file this under . . .

ways to tell you live in nyc:

there's a can of roach spray on your bathroom windowsill. what is it about new york and cockroaches? don't they like the the bathroom floors in other cities???

also - the one place i see plenty of cute boys in this city is whilst running in hudson river park (and they're athletic and have great abs and JUST MY TYPE) but what am i supposed to do? stop them in mid-run and complement them on their under armour? catch up and yell out my cell phone number as i blow past? there should be a dating aspect to the runner's stop at 15th street - you see someone you think is cute as you're out for your daily run you can leave word on a white board or something. that'd do quite a bit for correcting the sedintariness of this city if you ask me.

it's full steam ahead on party preparations for tonight. if you aren't joining us (boo on you) give a call around the witching hour. we may not be in the sd basement, or at 9 1/2 maple but thanks to modern technology, we can still all drink keystone together. =)

happy new year to all. bring on '08

amen

“For me the whole movie is the streets,” Ms. Parker said. “Because that’s where all the promise and potential is. That’s the romance. That’s the hope. That’s where single women walk out the door every day, and they just don’t know what is two steps away.”
- 'more sex and the city is happy about it' - nyt, 11/25/07

ring in the new

<--- where i come from. sigh. new england.

hear that? that's the sound of 2007 ticking to a close. i'm always very sensitive to time, mainly the passage of it to the probable detriment of my life, but at this time of year it becomes particularly clear. i am so far away from where i was last year at this time - and yet when i look back on it it doesn't seem that anything much happened - v. strange. kind of hurts my head to think about it, and it's not just from beers drunk while watching the patriots win last night. it's a good time to be a new england sports fan.

speaking of new england, came across this in a book and i really like it:

vermont is a region. maine is a region. cape cod is a region. massachusetts is not a region, nor is rhode island or connecticut. new hampshire isn't, either. new england, as a whole, is a region. texas is a region and so is the south. a 'region' i submit, is an area with which its residents associate themselves with far more than ordinary pride. "
- the best of new england humor

sums it up all so well. =)

two points of rumination today: hot toddys and stalking.

first of all - hot toddys. they always sound better in theory than they taste. personally i think they taste like thera-flu which is so disgusting that i have to be dying to resort to liquid crap to make myself feel better, and yet there's something so dickensonian (i doubt this is a word) about tossing out - let's get a hot toddy - that conjours up images of flannel scarfs, english pubs, and icy winds. i do not, however, know that this is a good reason for drinking them.

second of all - stalking. never has it been so legal, given the myspaces and the facebooks and the googling (you're a very hard person to google). in the words of coupling, "friendship is more lasting than love and more legal than stalking." i mean - be honest - that's what we're doing when we're bored at work isn't it? stalking. or if you prefer to call it, living vicariously through people you prob don't really care about. i believe this time is unprecedented in our history. all sorts of new social complications have arisen b/c we know more about people before we meet them then we dare to admit. before when you broke up with someone that was it. if they called you or sent you a letter that was nice, but their dream vacations taken with their new girlfriends weren't splashed about all over the internet or the details of their MARRIAGE for christ sake for a weak will to give into on a drunken saturday night (this is entirely hypothetical). it might have been better that way. hmmm - tricky. but enough about that for now - i gotta get back to 'seeing what my friends are up to' ;-P

also - if you're going to be around nyc for new years - we're having a fiesta at our apt to ring it in. get in touch if you want to come by!

food for thought

had an atypical christmas eve service while on the cape - my mom played the organ and we sat in an unheated church for an hour, sang christmas carols and people did readings, and someone read 'the night before christmas' and a reflection on christmas traditions that someone wrote. nothing like a little puritanism during the holidays. someone also read this poem which i liked a lot. here's a snippet:

ring out wild bells - alfred lord tennyson

ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
the flying cloud, the frosty light;
the year is dying in the night;
ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

ring out the old, ring in the new,
ring, happy bells, across the snow:
the year is going, let him go;
ring out the false, ring in the true.

ring out the grief that saps the mind,
for those that here we see no more,
ring out the feud of rich and poor,
ring in redress to all mankind.

good to think about as the year draws to a close. =)

judge's ruling

it's official. there is no place in the city of manhattan to play pong.

i was charged with the task of finding a place for my coworkers to play last night. i don't think my boss thought this one through. you don't think hundreds of d alums have tried desperately to find this proverbial treasure of sierra madre?

i called at least ten bars in nyc that had ping pong tables, but none of them would let us play beer pong on them. sheesh - you would have thought we wanted to introduce votes for women or some such radical concept. we just wanted to drink people!

ended up in a bar with two beruit tables side by side - one longer than the other - which was better than nothing - a sort of extreme pong. there were paddles, there was beer, i suppose it was the best we can do. this poor d kid who happened to be in interviewing and knows my brother and kevin garland came out with us. after pong we ended up in a karoke room in ktown. it was either the best sell night in the history of recruiting or we shouldn't hold the backstreet boy song he sang against him. =) woke up with 'all out of love' stuck in my head. awesome.

have a 9:30 meeting that's going to be rough. nyc feels like a ghost town these last two days. yesterday morning i had a momentary concern that the subway wasn't running b/c the platform and station was so empty. it won't be this way for long but it's crazy the tangible impact that is made by all those people being home for the holidays.

speaking of the holidays, scored several more canvas totes to add to my collection. my coworker makes so much fun of me. but what can i say - new england girls want totes! maybe i am as preppy as everyone says . . .

happy bday to laurak and taylor on saturday! love you kids -wish we could have a snowball fight or toast with florida native squared to your good luck in the next year. ooof - my head hurts

early morning riser

am awake v. early on a saturday morning, waiting for lingley to respond so she can tell me what time we're peacing from the city to go home for xmas. as thus far she has not, i will commence with posting.

am involved in a 'poking' situation on facebook. namely - i've been trading pokes with a guy for a good two months. i would like the record to show that i didn't begin this - he did. he is also three years younger (which explains it) and uses the fb applications more aggressively than i do (i have v. high standards when it comes to fb), but now that we are in it what can occur? it's not like there's a message i can send along with each poke - basically all it says is 'i was thinking of you and poked you back'. except after like ten million pokes, this gets a little old. i messaged him and asked if we were doomed to a life of poking or if we could take this offline. he responded 'we'll see'. so am back to poking poking poking. i sort of feel like someone who has been doomed to purgatory or something.

it has been suggested to me that the entire office knows about my crush on my coworker. first off - i don't act any different around him than i do around anyone else in my office. if anything, i act less fun b/c this is the way i operate when it comes to guys (get annoyed/mad with them and use their response to judge the situation). i joke, i tease, i laugh, i talk to everyone. and even if i do have a crush - what's so wrong with that? i don't make anyone uncomfortable, i'm not harassing him or anything, i just happen to think he's a smart, cool guy, who's pretty cute, who makes me laugh. everyone else in the office thinks this too - minus the cute part maybe - so it's not as if i'm out on a limb or something. as christine said - everything in the real world is basically a grown up version of middle school - so perhaps that's it.

anyway - the way i see it - if the office knows about this i basically have two choices - i can ignore him even more and pretend he doesn't exist in an effort to confuse the office, or i can open the floodgates and flirt up a storm and see where it gets me. unfortunately this situation really reminds me of just about every other situation i've ever been in with a boy i went on to be seriously involved with, namely, will just have to ride it out and see what happens with only the knowledge in my heart that this could be something, but it's KILLING me. new current favorite song as a result of this nonsense sums it up well:

you can look at the menu but you just can't eat
you can feel the cushions but you can't have a seat
you can dip your foot in the pool but you just can't have a swim
you can feel the punishment but you can't commit the sin
- howard jones 'no one ever is to blame'

allette came into the city last night - she's out of the woods for the holidays - great to see her and laugh a lot. we went to carrie rooke's holiday party and bought 40s of corona to drink. classy. low classy. lings was down, celeste came out - really nice to sit around and drink and pretend we were still at d. i miss that sometimes. actually, who am i kidding - i miss it all the time. steger was also back on the continent from austraila - looking fabulous and sporting kangaroo balls beer opener and being stegerish. god i miss that girl when she's not around.

off to the cape for the holiday - still have shopping to do and cards to send - christ am so delinquent - but it will nice to be on the cape. there's a spit of land off craigville beach that looks so pretty when it's snowed against the ocean. cape cod girls you know . . . ;-P

then there's that

feeling like the white rabbit this morning as i scramble to get stuff organized for the last day of work before christmas. got up early to do xmas cards, and ended up swapping music with vin - ergo i am sitting here in a towel with wet hair and nothing to wear. eeeek!

incidentally, the cards say

a time for good friends a time for good cheer a time to wish you happiness throughout the coming year! (holiday toast)

i got these with laurak when she was here last weekend. we had each picked out cards that we thought were quite indicative of our personalities - me with the quotes, she with an ocean themed card (so as to not ruin any surprises for anyone that she may be sending too).

huyett ended up being in town on tuesday night, with the detrimental outcome of staying out until 4. the chain of events was quite amusing - was originally going to play basketball, which i ditched when my friend aida told me she could get me into a screening of 'atonement'. turned out that it was a different movie we had never heard of, so we scrapped that plan and went to a bar with dollar drafts (unheard of in nyc). when huyett called from the airport asking if i wanted to go drinking it was serendipitously already happening.

dollar drafts turned into a bar downtown turned into a diner for silver dollar pancakes and bacon. so huyett left from the bar to go back to jfk (her flight to boston had been super delayed that night so the plan was to stay at my apt before her early morning flight back) and never made it to my apt at all. while this was exciting from a hanging out perspective, it was a big confusing in my head, esp since i was hella (hi nor cal) hungover the next day and exhausted. i ended up going to bed at 7pm. thurs went a lot better than wed. 4 am is all well and good for sat night, but not for tuesdays when you have to go to work the next morning. i'm not sure where all this late night rage came from - i could hardly make it past midnight many times in college let alone 4, and now i'm throwing it out like it's my job. all i can think of was that with three years of crew under my belt, i'm making up for lost rage time in a serious way.

shout out to little dolan for saying hello and a procrastination suggestion for the blog readers. we are always a big fan of this. adding it to the blog roll - as christine said, if it's not linked from this blog, she doesn't read it. i'm adding one more blog as well - this one happens to be written by the production team of my company's chicago bureau. very amusing and interesting insight to the world of a tv station.

alright - i officially have 10 minutes to get dressed, make up and out the door before i am late. heading home to the cape tomorrow for a few days, then back to nyc for work on thurs and fri. this could be bad news, but i am actually kind of excited to be back b/c am going to play pong with the coworkers! YES. i think i have found a place to play pong in nyc. a lot is riding on these games, namely bragging rights and pride. you know, nbd.

if you're in the nyc area for the holidays give a shout!

the way life should be

discovered two fun websites/blogs about maine whilst googling to figure out exactly where the term 'maine - the way life should be' came from. i quote that a fair amount, and yet we weren't sure that it was the state motto - something about 'vacationland' and whatnot on the license plate. according to one of the sources i discovered from my google search, the sign welcoming you to the state has that on it. i was just pleased to stumble on two intriguing ways to live vicariously in new england until i can get back again. please see:

1. the maine farmhouse journal
2. the way life should be

am enjoying reading these for the same reasons i take pictures of beautiful landscapes - so that when they show up as my computer screen cycles through i retrieve a little bit of my soul from nyc.

also stumbled upon an amazing blog for those of us in the working world - bnet.com.
affiliated with cnet.com, it's worth checking out simply for the 'office politics playbook'. worth its weight in solid gold.

had a busy wknd - caught up with many visitors from out of town. laurak dropped in for a visit from the west coast and some good old fashioned nyc tourist christmas activities. she's a little up in the air on the next round of plans for the upcoming months - perhaps a boat trip to mexico, and maybe even a job in woods hole. will have to stay tuned! mulley was back from london - had wine and cheese and clampuffs (courtesy of one of laurak's sailing pals) at her apt. she'll be back and forth btwn nyc and boston for the next week or so, hopefully ending up in nyc for new years! huyett also put in a late in the game appearance - she came down to interview with a nyc group this morning - hope it went well! and today is skip's bday. happy birthday bad one!

had a lovely drinks/dinner out with charlo and kit - discussed work and life and such. the evolution of these discussions is always interesting to think about - where we used to talk about classes we now talk about projects, profs now bosses, and going out clothes chat have been replaced by pros and cons of work clothes, but the conversation is still as enjoyable as ever. i think there is so much to be said for those people who have gone through these changes with you. and i have no doubt that there are several more cycles of conversation topics to go through in the upcoming years. =)

came home and lit my 'winter' candle, plugged in my white christmas lights and dialed up the itunes christmas playlist. had been feeling like christmas was cramping my style, but it was nice to unwind and enjoy it a bit. still - i wonder what's next!

cheers to you and yours

*also - it's just about the 2 year anniversary of this blog. wow - 2 years of my life chronicled publicly. i def post here more than i write in my journal. in the words of the grateful dead - what a long strange trip it's been. thanks for traveling with me!

<--- the sunshine state

well kids - i owe you all an update - so i will sip guiness and type while i wait for my chinese food to arrive.

i have been remiss in updating mainly b/c i was in florida from sat to wed of last week. it was 85 and sunny the entire time, which i was scared to tell people for fear that they would hate me (they did). it was absolutely glorious to lie on the beach in the sun while the pelicans flew overhead and the waves lapped at the shore. it seems hard to believe i was there since i've been back in nyc, and yesterday and today felt like mon and tues - it's v. confusing that today is friday. hmmmm.

really the most amusing thing from my trip was the christmas parade we went to on tuesday night. we were sitting literally at the start of the parade and just about every float had TONS of candy they were flinging at the parade viewers. i've heard that they throw beads from floats at mardi gras, but i have to think that beads hurt way less than a peppermint to the eye. i kid you not though - just tons and tons of candy was being hurled our way. many of the throwers were young children, with no concept of how hard they were throwing or how much. it was like halloween only better - you didn't have to do anything to get the candy - just sit there and maybe holler 'happy holidays' every once in awhile. i about died laughing while this was happening. after awhile we got really snobby and particular about what candy we would pick up - and this went against everything your parents have ever taught you about not taking candy from strangers or picking it up off the street. really, it was too funny.

incidentally, as it is the wknd whether it feels like it to me or not, laurak is on her way to the city for a visit, as she is on the east coast on vacation from san fran. mulley will also be in town as she is back from london for the holidays. i think the next two weeks are my favorite out of the entire year - normal behavior is temporarily suspended, which i love, and people are running all around like mad men. it's fabulous.

other announcement - my youngest sister got into d early decision - she found this out on wed. she'll be class of 2012. do you feel old yet? i'm so psyched/jealous for her, although i can hardly remember what it feels like to have your whole d career ahead of her.

of course i acquired links - the first being my new favorite someecard/pick up line: 'you drink like you're single'. i know - brilliant right? and doesn't it just sum up d in a nutshell?

also stumbled upon dickopedia - check it out - hilarious. and one of my new favorite sites - 23/6 - 'some of the news, most of the time' - snarky news and commentary. love it. linking it at right so you can enjoy with your daily dose of procrastination.

as for me, i'm back in nyc for the next week - yankee swap at work - the coworkers are lobbying for the eggnogging to begin at 4 instead of 5:30 - cape on sat for christmas (how the hell did it get to be christmas already? soooooo much to do!) and then back to work thurs and fri in the city as the clock winds down on 2007. def a year that asked questions.

if anyone has ideas for what to get fathers or brothers send them my way thanks.

amen

my grandmother emailed me last night about tomorrow - i'm flying to florida for a mini break - with the subject line 'happy saturday.' gmail asked me:

Would you like to...

Add to calendar

Happy
Sat Dec 8, 2007

and you know what? i am. =)

pantyhose sucks

fuck this

it's five o'clock somewhere

in this case, it's five o'clock in new york city. am wide awake b/c was out last night post-offsite with the team. first, a few words about the offsite.

it was productive - we got a lot done - but it felt a lot like high school. it might just have been the water fountains in the hall, and the fact that the floor we were on was painted an insane combinations of colors. or maybe it was because we sat in the same room for 8 hours. or had half an hour for lunch where we went down to the concourse and brought lunch back ala going to the cafeteria or something. or perhaps the part where we were emailing notes back and forth on our bberrys - the 2007 equivalent of passing notes?

as i noted, i was elected the 'minister of fun' - which means my reputation for bringing a toned down version of the rage is on the line every time i organize something. apparently, being the minister of fun meant that i had to tell embarrassing and potentially compromising stories from college. to be fair, our svp also told one about losing three games of one on one 56 and streaking the library as a result. he got points for that in my book. we also discussed preppiness in the office - and i was going to be voted 'most preppy' which i countered by claiming that i may be preppy, but i am not conventionally preppy. i mean, i don't know how to sail for christ sake.

we just had a d '95 join the team - very interesting discussing my d experience with his. he was a zete, he thought i was a kappa, if that gives you any indication of how i roll at work, which i found hilarious (see my dual fb profiles for more on this topic). it's crazy how quickly d has changed in the last 10 years - particularly with regards to the greek system. he was pre sli (student life initiative for you non-d people) and we were post. as boxa once said, the greek system when we were undergrads and from what i can tell, now, is stronger than it has ever been. with the addition of the '95, all we need now is a fourth for a real kick-ass and convincing pong game, and it sounds like we might get one believe it or not. at which point i will allocate budget towards a pong table that we can paint as a team building activity. if they won't play pong on grey's anatomy, we will play in our version of 'the office'.

anyway, i end up at a bar in times square with the '95, a guy whose nickname has become 'fidel' b/c he was fidel castro at the halloween party, and the hr rep for our team, who, to be fair, throws down, but i am so going to be fired very soon if this keeps up. and it will. company party on thursday. i guess we need to keep these things in perspective.

back to bed. it's too early for this nonsense.

money for something?

was just reading an article that my dad sent me about rising costs associated with the ivy league from businessweek.com. i know a lot of people that read this graduated from ivy league schools, and i think just about everyone can say that the most expensive thing they own at this point in our lives is their education.

i don't know about other people, but personally, as i think about possibly having to send my kids to college some day, any college, let alone an ivy, i'm scared to death at the thought of how much that is going to cost. living on a salary in nyc that is relatively decent - don't even get me started on how people survive in this city making entry-level salary at a job that is not finance or consulting - and still barely saving anything or supporting myself, i have absolutely no idea how i will ever have enough money to send my kids, should i decide to have them, to college. as the cost of college continues to rise, i feel a little helpless. it seems like i'm going to have an uphill battle. yikes.

had a low-key wknd - not the greatest weather in nyc, though nowhere near as bad as what htown and the rest of new england got last night and today. it's nice to be inside and cozy like a bear - at times like this i feel very lucky to have a roof over my head.

busy week this week at work - as the year winds to a close there's a lot of loose ends and changes to wrap up. all day offsite tomorrow - fun fun. i'm heading to florida on saturday to see my grandparents. i found out that my vacation days don't roll over to next year, so i am taking off for fun in the sun. very much looking forward to it.

i still can't believe it is december already - it's hard to believe that i've been at my job and my apt for almost a year. sometimes things don't feel very consistent, but then when you look back at the last year, you see otherwise.

onwards and upwards.

*it is a bad idea to eat crunch 'n munch while typing. just an fyi