Thoughtless for the Day

Y’know you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. So mine’s a shot of tequila, please. Preferably Patron.

Carpe Diem

While Stephen’s off shopping (aka, going to Bloomingdales for a few hours) I’ve started to pack my New York life into 1.5 cu. ft. boxes. This has given me the chance to throw out a lot of the crap I’ve accumulated over the years I’ve been here, and it’s also thrown up a few gems. I’ve never been good at letting go of anything, my whole family is hoarders, and when you’re moving all this crap seems like a curse. Then I came across my old World Trade Center pass from when I worked for Marsh back in 1999.

The Marsh offices were situated on the entire 96th floor of the Northern World Trade Tower, they also had a few other floors around there having moved from 120 Broad Street in mid-1999. From our cubicals we used to have amazing views down onto the Hudson river as cruise ships and light planes passed by. The building would sway very slightly to allow for the wind and one of the most terrifying and wonderful sights I saw was being in the middle of a thunderstorm one day. The sky lobby around the 60th floor used to catch the most amazing light as the sun set.

On September 11th the 96th floor was the first office to get hit, and I’ve since found out that four people I used to work with were caught in the attack, all of whom had families. Luckily it wasn’t many more, so many people who I knew were late into work that day. Timing is everything in life, and finding that pass just reminded me that we only have an alloted span to enjoy on this planet and we never truely know when it will end. The only truth is that it does end and you will have lived your life and no-one else’s. Seize the day.

Mmm.. Hurty Head

Stephen’s just come in from Brit-land for the weekend so to celebrate his arrival (and lack of jet-laggedness) we went out on a bit of a Billyburg bar crawl. Started off at Union Pool where the usual eclectic music (think David Holmes) was playing and we sat watching everyone dancing. Then over to Abbey, a dive bar I’ve never tried before which is classic dark pool playing paradise. Next venue was supposed to be the classic Galapagos but for some reason it was already closed at 1.30am! So we ended up going to Level X instead which was playing some great dance music, not that we were supposed to be dancing to it, sigh. Finally we ended up in the Blu Lounge where Ann very kindly let us stay long after everyone had gone to regale us with tales of the Irish mafia in the area. A smashing night all round.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Sometimes things happen and they seem like the greatest thing imaginable – but you never see the downside because you’re being swept along in the rush of the moment. This held very true for this poor chap who was definately having too much of a good thing. I always thought that suffocation would be one of the worst ways to die but he has shown me that there are definately levels to it. Actually, come to think about it, someone was telling me over Christmas that drowning is actually a pretty good way to go as after the initial pain of the water flooding your lungs your body releases massive quantities of endorphins so you die in a euphoric haze. Sweet.

After all those cheery thoughts I now must return to cataloging all of the crap I’m shipping back to the UK. I seem to have aquired 85 DVDs, 500 CDs and about 300 books (from art books to trite science fiction) in my time here. That’s an average of 1 CD every 4 days or something like that. Amazing how these things mount up.

West Coast Flava

Big thanks and shout out to everyone in San Francisco and Sonoma who gave me a luverley, relaxing (and semi-head straightening) week. Just got back after a quick, smooth flight and managing to get bumped to an hour and a half earlier flight. Thanks to SuperShuttle for being stupidly early there and I hope I didn’t wake you up Dave and Susan….

Something about the west coast seems to be bringing out the engagements. Went to Sam and Amy’s party on Saturday night where I got to hang out with lots of ex-nuncers and had a jolly smashing time. Then on Sunday saw Damien and Trish who recently did the ring thing as well. Must be the air and all that outdoors life that us over-thinking New Yorkers don’t see much of.

Now feeling a little bit spacey for a number of reasons and not sure what to do about some things. So much to do over the next two and a half weeks before I start my travels via the U of K. So I’ll leave you with a helpful analogy for change that my friend Alicia shared with me: Imagine the thing you need to fix in your life is like an infection on the end of one of your fingers. Now you worry that you don’t want to lose your finger, so you cut a bit of the end with the infection, which hurts like fuck but then starts to heal. But then you find, by playing and worrying at it, that the infection has spread to the rest of the finger. So you cut another bit off, again going through the same pain as before. This can continue all the way down your finger until it may even cause you to lose your hand. Better to bite the bullet and cut off your entire finger, saving your hand as well as a lot of repeat pain on the way. Of course the question is, what if you’re no good at diagnosing? Should you cut off your finger for a broken nail? Ah, the fun of analogies.

Mmm.. wine

Yesterday, before I came into SF central, I cycled out to the Ravenswood winery in Sonoma. It was a beautiful sunny day and the ride was very beautiful indeed, like France in so many ways. At the winery got to taste feckloads of wine for $4 – merlots, zinfandels and some dessert wines. Normally it’s supposed to be limited to four wines but they’re so quiet these days. Thanks to everyone up there for a fun hour! My hectic bike ride up the hill after that definately helped to burn some of that back off again even if I never did quiet get to the valley view I was hoping for.

Taking the Fifth

Lot of things in the news at the moment about upper management in Arthur Andersen taking the 5th over the Enron bankruptcy. The 5th Amendment, for those of you who don’t know, basically states that you cannot testify if it might incriminate yourself. Now what the fuck is that all about?? Surely anyone who takes the 5th is basically saying “I’m guilty, but if I say anything you’ll put me away”. Hmm. America is a strange country sometimes….

The subject of honesty is close to my heart at the moment. Sometimes people can seem transparent in their actions and you think they aren’t coming clean about what they are really thinking. There’s no point telling them that you’re pretty certain you know because that will just make them react badly. It’s another classic no-win situation. You keep quiet and hope they ‘fess up, or you say something and they deny it. I’ve been on both sides of this and it’s always awkward, but the times when honesty has come out has always been the quickest to resolve, whatever way it did.

A few years ago there was a situation with this girl I had been dating – we had broken up but still worked together and were going for lunch a few days a week. Suddenly she stopped going for lunch with me and acted very strangely indeed. I asked her what the matter was and she said ‘nothing’. Her behavior got increasingly strange around me during our work day till eventually she agreed to talk to me over lunch. Over the lunch she asked me to stop asking her what was the matter, that nothing was the matter. I asked her if she was seeing anyone. She said ‘no’. I said that was fine, that was all I wanted to know, so the reason why she behaved like she did was down to me. At this point she went quiet, and then said, softly, would it matter to me if she was seeing someone? Happiness set in, I’d known this was the case for a while and had felt like I was going mad due to her white lies to me, designed to prevent me being hurt. I said no, so she admitted she had started seeing someone for the last few weeks. It transpired to be the person I’d thought it was which threw her even more.

What was interesting to me about that situation was that I’d normally taken myself to be very insensitive to these emotional situations, but I’d turned out to be completely accurate. Only because someone was lying to me to “save my feelings” had I felt like a complete idiot. If they had respected my feelings and told me everything would have been a lot simpler, but life isn’t always that easy. Of course this isn’t to say there haven’t been times when I’ve been completely wrong about this sort of thing. I’m not perfect.. honest!!

With an Aching in my Heart

Finally got the chance to go to Banania last night. I’ve seen this place quite a few times on the way to Tim’s over the years and always wondered about it, so we bit the bullet and went in. Well, probably could have waited a bit longer really. The food was OK but ended up being a lot heavier than it could have been – I’ve never had a piece of salmon that weighed so heavily on my stomach! Foie gras was nice though and the conversation was excellent.

Also back on the Artist’s Way wagon again. For those of you yet to come across this best selling book/process/lifestyle it’s all about how to open yourself up to greater creativity and ‘awaken the artist within’. Suspect that in my case that’s a piss artist, fingers crossed I can get more into photography and other creative outlets though. I’ve had some good feedback from people recently about my photos (see link on right) and I’m pretty excited about travelling around the world and shooting all the way. Might need to take an extra rugsack for all the film.

Anyway, the key points of the Artists Way are to write three long hand pages of whatever comes into your head first thing in the morning and to take yourself out on an Artist’s date once a week (ie, spend time with yourself). I checked out the companion “Morning Pages” book you can buy and realized that the original book I used was about half the size needed, should be letter page sized. So I’m re-doing this all with a much larger notebook now. I also re-read some of the things I’d written when I was doing this over the last year during AccuWeather and September 11th. It’s interesting to see who and what was occupying your mind and how you write it all down, reminded me of a lot of things I’d forgotten so it’s definately been useful already even if I’m not exhibiting photos just yet… maybe next year.

Fun

Huzah!! It has finally snowed in New York this year! A thick layer of white stuff is sitting over everything that doesn’t normally have 20,000 cabs going over it a second. Everything looks so pretty. It reminded me of my first snowy New York day back at the start of ’99 – looking out of my window on Park Avenue South after wondering why everything was so quiet (the snow was muffling the usual mad road of traffic I used to have to deal with).

The snow helped the touristy qualities of New York for Helen’s final full day in town. Having had an extended, crossword solving (well 80%) brunch at Puck Fair we went over to Times Square and then down to the Empire State building. Thick snow was falling all the time which made it hard to look up at all, but Bryant Park looked wonderful. Also introduced Helen to the wonder that is White Castle, a peculiarly American fast food burger chain that sells burgers only an inch square that you inhale rather than eat they are so small. Luverley. Following that a bit of Polish food down at Veselka’s where we had borscht, pierogis, polish meatballs and cheese blintzes and consequently felt more than a little bit bloaty. I will miss Polish food when I leave here.

Must be getting old though, or maybe just tired from not being able to lie in these days for some reason – just wake up and start thinking then can’t get back to sleep so get up and do stuff to clear my head. We went down to Pioneer last night (Bowery btw Spring and Prince) and the volume of the music just did my head in completely. Suspect this was for a few reasons – 1) I was quite tired, 2) I was trying to have a conversation with my friends Andy, Helen and Ruth and I couldn’t hear a word they said and they couldn’t hear a word I said and 3) it was bad 70s disco for the most part. We were down there because, in theory, Seb Fontaine might have been popping over to do a quick set for a friend who was having a party there. Didn’t sound like he got to the decks before we left though… either that or a new, scary direction for him!