2006: A Summary,
published at 11:01am on 01/03/07, with 1 Comment
I think that the year 2006 was summed up nicely in an event that took place on Christmas day at my parents’ house in Westchester County, about an hour outside of New York City, where I have spent every Christmas day since I was little, waking up early(-ish), going downstairs with my sister, having breakfast with mom and dad and then walking (calmly, so calmly) into the room we call the museum to open our stocking stuffers and then to the living room (alternating between the more formal living room, which would have plastic on the sofa, if we were that kind of family, which we are not, and the less formal, but not nearly as intimate living room, which one might call a Family Room in other houses, i.e., the room with the television) to open our bigger presents sitting under the tree.
We had just finished the aforementioned ritual (I got a Roomba! Holy crap! A robot that will vacuum my floor for me! I am totally in love.) and were in the kitchen having Christmas morning pancakes (which, I will admit, I bullied my mother into making because, well, I really, really wanted pancakes) when one of us remembered that A Christmas Story was being shown in an all-day marathon on television. The remote was procured and the television sprung to life.
Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with this movie, it was made some time in the early 1980s and takes place in the midwest somewhere in the 1950s. The protagonist is the unseen narrator of the film providing commentary to his memories of this one particular Christmas. What I didn’t know was that the movie and the book it was based on were both penned by Jean Shepherd, who I had not heard of prior to my father making that connection this year, but who I am sure I would like and whose work I should probably pick up at some point when I a) have more time and b) am not trying to get through a book that I have been working for, and I kid you not, over three months. I mean what the hell is that all about? They’re just words. I should not be scared of words like that. Plow through, young man, plow through!
In any event, we were watching this movie, and the protagonist as a young man has just blurted out an unfortunate curse word and was having his mouth washed out with soap by his mother (and though I recall blurting out that same word when I was of a similar age, I do not remember receiving the mouth washing punishment; I probably just got a stern talking to and was made to feel incredibly guilty for what I had done). He begins to muse, in the voiceover, that over the years, he had become quite the connoisseur of soaps, over the years.
For some reason, this statement resonated with my father, who all of a sudden made the most grotesque noise and as we all turned to look at him, he began drooling tea out through his hand and onto the kitchen floor, which continued until he regained his composure (as much as a man who has tea running down his face can do).
And that is what my 2006 was all about: my father, his eyes bugging out of his head, with tea running down his face.
I am really, really glad that this year is over.
Other Lessons Learned In/Memories of 2006:
1. I learned how to ski this year. In Montana. Nobody learns to ski in Montana. In Montana, they are born with skis attached to their feet, and their idea of the “easy way down” involves a slope so steep that you can not see where you are going when you are at the top of it. Suffice it to say, I loved every minute of it and came back to New York and bought ski pants.
2. If you ever spill wax on your clothing, do not wash said clothing! Instead, gently scrape off the wax that you are able to and then place a dry paper towel over the affected area and use an iron to melt the wax through the paper. The wax will melt and will get wicked up into the paper towel. You can also do this with brown paper, but I found that the paper towel worked better. Also, you’re going to have to move the paper towel around a bunch because once you get wax into one piece of it, you are not going to want to use that area of the paper towel again (otherwise the wax will melt right back into your clothing). Also, make sure the iron isn’t going to start spraying steam all over the paper towel.
A year of significance,
published at 3:11pm on 11/24/06, with 4 Comments
I recently had a birthday, and because my birthday falls towards the end of the year, I tend to equate an entire calendar year to a single year of my life, those two months not withstanding. I mean really, December, in general, is a complete wash, right? No work happens in the second half of the month, and the entire first half of the month is spent thinking about how it’s going to be so nice when nothing is happening in the second half. That leaves the rest of November which, arguably, is a full month, complete with the onslaught of the Northeast’s wintertime jollies, which for the most part just leave me cold and angry at myself for not having bought myself a winter coat. I’ve lived in this part of the country my entire life and the last time I had a winter coat was when my mother bought me one when I was 10.
So now that my birthday has come and gone, I can say with certainty that I am looking forward to this next year of my life. The official end of my twenties is finally here, we are about to tick into a new calendar year, and I can look back and say that my decision to write off almost all of 2006 is probably not entirely unfounded.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote that I wanted 2006 to be a year of significance. Turns out that 2006 was also the year of breakups for me and for seemingly everyone else that I know. Besides the half-dozen or so long-term dating relationships that came apart this year that I heard about (“oh me? Yeah, my boyfriend and I just broke up. What? Oh, six years…”), this was also the year of at least one divorce in my circle as well as a business relationship that just unraveled. More than any other year in recent memory, this one seemed like a year when everything was falling apart, and very little seemed to be coming together. And I, of course, have a theory about this.
We operate on four year cycles. High school is scheduled to last for four year, as is college. Insert your own four year cycle now as I don’t really have any other examples (the Olympics? World Cup?). And I believe I read somewhere that humans do operate, biologically, on a four year cycle, but that’s entirely a lot of bullshit.
The important thing to remember is that four years ago, we were in the middle of 2002. Now 2002 was a funny year. We were all (and I mean, all) coming out of the trauma of 9/11 and the world seemed like a remarkably different place. In 2002, I posit that everything got stuck in time. We, especially the we of the twenty- and thirty- somethings, decided that it was much safer to hole up in our environments as they were at that exact moment in time – say, early to mid-2002 – and just hang out there for a little while. In a relationship? Wonderful! It is safe and it is not going to fall down on you like a big building or a bag of Anthrax. Safety and security trumped everything, and we locked ourselves into our lives.
If that doesn’t float your boat, think about the economic climate of the world (and specifically of the US) at the time. 2002 saw us at the end of the first dotcom bubble, watching businesses implode, watching paper fortunes evaporate and watching jobs vanish. The last startup I worked at was in 2000. In 2001 the last companies in that first wave were just burning through the rest of their seed money and everyone was saying that it was time to grow up, to cut your hair, to get a real job, and leave the business of business to the big boys. And again, everyone locked themselves down with their collective noses to the grindstone and got to work.
Fast forward four years. We are now, four years later, just emerging from our cocoons. The first thing to note is that the calendar made a jump in 2006 to the latter part of the decade. Remember that the early part of any decade is really a continuation of the previous one. Remember the 80s? They really happened in the early part of the 90s. So everything leading up to, say, 2005, was really just a transition out of the late 1990s. Assuming that 2005 was sort of a limbo year for everyone, 2006 is the first time that you can imagine that the end of the decade is actually approaching. Where I live, right near the university, there are students, children, walking around with class of 2010 t-shirts. There is all of a sudden the realization that if I don’t get my act in gear, the thing that I am working on now (that novel, that degree, that start-up company) take any significant period of time, they could bring me into the next decade. Decade. That’s 10 years of my life, missing, gone.
So we sit here in 2006 with this wakeup call that we have just passed the cusp of the middle of the decade are are rapidly running out of time. And all of a sudden people start emerging from the shells that they started building up in 2002 when they were afraid of change. When they were craving safety. And all of those relationships that were formed in the aftermath of tragedy are finally being evaluated on their own merits and in the context of a much longer period of time (“the rest of my life”) rather than in the immediate context of “I really hope I don’t die tomorrow.” And many of those relationships that had their foundations set in that time of uncertainty found that they couldn’t survive outside of that world. People feel free to evaluate their personal relationships for what they are. People feel free to evaluate their professional relationships and are determining why, exactly, they are doing what they are doing. Is it any surprise that 2006 saw the coming of the second Internet bubble? Everyone is finally waking up to their situations and realizing that if they want to move their lives forward, they’d better do it now before the calendar flips again and we find ourselves in the 20-teens.
How significant was this year for you?
Filed under: Observations, Personal, with 4 Comments
Make your own luck,
published at 12:10am on 10/23/06, with 2 Comments
On the evening of March 20th, 2006, on the sidewalk outside of my apartment, I came across six pennies scattered fairly close to each other, clearly having just fallen out of somebody’s pocket. Pennies being what they are (the homeless man on the street imploring “help feed the homeless, help make a difference, even a penny makes a difference” not withstanding), it was nevertheless surprising to me to find so many of them in one spot, like finding a cluster of four leaf clovers in the grass outside your front door after scouring the entire yard and turning up none.
I picked them up, all six of them, and walked down the street towards the subway. Every couple of steps I stopped and placed one of them, carefully, heads up, on the sidewalk, in the hopes that the luck of a heads up penny could be spread across six different people heading home from work that evening. I felt pretty good about myself as I placed the fifth penny down and smiled as I looked back behind me. For the most part I knew they would be ignored, passed by, kicked around, the little copper heads on the dirty city street. But a part of me held out hope that someone, a romantic like myself, would come across it, stoop down and whisk it up. A penny! Heads up! What luck!
Is a penny purposely placed heads up as lucky as one that happens to fall face up accidentally? Is it lucky at all? I heard once that if you find a penny lying face down that you are supposed to flip it over and leave it for the next person who comes across it. Can luck really be manipulated like that, so easily?
I like to think so.
Oh, and that sixth penny? I kept it for myself. It had been sitting face up when I found it.
Filed under: Personal, with 2 Comments
Man of the Year: a movie review,
published at 8:10am on 10/14/06, with No Comments
On Thursday night I went to see a screening of Man of the Year, the new Robin Williams movie. Well, at least I’ve been calling it the new Robin Williams movie because all of the previews that I’ve seen for it depict a movie about what happens when a political comedian decides that he’s fed up with our political system and decided to run for office himself. Clearly, hijinks ensue (on scandal: “I did not sleep with that woman. I wanted to…” and on political appointments “Just off the top of my head, I was thinking of Bruce Springsteen, Secretary of State”).
Or at least, that’s what the preview is about.
The movie itself is about something a little different. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Observations, with No Comments
Port Authority and the Bus to Pittsburgh,
published at 1:10am on 10/06/06, with 8 Comments
New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal at 11pm on a Thursday night is a dead, depressing place. The only people there are passing through or never leaving, all the restaurants are closed, and the information booths are empty shells of anything even remotely useful. My friend was one of the ones passing through on her way from Boston to Pittsburgh and by the time she is done, she will have traveled for something close to 15 hours on two buses with an hour layover in the Big Apple.
She never actually leaves the bus terminal, but at least she got her taste of the eccentricities of New York City.
Port Authority is home to one of a handful of bowling alleys on the island of Manhattan. The only other one I know of us down in the Village where the NYU students pay a cover to listen to loud music and drink while they throw their balls down the lanes. The Port Authority bowling alley, though updated, is an almost serene place with a bar to the side and empty lane after empty lane, punctuated at times by the local bowling league.
There really is nothing happy about the entire building.
The bowling alley is also closed by 11pm on a Thursday night. The arcade adjacent was open, but our attempts to get a beer at the bowling alley bar were thwarted by the city that, apparently, finds time to sleep. The other bar on the second level of the building, MiLady’s (“meet me at MiLady’s,” the sign out front proclaims) was open, but was filled with bad karaoke, set up inconveniently directly in front of the front door to the establishment, leaving us only to watch momentarily and actually consider going in, until we realized that it was occupied by those who never leave.
We ended up at a pizza/pasta/other food establishment on the ground floor of the terminal eating $2.50 slices of pizza and watching European tourists in matching white hooded sweaters. By the time we left a little past 11:30, the chairs were going up on the tables.
I pity the person who gets stuck in Port Authority over night.
For anyone who’s never actually been in Port Authority at all, I can only describe it as an example of how not to arrange a building for optimal navigation. Where one might describe the flow of people through Grand Central Terminal as a dance, Port Authority is something more akin to a tumble down a flight of stairs. We we reached the bottom of the stairs to where my friend had arrived, a man called out to us.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
He was older, unbathed, carrying a small black nylon workout bag that was tearing at the seams. His black winter coat was tattered, and he was definitely one of the people who called the building home.
“Bus to Pittsburgh,” we responded.
“This way, follow me,” he called back, “this is arrivals, you need departures.”
And we followed him through the terminal, under 41st Street, to the departure terminals. “Don’t be scared. You’re scared. Don’t be.”
“Gate 69,” he said, which was definitely not right as we looked over towards it and found it completely empty. I went to the information booth and asked where the bus to Pittsburgh was departing from.
“Gate 69 or 70,” said the only information booth worker in the entire building.
We walked over to gate 70. On our way, our new friend was standing by the escalator.
“Hey, can you help a guy out?”
My friend gave him a dollar, justified with the notion that “this was a legitimately useful service.”
We wandered over to the gate where my friend was told that the bus was about to leave. Did she have her ticket? (Yes.) Then come this way. (We hugged, and she was led through a closed door to the waiting bus.)
I looked up at the sign above the door.
Gate 69.
The maze of Port Authority is a curse to any traveller, but in the confusion has developed an ad hoc service economy, both out of necessity and opportunity. Like good businessmen, they stand near the entrance to the building, beside the empty information booth, and inquire, ever so gently, “looking for a bus?”
And in that moment those who are just passing through can get a little taste of what New York is all about.
Filed under: Observations, with 8 Comments
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