personal

Lighten up

If there’s one thing I like about Wednesdays, it’s how much lighter my bag is at the end of the day than at the beginning. Most Tuesdays, including this past one, I work from home, which means taking my laptop home with me every Monday night and returning with it to the office the next day. It’s not ridiculously heavy, even with the battery, but my bag does feel wonderfully lighter at the end of the day.

Also lighter — check out the dismount on that segue! even the Russian judges are impressed! — is my musical mix for July. Only four songs total:

  1. “Guggenheim” by the Ting Tings
  2. “Calabria 2008” by Enur
  3. “When I Write the Book” by Nick Lowe
  4. “Abide With Me” by Emeli Sandé

I think that “Abide With Me,” from this year’s Olympics opening ceremony, is just too beautiful not to share:

NBC, of course, didn’t agree. They cut it out from their (overall pretty lousy) coverage of the opening ceremonies in favor of an interview with Michael Phelps. As I wrote on Twitter: Anyone who could listen to Emeli Sandé’s stunning “Abide With Me” and think, “let’s replace that with Ryan Seacrest” has no soul.

Tuesday

A pretty ordinary Tuesday. Even the things that ostensibly made it different from other Tuesdays don’t, in the aggregate, bear mentioning. You know, it was just that kind of day.

Every inch a Monday

Today was just, y’know, every inch a Monday.

This evening, I got to Grand Central only to discover that two of the three shuttles to Times Square were stuck there on the tracks. Rather than wait around for the one remaining shuttle to depart, pick up new passengers across town, and then come back — only to fight the crowds and maybe still not get on the train — I decided to try my luck with the 7 train, which also stops at Times Square. Of course, that involved a lot of walking back through the subway to find the right track, then waiting forever for the train, then being kind of a dick to a guy coming up the stairs when I was going down, trying to make the connecting E train to Penn Station.

(There didn’t seem to be anywhere to move, really, but I could have been a lot nicer about it. I could have made an effort. I didn’t realize until after I’d refused to budge that he maybe needed the stair railing to help himself up. And so to that anonymous stranger, I’m sorry for being a dick. If it’s any small consolation, I missed my train out of Penn Station, so all my running around was for nothing.)

Anyway, that was Monday. I also got the sad news that actor Jonathan Hardy, the voice of Farscape‘s Rygel, passed away at the age of 71. So I’ll leave you with this small clip from one of my favorite first-season episodes, which I tried and failed to upload to my Tumblr:

“I love you but you have no idea what you are talking about.”


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I went to see Moonrise Kingdom. It’s almost a parody of Wes Anderson movies, or, maybe more forgivingly, the apotheosis of them, but I quite enjoyed it, for all its quirks and affectations.

After, I came home, and joined my parents next door, for a barbecue in our neighbor’s backyard. It was nice. I met someone I went to junior high with, now the girlfriend of another neighbor, who I also went to junior high with. I don’t know what was weirder: realizing that junior high school was twenty-plus years ago, or realizing at the same time that it feels like at least twice that.

Just a day

Today was just a day. Hot and muggy, turning to rain. I read a little. I went and picked up a propane tank for the backyard grill. I watched some of the Olympics — although I think NBC is, counter-intuitively, trying to discourage that kind of behavior with their coverage. I took a nap.

This evening, I watched the pretty mediocre Lockout.

Just a day, you know.