new york

The write of way

This evening, I went here, to hear author Peter Straub talk about the craft and process of writing fiction. The talk, which was a lot of fun and full of lots of interesting “tricks of the trade” and stylistic “rules” (like, for instance, how your prose should never rhyme), was free to subscribers to One Story — which, thanks to Heather, I happen to be. And to think, I had never even heard of the Center for Fiction before, much less realized how close — a ten-minute walk — it is to my office.

That was about it for the rest of my day, which was spent back at work but with not much else to report.

I was deeply shocked and sad to learn that Elisabeth Sladen, Doctor Who‘s Sarah Jane Smith, had passed away. She wasn’t a formative part of my childhood — if anything, I was more familiar with her recent work on the series and still-on-the-air spin-off — but she did always seem like one of the best companions the show ever had. She died much too young and will be missed.

And that was Tuesday.

This day was just bananas

So today was kind of an interesting day.

I got to sleep in a little later than usual because I wasn’t headed to the office, but to a conference a little further uptown, and I would be taking the subway from Penn Station to arrive there at 9 am. I was filling in for a colleague for about four hours, helping to sell books to psychoanalysts. Aside from the exhibit space itself, which was in a dark and cramped room well off the beaten path from the rest of the conference (or much of anything else in the hotel that would direct foot traffic our way), those four hours passed just fine. I left a little after 1 pm and walked back to the office.

Where I stayed for the better part of half an hour, mostly just to grab a bite to eat for lunch, and check in. (Also to print out my receipt for a talk I was attending later that evening, but I’m getting ahead of myself there.) I ate a chicken club sandwich, read a couple of e-mails — my favorite was easily IT’s earlier apology for the fact that we were apparently “experiencing internet and network access” — and got my name badge and team number for our company- and midtown Manhattan-wide scavenger hunt.

Yes, a scavenger hunt. It was ten bucks, to benefit the World Cancer Research Fund, the company’s charitable organization of choice, and I got a T-shirt out of it, plus a couple of drinks (again, skipping head), and an excuse to leave the office at 2:30 and run around Manhattan taking photos of bananas in unusual places.

This, in itself, is sort of a long story. The company’s charitable events, from fundraisers to races to this inter-office scavenger hunt, are for some inexplicable reason, banana-themed. So we got bright yellow shirts, a bag of bananas to each group, and instructions on the sort of pictures we had to take. There were ten in total, from “a police officer holding a banana” to “a banana in disguise” to “a banana riding a subway.” It was all silly, and a surprising amount of fun, thanks in no small part to the really lovely weather we had today. The eight or nine groups started near the UN, a few blocks from our new office, and reunited at a bar further downtown. There, a winner was picked, leading to the sort of grumbling and nitpicking — the teams showed up long before HR did to judge who arrived first — that’s likely only of mild interest to the parties involved.

The important thing is, it was a surprising amount of fun. Even if — or probably because — I was only really at work for about fifteen minutes today.

After the drinks — a beer and whiskey sour, the latter of which our HR department graciously bought, along with a round for our office — I headed uptown, near Columbia, for a talk between Neil Gaiman and Paul Levitz, hosted by the university. I had a very nice dinner right beforehand, at a Japanese/Thai place across the street from the theater, and enjoyed the heck out of the talk itself. (I also spotted Amanda Palmer briefly at the box office, so that was neat too.)

And now I’m home, a little tired but glad to have had such an interesting day. Tomorrow probably won’t be half as exciting, but it will at least be Friday.

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?