personal

Monday

Today was a pretty good day, especially for a Monday.

I had a launch meeting for a book I recently put into production, which is something I haven’t done before. The meeting, not the other thing. I’ve actually lost track of the number of books I’ve put into production, although this is the first since I started my new development position last April.

The meeting was really just an opportunity to talk with sales and marketing about the book, make sure everybody’s on the same page about how best to sell and market it, and it seemed to go really well. It helps that it’s a good book.

Some other stuff happened too, but it was pretty much just a Monday all around.

Sunday

The weekend went by pretty quick, but it was pretty decent, the rain notwithstanding.

Last night, for reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, I watched the first Tomb Raider movie for the first time. (It was on Netflix.) The movie was…I hesitate to say bad, because there were things to enjoy about it. I like Angelina Jolie, and she at least seems to be having fun throughout most of it. And I’ve also grown to like Iain Glen’s work on Game of Thrones (which I’m close-ish to being caught up on). But the film is maybe one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen. I thought I knew from silly movies, but this is something else. Let’s just say that Daniel Craig’s American accent is one of the least ridiculous things about the movie and leave it at that.

After that, I watched the…I guess we’ll call it “season finale” of Doctor Who. I liked a lot of it in the moment, not least of all because I think it explained a lot about what I guess we’ll also call “the Clara era.” But out of the moment, actually taking a look at what I’d just watched…well, I think Alasdair Wilkins of the AV Club gets at a lot of what I think does and doesn’t work, about the episode, the season, Steven Moffat’s writing in general. I’m a lot more forgiving of the episode that Wilkins is, because I did genuinely like it, and it played to classic Who in some fun ways, though I do agree with him on its weaknesses and missed opportunities. (Seriously, casting Paul McGann in a cameo would have been inspired, if only because it would have meant a weird Withnail & I reunion on screen.)

So while I liked the episode, more or less, I kind of hope that next season, Moffat goes smaller.

Oh, and in between those two, I watched Hannibal. So it’s altogether possible my brain was in a really weird place by the end of the evening’s entertainment.

Today, I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?) I think the movie is a lot of things, like shiny and fast-paced and entertaining. But like its predecessor, there are a lot of things that it’s probably not, like smart and consistent and, ultimately, Star Trek.

Wading into spoiler territory here, I think the movie does some interesting things in the way that it quotes from the original series, Wrath of Khan in particular, but in the end that’s all those feel like: quotes. As I watched a pivotal, climactic scene, I kept thinking, “well, yeah, but Wrath of Khan did this first, and better. There’s no great accomplishment in proving that you’ve seen that movie, too.” The movie’s fun, I won’t deny that. It’s well acted, looks great, and Benedict Cumberbatch owns basically every scene he’s in just through voice and glower alone.

But there are things about it… For one, Felicia Day’s not wrong in asking “Where are the women?” But even beyond that, looking deeper into the movie, the philosophy of Star Trek — those tenets and deeper questions that made it something special, if sometimes a little hokey — that really does seem to be missing. I realize, as I did after the first movie, that while this is the future of the franchise, it doesn’t really feel like the future of Star Trek. There are more interesting places for it to go, I think, than a shiny, lens-flare-filled re-imagining of its past.

Oh, and before the movie, I wrote this with my writing group:

[deleted]

So it was a pretty decent weekend.

Thursday

Thursday is a case study in almosts. It’s almost Friday, the week is almost over, and I almost finished the report I’ve been working on this whole week. (If not longer. It feels like longer.)

I decided to do summer hours again this year, almost at the flip of a coin. They won’t start until next month, but already I’m wondering about what I’ve gotten myself into. I’ll have to work forty-five minutes more Monday through Thursday — in order to leave at 1 PM on Friday. I think that means I’ll only be one train later in the evening, but we shall see. I haven’t done it since the first year, when we were back in our old offices. Like I say, I think I can get from the current office to Penn Station in 15 minutes by subway, but we shall see.

Meanwhile, my work-from-home day will be switching to Monday in the next few weeks. There’s no particular reason for the switch, beyond that that’s what our UK counterparts have recently switched to, but it actually makes a lot of sense for several reasons. Well, mostly meeting-related reasons. (I wouldn’t have had to give up my telecommuting this week, for instance.) It probably doesn’t work so much in our favor when there’s a three-day holiday weekend and we have the Monday off, but I’m not really complaining. And anyway, it won’t go into effect until after the three-day weekend that’s coming up in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, I guess I’m going to start looking for an apartment.

Tuesday

I wish I could say I’d been doing anything more exciting recently than watching episodes of Game of Thrones, but that would be a lie. I didn’t even have my regular writing group on Sunday.

I had to go into the office today, to take notes at a meeting, rather than work from home. And I finally (yesterday) finished reading Maureen F. McHugh’s Mission Child. (I liked things about it; I don’t know that I liked the book.) That’s about as close to exciting as the past few days have gotten.

I’m kind of okay with that, actually.

Good well hunting

Yesterday was my company’s third annual midtown Manhattan scavenger hunt. I’ve written about this a couple of times before, since this is the third time I’ve participated. It’s all silly and in good fun. You get to leave work early, and the money goes to charity. And this year, I was even on the winning team.

Except I lost my team after the second of what were apparently seven clues, getting separated in the run from Grand Central. After about ten or fifteen minutes of watching other teams — recognizable in our bright yellow banana-themed shirts — pass through but not my own, I walked over to the bar where I knew the scavenger hunt was going to end.

I hung around for another hour or so, basically just standing around outside. Finally, after a number of other people started to arrive, I wandered inside to get a drink. Most of the people there were HR, the folks from three different offices who were running the event, but there was another group that arrived after I did, whose story I didn’t quite catch, but who I think decided somewhere along the way not to continue. These are people from another office, a different company, who I’ll likely never see again…but they did buy me a beer, so that was nice of them. Then I got a free drink when my team arrived — because that’s what the winning team won — full of apologies to me and tales of tired and aching muscles. Apparently, by accidentally bowing out early, I lucked out as well. I got less of a workout, but I also didn’t steered clear of having a heart attack. (I know this may be hard to believe, looking at me, but I am not exactly a long-distance runner.)

I was still a little tired when I got home — two beers on top of twenty minutes running isn’t two beers on top of ninety minutes, but it’s not nothing — so I mostly just watched some television.

I noted this on Twitter, but if you’d told me just a few weeks ago that Hannibal would be one of my favorite shows this year and Community would be my least favorite, I would not have believed you. I should have known I was in trouble when the AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, who I feel has been something of an apologist for this not very good fourth season, gave this season finale a D. It was a really dreadful half hour of television, at the end of a pretty lousy season, largely for the reasons that Todd gives. And yet the show has been renewed for a fifth season. I honestly don’t know how to feel about that.

Hannibal, meanwhile, is still on the bubble, though I really hope it comes back. It’s a dark and sometimes very difficult show, definitely not something to watch on a queasy stomach. But it’s also kind of terrific, which is not something I expected from a Hannibal Lecter TV show.