To be fair, that wasn’t so bad. Stuart and I woke up at the asscrack of dawn, moaned and whined our way through our morning preparation, and met my co-worker Paul at 30th avenue in his little car. Our fourth, one of Stuart’s co-workers, met us there and we all got in Paul’s car and suffered through 20 minutes of traffic at the Queensboro, happily bitching about our companies and health care and anything else we could think to complain about. It was only at the QB that we faced real traffic – once we got into the city, it was smooth sailing down 2nd avenue to Houston, to drop the downtown guys off and pick up Paul’s co-worker Steve and ride 8th avenue back up to Midtown.
My big fear, that the parking garages would be chock-full, wasn’t a problem at 8:40 when we arrived (we’d waited for Steve for 20 minutes because of a timing miscommunication) and now I’m sitting with a bagel and tea with just enough time to write this and get to my all-day training down on the 42nd floor.
This afternoon, Paul and I leave at 5, head back to Queens, where I then grab ingredients for tonight’s cozy little friend get-together down in Brooklyn, and jump in my (parents’) car, which was set to spend the week with us anyway, since we need it to get up to RI for Christmas weekend. The parents were here this weekend, actually, and we had an absolutely lovely time with their visit.
In fact, I guess, I can’t complain too much about the strike. I’ve got nothing but solidarity for the transit workers that are striking, so I’ve been trying not to sound like I’m the one with the huge problems, since I don’t have to strike to get my company to pay attention to me (they just don’t, it works out okay). Tonight, after our get-together, I’ll play happy taxi for my Brooklyn friends and then Stuart and I will head home and do the same thing tomorrow, and the day after, until the MTA and the TWU can see eye to eye on something.
How’s everyone else holding up?
fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
More coherent thoughts after the hellish workday.
When a state declares a state-of-emergency, it basically means that they’ve reached their capacity for dealing with things and they need more resources, or they need to drop non-essential tasks from their to-do list, or they need people to QUIT MAKING DEMANDS ALREADY, WE’RE WORKING ON IT.
About ten minutes ago, after an entire morning spent looping around my to-do list like a bat trapped in a barrel, I officially, but unceremoniously, declared myself overwhelmed with my own demands.
Today I have to:
track in the changes that Shana and I talked about over iChat last night (note to other writers: be sure to use iChat’s talk function when going over things with an editor! It’s awesome! I didn’t even have to use a phone!)done!
make the really painful five pages of little cuts from my manuscript because while cutting an entire scene from the beginning is the easier choice, I had to suck it up and admit that it’s not the wiser choice, so now I have to do it the hard way, and by three PM so Shana has a chance to look it over for another talk session tonightafter throwing a total hissyfit, and still a few changes short of finally finished, but at least i went from 95% done to 97.5% done!
finally finish making requests from publisher’s publicity departments for books to review for Gothamist so that I stop doing the reviews in the middle of the night on books bought on my own paltry dime because I haven’t gotten my act together to make a sweeping request from publisherswith a few typos, done!
ather and write today’s literary events roundup for gothamist, before 4PMwell, by 5PM anyway, done!
make a painful but necessary phone call to my former professor to gently but forcefully remind him that the deadline is Thursday please, please don’t let me down and upload that recommendationdone, bless him, he uploaded it!
write a personal statement for Thursday’s NYU deadline, “hi, I’d like to attend, THANKS” having been vetoed by common sense (moved to wed/14th’s to-do list)
figure out if my parents are coming to visit this weekend and when, so that I can draw up a schedule for the two billion household chores I need to do that I can’t lump on Stuart to do because he’s working his butt off to pay off the Bahamas time, see if it’s reasonably possible to get the house spotless by Saturday morning considering that tonight I have to edit, tomorrow I have a play-oriented committment and Thursday is Stuart’s office Christmas party, am I really going to spend Friday night cleaning?done, and was told by mom not to freak out about cleaning, HA
do my real job, sitting here at my desk, while trying to juggle all these other things, oh and work out at lunch, oh and have a healthy lunch, oh and stop wearing all those earth tones, lady, what are you, a hippie?i only half-did all these things. except the gym. i didn’t do that at ALL. something’s gotta give, right?
Buried into this APB is blogging, really, and one of the reasons I just wrote out this desperate list is because I know everyone wants to hear about our heavenly four days in Eleuthera, the trip that was the most beautiful and perfect beach vacation without a single blip (until the last day with the bug bites and the falling off the horse and the no water at the HILTON, people, the HILTON) and how much I wish I was still a little drunk on Bahama Mamas, after a perfect steak that Kevin and Stuart grilled, staring up at the milky way and out at the ocean from our villa deck, pleased as rum punch that we were having the absolute perfect vacation.
I know you want to hear about it, and I want to tell it, but Jen’s done such a remarkable job, and as you can see by my Official Declaration of Overwhelmedness by all the wonderful yet slightly chaotic things I have to do for the present and future that I’m so excited about (so that no one accuses me of complaining about my life), well, describing a trip to the Bahamas that happened last week but feels like it was a million years ago, it’s just not on today’s table.
Oh, and send vodka VODKA AND DINNER.
This is what happened today, when Stuart went in to work (o, weekend work! how we loathe you!). With my portfolio/manuscript/scrapheap of talent due on Thursday, my agentish and friend came over and we consumed yummy things and talked our way through thirty odd pages of writing. Click on the picture to take you through to Flickr, then hover over the notes for details.
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It may not look like the very best picture of Eleuthera. It’s not. But for some reason, it’s everything I’m looking forward to for the next five days – driving down narrow island roads, oceans to either side of us, and a breeze.
See you next week.
(photo from statico.)
