researchgirl

I honestly don’t have the capacity to provide detailed commentary on anything, but there’s lots I want to write about… in the meantime…

One of my faults/shortcomings is that I am a “perpetually helpful can-doer”; I usually end up with all kinds of resentment and anger over it. Today, I stumbled across this short article on QuirkBooks “Irreference” blog. It’s part of a series called, “Stuff Every Woman Should Know.” This particular piece is called, “How to Say No.” It’s only five tips, and they’re probably easier said than done, but here’s one:

3. If you’re used to being busy, you’ll have a hard time doing nothing.  So start slow by doing something that relaxes you but won’t make you feel restless. Think of what you enjoy that doesn’t involve work or helping other people.

It’s true, it’s true. I have a hard time doing nothing. I will attempt to take this lesson to heart.

Then there was this article in the NYTimes about branding and product placement in films and how early in the filmmaking process all that craziness happens. It stirs up all kinds of wrong and ick, and I’m in marketing, for cry-ay-ay! It’s getting pretty awful and flagrant; I was highly entertained by how heavy-handed it was in Transformers (lingering shots of HP computers and GM automobiles), but that was a big dumb action movie full of CGI robots. I’ve come to expect that kind of ridiculousness. Then it starts creeping up in things like, oh, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” That was an awful adaptation in and of itself, but Coca-Cola must’ve really wanted to be seen as the post-apocalyptic beverage of choice; the father and son stumble across a single can of Coke in a vending machine and the father treats it like the most precious aqua vitae (in the original sense). When they find a storm cellar/bunker full of food, guess what beverage is there for them? That’s right! Glacéau VitaminWater, a Coca-Cola product (acquired in 2007)! There might’ve been more, but those were quite enough.

The most embarrassing bit of product placement I’ve seen recently was on an episode of (guilty pleasure alert) “Bones.” It’s bordering on pathetic. Here’s an article about it. I can’t find a transcript of the most recent episode (“The Bones on a Blue Line”), but the quote in the article gives you a good idea:

As the investigators drove it up to a dealership, the slick vehicle was the subject of several close-ups. Then, a saleswoman looked out the window and offered up: “That Sequoia’s a honey.” Then she praised it for being “roomy enough, you could have a Super Bowl party” in the back. And followed that up by mentioning it has “great gas mileage.”

The new episode has a similar set-up. One character asks another, apropos of nothing, “Why do you drive a minivan?” And she responds with something about being an artist and needing lots of cargo room – and the camera moves away from the face of the woman speaking and they OVERDUBBED her saying the name of the car. I guess they hadn’t decided which one to promote when they filmed the episode. Sad.

I must sleep.

Some metrics:

Time at new job: this Friday will mark the completion of four (4) weeks at the new job. It’s going well, and that feels nice.

New wake-up time: 6am, which isn’t bad and I realize that that’s a reality for many people. I’m just not a morning person so it’s been a slightly more difficult adjustment. It took three full weeks for my sleep schedule to adapt.

Birthdays I’ve celebrated in the last few days: one (1). Mine. On Easter. It was very, very chill. I didn’t do much of anything, and that felt pretty good.

Time I have to “live” every day: 3 hours. That’s hard. That includes dinner, any exercise I want to get (which I haven’t gotten – I’ve been too f’ing exhausted), to do any chores/run errands (laundry, groceries, pharmacy, doctor’s visit, dry cleaning, shopping for socks, etc.) – and that’s about it. Bedtime. I’ll find balance. It’s just a matter of getting used to the new way and then working within that framework. It can be done.

This weekend, I had some time to take photos. This was nice. I went to the Great Falls of Paterson (a national park not 10 minutes from my home with some of the tallest waterfalls in the US – and I never knew!) and took some photos. Here’s a sampling:

There’s a great building with a great plaque:

And there were rainbows!

It wasn’t a bad day. Nope.

I’ll be having more of those. Tomorrow is going to be almost 90 degrees. I am bringing my camera to work with me so I can pop out during lunch and take some slice-of-life photos of Brooklyn. Or other interesting things I find.

I’ve been at my new job for just over two weeks and I’m still sort of adjusting to my new schedule and commute and responsibilities. It’s going pretty well, and one good thing about having a long commute is that I have ample reading time. I’ve been bringing a work-related book or reading  material with me (something about marketing or advanced Google AdWords, or case studies), as well as a novel for pleasure-reading.

My current literary crush is Iris Murdoch. I read “The Sea, The Sea”  a few months ago and rather loved it. I have several other books by her which I’ve also not read yet, so I picked up my copy of “Nuns and Soldiers.” I am also loving it so far (just about 125 pages in). Here are some passages I underlined (gasp!) in pencil in the book.

One relationship in the book is a friend between two men: Guy and the Count. The Count is only nicknamed the Count because of a joke among his college schoolmates that all Polish exiles are Counts. Guy is his mentor/best friend, and he is dying from cancer. He’s on his deathbed and the Count is keeping him company since Guy is avoiding/sparing his wife (Gertrude) from all that time together. Here, the Count is thinking about the nature of his current interactions with Guy:

The Count had often talked of abstract matters with Guy, but in the past they had talked of so much else, they had even gossiped. Now there were few topics left. Their conversation had become refined and chilled until nothing personal remained between them. Love? There could be no expression of it now, any gesture of affection would be a gross error of taste. It was a matter of behaving correctly until the end. The awful egoism of the dying. The Count knew how little now Guy needed or wanted his affection, or even Gertrude’s; and he knew too, in his grief, that he himself was withdrawing, stifling his compassion, coming to see it as fruitless suffering. We do not want to care too much for what we are losing. Surreptitiously we remove our sympathy, and prepare the dying one for death, diminish him, strip him of his last attractions. We abandon the dying like a sick beast left under the hedge. Death is supposed to show us truth, but is its own piece of illusion. It defeats love. Perhaps shows us that after all there is none. I am thinking Guy’s thoughts now, the Count said to himself. I do not think this. But then I am not dying.

Another pair of characters are Tim and Daisy. Tim is tangentially related to Guy. He is a struggling artist/part-time art teacher who can’t make it, no matter what he tries. His girlfriend Daisy is a talented artist but gives up on everything and everyone and prefers to drink and complain about writer’s block than look for a job. Daisy is about to get kicked out of her flat because she hasn’t been paying rent; Tim can’t afford to float her anymore, and is thinking about suggesting that they move in together, even though they’ve discussed and dismissed the issue many times before:

Tim often let Daisy decide things, even if the decision seemed dotty, because he trusted her instincts and because if he decided anything and it went wrong she never stopped blaming him, even if she had agreed with the original idea. Just now there were no very clear ideas. There would be one long row, the usual one-sided row with Tim saying nothing, but feeling bitter and sad. Once Daisy, in a rage, had thrust a rose he had given her, long thorny stem and all, down the back of her shirt, and that sharp pricking pain all the way down his spine came back to him during those vituperative monologues.

I don’t have the energy right now to unpack or otherwise discuss these, but suffice it to say that they each contained some elements and details or truth that appealed to me strongly. And now I will attempt to sleep.

I sort of didn’t remember it was St. Patrick’s Day until I arrived at Penn Station and started seeing people wearing green shamrock antennae/headbands, I “shamrock” NY t-shirts, etc. And men wearing kilts. There were many of those.

I didn’t think about St. Patrick all day – until I got on the subway and started seeing lots of young people (teenagers, college students) stumbling around at 5:15, smelling of beer. For about 5 stops, I shared a subway car with ten naval officers, who crowded aboard and one announced, “Everyone get comfortable; we’re in the navy!” I think they might have been celebrating, too, since their conversation wasn’t exactly linear and only one of them was paying attention to the station stops.

Also, there were two men in kilts carrying briefcases. Oh, holidays.

These days, I leave the house at 7am, get home at 7pm, and have about 3-4 hours to myself before I get up and do it all over again. It’s not too bad now that I’m getting into the swing of things and am sleeping through the night. It was a bit dicey for a while since I was so anxious about oversleeping that I would get up numerous times in the middle of the night, resulting in almost no sleep at all.

Of course, I have lofty goals for those 3-4 hours: going running, doing some cleaning, eating some dinner, catching up on email and reading. And, of course, I end up changing into pajama pants and plopping into a chair or right into bed to watch a movie or read. Tonight: watching “Flying Down to Rio“, the movie where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were first paired, though they are not the stars of the film.

I meant to watch “The Hurt Locker” since that just arrived from Netflix, but I think it needs a bit more attention than I can currently give it. I’ve been falling asleep or drifting off in the middle of movies lately… I’ll save it for the weekend when I am awake during daylight hours and able to focus on something for more than 15 minutes.

I am more or less ready for spring.
I have several pairs of rainboots and have purchased a light water-resistant trench coat.
Call me prepared.

You?

Flowers @ Filoli Gardens

When I have a good night’s sleep and have spent more time sleeping than commuting (roads are flooded, wreaking havoc with commuting anywhere in this area) I will post something longer.

In the meantime, this made me smile:

I’m starting a new job tomorrow. I haven’t started a new job in more than 4 years. Crazy.

I’ve already had to change my first commute plans twice; the heavy rains in the Northeast over the last 3 days have led to flooding. Flooding has led to service suspension on several train lines, including mine. So much for my nice civilized train commute.

So? The bus. I’ll be taking the bus.

What’s wrong with the bus? There’s nothing innately wrong with the bus version of the mass transit commute. It’s actually a little quicker than the train. It’s just that I get motion sickness aboard a bus, which means I can’t read or do anything, really, while on the bus. At least when I’m on the train, I can make use of that train time and read a book or check the NYTimes via BlackBerry. Can’t do that on the bus.

Oh, well. Until the flood waters recede and we can see the tops of the mountains again/find some doves flying around with olive branches for inexplicable reasons, I’ll have to deal. The important thing is to get to work on my first day on time.

I feel ready. Just anxious over what else could possibly go wrong in the morning.

We’ve got some rain over here in NJ. And some crazy, scary howling wind. And power outages. I am writing this on my BlackBerry since it’s not worth turning on the computer if it’s just going to turn off mid-sentence. We’ve lost our cable anyway, so no interwebs for me. There are plenty of fallen trees and flooding, so all I can do is hope that everyone is safe. I have friends in the southern part of NJ (which has been hit particularly hard) and I hope they’re OK. It’s a bit late to call.

I was supposed to attend a friend’s poetry reading in NYC tonight, but a state of emergency has been declared and the roads to get there from here are flooded. I opted for safety.

Time to light some candles (I recommend the Henri Bendel Home candles in Fig and Black Fig) and read.

Over the last couple of years, photography has risen to the top of my hobby list. It’s up there with reading and rock-climbing. Since WordPress and Flickr have this nifty widget/plugin going on, it’s extremely easy for me to post a photo directly from Flickr. “Why not take advantage,” thought I, “and post a photo every day or so?”

I’m sure I’ve written about this at some point before now, but it bears repeating. My father (an artist, graphic designer, photographer, etc.) once told me that being a photographer is being a slave to the moment. Well, he said it in Polish so I’m translating and paraphrasing, but you get the idea. I’m always very pleased when I manage to catch a moment — for example, this one. Flying back from San Francisco, I managed to get a pretty clear window and kept my camera out almost the entire time since it was a fairly clear sky.

I love how this photo captures earth, water, wind, sky and metal, all in one frame. A moment later, that lake would have been somewhere else in the shot:

Flying back east from SFO

I’m even happier when I catch a detail that seems like it would go unnoticed or unappreciated by most people. I  can say this with some confidence; my father has noted that while he tends to go for the big picture, panorama, beauty shot of things, I focus in on details that capture the essence of a place or moment in a very effective way. My friend Krys told me that she’d never think to take a photo of a rusty railing – the photo in question is one of my favorites. I apparently photograph lots of rusty objects, but I don’t want to show them all here. I’ll save them for future POTDOS posts:

Rusty railing on a taxi in Barbados.