work

Today was pretty much average, just your typical city involved in a typical daydream, as it were. I was running late this morning, and then literally had to run to make my train, only to discover that it was itself running about ten minutes late. I guess, under the circumstances, that’s a good thing, right? I do remember thinking, as I ran, that the trains are never late on those rare occasions you need them to be…and today it was.

Other than that, nothing much to report. My mom went back to work herself today, too, so she’s feeling reasonably better. Tired and still not at fighting strength, but all the well wishes were much appreciated over the past couple of weeks.

Today was an awful lot like yesterday, except that it was, of course, a Friday. And not just any Friday, but the Friday before a three-day weekend. Which is always nice.

I stayed up much too late last night finishing the first book of The Walking Dead comic. I liked the television series quite a bit, even if I had some minor issues with it and thought the middle episodes — can such a short season even be said to have middle episodes? — were perhaps not anywhere as strong as the beginning and end. But I genuinely liked it.

I can’t say the same for the comic. It’s received accolades and even an Eisner, but by the end of twelve issues I had grown to actively dislike it. I’d decided not to continue on with the subsequent books. I found the characters potentially compelling, but ultimately one-dimensional (or less), and oh my lord was there a lot of dialogue: endless speech balloons of heavy exposition, sometimes even obscuring the artwork — which, I have to say, is the one thing I really did like, especially in the original six-issue run. Characters talking about what they were going to do, what they had done, who they’d been (in great, unnecessary detail) before the zombie outbreak, etc., and not very surprising, often repetitive action handled fairly perfunctorily. Lots of readers seem to like the series because it deals with the characters and their interactions, the zombies being almost incidental. It’s not a story about zombies, they’ll tell you, but about human survival. Which is great; stories about things or plots are never as interesting as stories about people, for the simple fact that it’s we, as people, who are reading them. But there’s a big difference between telling a story about characters and telling that story well.

And in its meandering, talky, unconvincing way, The Walking Dead just doesn’t do that.

It also diverges pretty wildly, pretty early, from the television series, which I think rightly borrowed what worked, improved upon what was suggested, and dropped what didn’t work. The show wasn’t perfect, but I’ll be returning to that. I won’t be returning to the comic.

Other than that? We had a meeting/presentation this afternoon to discuss the plans for our office move in April. Things are still uncomfortably vague — how much space will we have? how open will this open plan be? — but we got some concrete details and can expect more in the next couple of weeks. I’m nervous about some of what I’m hearing, but there’s little I can do about it at this point.

Of course, the office move is definitely going to screw with my commute, and almost certainly necessitate my moving.

So today was pretty much just your quintessential Thursday, nothing special about it. I spent most of it reading through a manuscript on animal-assisted therapy that I helped contract, plus attending a presentation on an “introduction to market research.” This latter just helped underline that, while there are some overlapping methods to how I and the developmental editors in other departments conduct our day-to-day work, theirs is organized in very different ways.

Tomorrow is Friday, then a three-day weekend, and then apparently I will finally be having my yearly performance review sometime next week. I don’t expect it to go poorly at all, but they’re always nerve-wracking, a difficult process that seems to get more convoluted and complicated with each passing year.

Oh well. The three-day weekend thing is nice. Especially since this time I don’t have to take any vacation time to swing it.

My mom’s still not feeling so great, but she does seem slightly better than yesterday and the day before. Hopefully whatever this bug is, it will be out of her system before too much longer. And, I hope, without passing through anyone else’s system (i.e., without making me or my father as sick).

I spent the morning waiting around for my car’s windshield to be replaced. I got to the repair place around 8 o’clock this morning, and I returned home around 11. In between that, I just hung out in their waiting room. Thankfully, I had my iPad along with me, but I can definitely see why people leave their cars and come back for them later. And if the shop wasn’t closed for the weekend at 5 o’clock on Friday, I’d have considered doing that too.

Anyway, it was a long but not terrible morning. I got to listen to a few horror stories by one of the guys who works there, who apparently also works as a mechanic for the highway patrol. It makes you cold, he told one of the other customers, seeing all those dead bodies. The customer, who had apparently once been an EMT, said he knew exactly what he meant.

At 11, I came home to take the dog out and check on my mom. Then I caught a train into Manhattan and worked a half day.

Exciting stuff, I know.