work

Wet day

I overslept a little this morning, by about ten minutes, and raced to catch the 7:20 train. I needn’t have bothered. I’ve been taking that train because it has a connection to Hunterspoint Avenue in Queens, which is just two subway stops away from Grand Central — and the subway’s right there, up and then down some stairs — and then that’s only a couple of short blocks away from my office. But this morning, at Jamaica, where the Hunterspoint train connects, they were announcing a thirty-minute delay. So I just stayed on until Penn Station in Manhattan and walked to the office.

I actually tried to take the subway from Penn Station — it’s basically just the reverse of my new evening commute — and I swiped my MetroCard to get through the turnstiles and everything. (After having to back up and wait in line at the machine when I discovered my card was empty.) But the train was so packed I couldn’t get on, and it seemed silly to waste even more time waiting for the next one. It’s a straightforward walk, and it wasn’t raining too badly.

Still, I could have caught the 7:37 train and done about just as well.

Monday

I’m still not entirely used to the new office or neighborhood — have we seriously only been there one week? — but I think I’m growing accustomed to the commute finally. I don’t want to use that as an excuse not to move out, since long-term that’s really something I need to do, even if I’ve right now worked out a good strategy for getting to and from the office. When I moved back home in the summer of 2004, I did not expect to still be living with my parents seven years later. I love my parents dearly, and living with them has not been at all what I’d characterize as difficult. Nevertheless, I think it’s time to find a place of my own again.

Although I think, in the short-term, I’m going to focus on where I can go to get lunch near the office.

Ah, Friday, blessed Friday

I managed, somehow, to make the whole “three trains in the morning, three different trains in the evening” commute work for me today without a single hiccup. No side-trips to Brooklyn, no confusion of uptown with downtown, no brushes with death on stairs leading down to the train platform. The whole thing went off without a hitch.

But oh man what a long week this has been. I’m so looking forward to the weekend…except for the fact that I do have to get up early tomorrow, to bring my car in for its annual inspection. And I have to finish this month’s issue of Kaleidotrope, maybe even start printing it out (to be mailed out en masse next weekend), even though the artist whose work I’d hoped to use for the cover hasn’t been responding to my repeated e-mails. And I have a lot of Kaleidotrope slush to read, too. Some of it, I’m sure, even good, but it’s a bit overwhelming right now.

But at least it’s the weekend!

Up is down

If you believe in the existence of parallel universes, an infinite number branching off from this one with every decision that we make, every moment and action, then there’s at least one universe out there with a version of me who cracked his head open running down the stairs to catch his evening train.

It very nearly was me, in this universe, and I’m not sure I’ll ever really know how close I came to tripping down those stairs, plummeting to a bloodied rest below, as I raced to get aboard the train that, by all rights, should have left the station before I even felt myself tip forward, much less regained my balance and reached the platform. I was racing to make the 4:54 train, and I didn’t arrive at Penn Station until 4:54, and it’s only thanks to crowds of people apparently having done the same and also trying to squeeze aboard that the doors were still open.

So I didn’t get a seat, but I also didn’t die, so that’s a plus.

I was only running so late because my brain sort of hiccuped on the subway commute previous to that. Somehow, even after I’d successfully managed to take the shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square, I got it in my head to get aboard a train headed uptown, for some bizarre reason thinking, at least until I was safely locked inside the car, that this would take me to Penn Station. Times Square is at 42nd Street, and Penn Station is at 34th Street. Even a non-New York native could tell you that 34 is down from 42. I walked across the street and hopped aboard the next downtown train.

I’d like to think I am not usually this stupid, but I do have an almost impressively awful sense of direction. And for almost seven years, I’ve had a commute that consisted of a single train, no connections, and a short walk…which, in the space of a week, has become three trains each way, and nearly all my walking done underground in the mad rush hour of the New York Subway.

I’m thinking tomorrow, depending on the weather, I may just take the morning train to Penn Station and walk from there. I’m not convinced taking the subway in from Queens is saving me any time, just walking.

Meanwhile, I’m still getting used to new office and environs, figuring out what’s within easier walking distance now, what stores and restaurants are situated nearby. It’s funny, in a lot of other places, a move that’s no more than a ten-minute walk away wouldn’t be so discombobulating; it probably wouldn’t put you, for instance, in a different zip code, which our move did, and it wouldn’t be like moving to an entirely different neighborhood. (Not that midtown Manhattan really has neighborhoods.) Look at where you work now, then think about moving to another building you can walk to in ten minutes. Would you feel lost? Would you be confused about where you could go to eat lunch? That’s sort of what’s happened to us.

I have no doubt we’ll all grow accustomed to it. When I think that we’ve only been in the new office now a week… It seems like much longer.

Brooklyn follies

I got on the wrong connecting train in Jamaica this morning and wound up in Brooklyn. I realized I’d made a mistake almost immediately, but almost wasn’t good enough to get off the train before the doors closed. So I took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, a slower ride than I might have liked, and wound up at work maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later than I had planned on being. Which I can say now, like it’s no big deal, but for someone who only rarely uses the subway — and has quite possibly never actually even been to Brooklyn before — it was a panicked hour or so as I tried to figure out how best to correct my course, and if the corrections I’d landed on had me going in the right direction. It’s only in retrospect that I can say, “Oh yeah, got on the wrong train. So I went and got some cereal for breakfast, hung out in the lunchroom” — that’s it up above — “left half an hour later than planned. No big deal.”

The office move has forced me into a whole new commute (or at least some added parts to cut down on the walking), and I’m still trying to get the hang of it. I’ll no doubt be an old pro just as it’s time for me to move out and learn which trains I need to take now.

Meanwhile, the week is kind of kicking my butt. It’s been an okay week — in some ways better than okay — but with a little too much excitement and crazed walking around. I’m actually really just tired…and a little flabbergasted that it’s still only Wednesday. How can it still only be Wednesday?