty stomach, is not good for you.

I had fun at yesterday’s office holiday party, but, if I’m being honest, I also had a little too much to drink. There was food, much better and more plentiful than at last year’s party, but I almost certainly had more whiskey in me than anything else. I remember everything that happened, the content of the conversations I had, et cetera. It’s not as if I embarrassed myself — although there was a moment, at the bar afterward, when a co-worker (who I genuinely would have like to have talked to) tried to ask me a question, and I simply could not make my brain and ears understand what she was asking me. (This was all the more disappointing because I think it’s the first time we’ve ever really talked, and I couldn’t muster more than “What? I’m sorry, I can’t — what?” I didn’t even see her again on my way out.)

I didn’t join the group at the second of the two after-parties, probably recognizing that four mixed drinks and a beer in as many hours was probably already pushing things for me, but rather stumbled out and got the subway back to Penn Station. I’d like to view this as a victory of good judgment over pickled brain cells…except that, at Penn Station, I decided to have KFC for dinner. So, clearly, I was still not thinking clearly.

I got home sometime after 8 o’clock, and spent most of the next twelve hours asleep. I don’t know that I’m fully recovered, but rest and re-hydration have seriously helped.

I am not, as I have probably mentioned here before, much of a drinker, and only ever drink socially, rarely, usually much more sensibly. I’m keenly aware of the dangers of overdoing it, and of alcoholism, above and beyond the hangover I’m still dealing with today. I mean, let’s be honest here: KFC is pretty darn terrible.

Well, I don’t plan on drinking again anytime soon. (This morning, even the thought of whiskey puts my stomach into knots.) I’m off from work for the next almost three weeks, a nice extended holiday vacation, and I managed to get everything and more than I expected to done before I left to become inebriated at noon on Friday. I have a lot of work waiting for me when I get back — or, I’m hoping not, lots of e-mailing instructors to ask why they haven’t sent me their reviews so I can work on them when I get back — but for now it’s just movies and TV and hangover recovery and, eventually, when my brain’s a little better, reading and writing.

I’ve got the world on a string, I tell you

So, last night, I went to see this at Symphony Space, “An Evening with Radiolab,” a combined effort with their show and Selected Shorts. And it was really quite wonderful. The three stories they picked were weird and interesting and unsettling in all the right ways, and Kyra Sedgwick, Jane Curtin, and Liev Schreiber did terrific jobs reading each of them. I thought last month’s show was good, but this was actually even better, and I left feeling pretty happy that I’d stayed late in the city.

Which is why I was maybe less upset than I might have been when the young woman sitting next to me on the train home, clearly inebriated (and it clearly not agreeing with her), vomited against the wall of the seat. There wasn’t a lot, as that kind of thing goes, and she didn’t get any one me. But I wasn’t going to stick around for the second show. I picked up my bag and my coat and skipped out to the next car. I felt bad for the girl, and for the older woman in the seat in front of her, who couldn’t escape quite as easily as I could. So I was glad to see, later on, that the girl was at least sober enough to walk around, and not going to fall unconscious or asphyxiate or something on the train. Of course, I would have been more glad to have discovered this second-hand, or by glancing through the windows of the train as I left — and not, as it happened, because the young girl was stumbling off the train at the very same stop. She was shocked to discover — as a fair number of less drunk people often are — that there is no taxi service of any kind at this station. She seemed ready to collapse when I told her this, and pointed out the nearby — in non-drunk terms, but probably miles away to her — road where maybe she’d be able to get a cab or the number for one. (Though after 11 on a weeknight…I don’t know.) Luckily, the guy behind us both knew the number for a cab company, and she seemed well enough to use her cell phone. So I left them there and walked home to go to bed.

Today, there’s nothing half as exciting. The train ride home wasn’t a lot of fun, but mostly just because I got to it so late and it was so crowded. This morning, I took notes at one of our regular premium text meetings. Which can sometimes be a real chore, but today…well, there were only two projects. A couple of weeks ago, when I was originally scheduled to take notes, there were nine. And it was on a Tuesday, when I usually get to work from home. But another development editor asked to switch, and I agreed, and I really lucked out.

And that’s about the extent of the excitement today. Although yesterday — and tomorrow’s office holiday party, where I must endeavor to learn from that young lady’s mistakes — should be more than enough excitement for the week.

Hammer time

Wouldn’t you know it? The day I work from home, that’s the day they come to replace the siding on the side of the house.

They couldn’t just replace the few pieces that came off in the storm, but instead had to redo the entire side. So they were pounding hammers all day long.

It wasn’t so bad — I did get some work done — but still.

Friday

I realized last night, right before going to bed, that I’d left my jury summons at the office. And while I had the phone number I needed to call, I didn’t have the nine-digit juror number I needed to check on my own personal status. I knew I probably wouldn’t have to report to Brooklyn this morning, but I couldn’t be sure. I am still on telephone standby for another week.

So I decided I’d go into work half an hour early. That way I could call from the office and, if need be, still have time to take the subway to Brooklyn for 8:30. Of course, I didn’t have to do that, just like I won’t have to report there on Monday, but I didn’t know that until after I’d made the call.

That was about the most exciting thing that happened to me today, though.