Sabres at Dawn (kind of)

So with the Sabres decidedly not in the playoffs, I've been spending a lot of time watching stress-free playoff hockey. But clearly I cannot be allowed to live without sabres in my life: A group has been getting together, generally in the evening, to fight with lightsabers in my courtyard. They show up for an hour or two, grunt and yell like women's tennis players, and then leave.

To each their own, I suppose.

A Little Bit Scary

I just went out in the rather wet, slushy snow to buy ingredients for a Maple Pecan Cake from the Key Foods near my apartment and there were news trucks all down the street and police tape around the store. I googled it when I got home and it turns out two of the female employees were attacked today. That's really pretty horrifying. I grew up in one of the safest large towns in America and I often kind of forget that this sort of stuff happens.

ABT: Clear, Leaves are Fading, and Fancy Free

What's the movie where that one character is always saying, "busy, busy, busy!"? I feel like it's a Disney movie or something. I don't know. That's been me this week. Wednesday I went to the ballet with Kir, Jenny, and Wendy (more on that below) and Thursday Wendy and I met our across the hall neighbor for the first time. He's lived there for about a year, but we weren't even sure what he looked like, which is so very New York, but not in a good way. Hey, I grew up in the suburbs, I'm used to the whole chatting with the neighbors thing. Anyway, he had a few friends over and invited us to come over and drink port and eat with various cheeses and such with them--seems like a nice guy. I'm pretty sure he's also the only other person on our floor who is under the age of seventy.

Then today I went up to a bar on the Upper East Side and met Jenny and some of her friends there to watch the Sabres game. So it's all been fun stuff, but I'm such a homebody that I find it exhausting. And on a sidenote, the whole having a life thing is really interfering with my blogging. I'm going to stay pretty busy through the weekend I think, but after that things should lighten up. Who knows, I might even get to catch up on some of my reading. I'm in the middle of a couple interesting books right now, and recently finished a couple other books that I'd like to write about. But anyway...

Wednesday I met Kir after work and the two of us walked over to a Japanese restaurant on 49th between 6th and 7th, where we met Wendy and Jenny for dinner. It was one of those places where the food is really cheap and they give you enough to feed an army. From there we walked up to City Center in the rain--which I normally don't mind, but it's been the nasty, drizzly kind of rain for the most part.

I really enjoyed everything we saw on Wednesday, although I feel like I missed bits of Clear and would need to see it again. Which I will, tomorrow, so it's a good thing I'm interested in watching it more than once. I'm not sure exactly what it's trying to say although I certainly get the impression that there's an emotion or idea there that it's trying to express.

I'm sure that I could do with seeing Leaves are Fading again as well--which I won't--but I did think that it's meaning was much more apparent and clearly expressed in the choreography. The Dvorak music it's set to is absolutely beautiful and the dancing, which is a meditation on love and memory and aging and the passing of time--or at least that's what I thought it was--fits it perfectly. I saw Julie Kent and Marcelo Gomes (they're pictured above in the photo I stole from ABT's Web site) in this and thought that Kent was particularly beautiful. Everything about the role seems well-suited to her. Gomes was also a pleasure to watch. If you'd like to see the pas de deux they performed, you can see different dancers doing it here (embedding is disabled). Really quite lovely.

The final piece of the evening was Fancy Free which just seemed like a lot of fun not only for the audience but for the dancers as well. I mean, for all I know they loathe dancing it but they certianly managed to seem like they were having fun. The only choreography of Robbins that I'd seen previously was West Side Story and I really enjoyed watching Fancy Free because you can definitely see that Broadway/Musical Theater sensibility in it. It also seemed so quintessentially 40s with it's sailor costumes and gags. Which is neat because I quite like musicals and such from that era. Watching, it was like watching a musical except one where the story is told through the dancing/movement alone. As someone who has really never danced or used any non-verbal communication I think it's fascinating to see how people are doing that. I love it.

Tomorrow Wendy and I are going to see Clear again and the new Millepied and Elo works. Hopefully it's as enjoyable as Wednesday was.

Explosions and Con Ed Suckage

So, as many have no doubt heard, a steam pipe exploded near Grand Central yesterday evening. I work a couple blocks up from Grand Central but happily was already downtown by the time it happened. My rather less fortunate boss had to evacuate our building, walking down quite a few flights of stairs. The only real effect it's had on me was that my morning commute--I normally take the 6 to Grand Central--was fucked up, with the train taking forever to come and a bit more walking then usual. So I was late to work, but that's not the sort of thing you're going to get in trouble for given the circumstances.

The sidewalk is (mostly) open in the area around my building but Lexington is closed to traffic and they've dug into the road in various places, I assume to work on the other pipes. And just south of me the sidewalks are (mostly) closed as well and they don't want people going into the area. My grandmother works in that area and her office was closed today and is closed tomorrow. Anyway, they claim that there is asbestos in the debris but not the air, and the heat and humidity will prevent it from becoming airborne. I'm not particularly concerned. I do find it interesting though, that they have nevertheless outfitted the many police officers on the scene with these lovely pink masks. Of course most of them aren't actually wearing the masks, just carrying them around.

As usual, when the unusual happens, the incompetent Con Ed appears totally unprepared for it. We got an email in the earlier part of the day saying that due to the heat and the explosion the building would have to go into energy saving mode to help prevent blackouts. I was actually rather glad that this meant turning the airconditioning down because the office has been frigid the last couple days. Less happy though that it meant shutting down half the elevators. Our elevators are a constantly discussed pain in the ass to begin with. Around lunchtime or 5 o'clock you're frequently stuck waiting for 10 minutes for one to come and then when it does come it's completely full and you have to wait for the next one. So losing half of them really sucks. I ended up with a very short lunch. Fucking Con Ed.

The Weekend

I had a killer allergy attack last night and then got wrapped up with doing eight loads of laundry. Fun, no? Also, I just got a new glasses prescription a few months ago but I think my vision has continued to go downhill at an alarming rate. The problem with working at a computer I suppose, but I'm very concerned about it.

It seems we've be launched directly from wintery weather to summer, which is unfortunate because while I love spring, I;m not a big fan of summer. It was nice on Saturday, as I went to a picnic in Central Park and ate all kinds of good food while jealously watching people playing with their dogs. A nice afternoon.

Wendy and I also went to go see the new hall of Human Origins at the Museum of Natural History, but we only had enough time to see half of it, so we'll have to go back some other time. In addition to giving creationists fits, it actually looks really nice. It's so strange to go there and see exhibits that don't look like they were made in the '70s. Not unlike the Hall of Ocean Life they've spruced up the dioramas nicely. They've also added interactive stuff and things you can touch. I probably would have like that hall more when I was little if it looked like it does now. Although lets face it, when you're little, you're totally in it for the dinosaurs, the giant whale, and the dino-shaped fries in the cafeteria.

Apparently Wendy's childhood visits also included long hours spent at the gemstones exhibit. This is what happens when your parents are former geologists, I suppose. For me, the gemstone exhibit was mostly notable for the carpeted benches (like I said, very '70s) and the fact that we would always go see the Star of India. This visit always brought on the story how my PopPop recovered it when it was stolen, and was on the television because of it. Hey, it's my family's one and only claim to...well, not fame, but some proximity to an event of national interest, so it's going to get rehashed a time or six. Someday, I'll probably be lugging my children for through the museum and telling them, "You're great-grandfather..."

But anyway, enough with the nostalgia, which you probably don't share unless you too made numerous childhood trips to the museum. My point was,: neat exhibit, will have to go back to see the rest.

Yesterday, the heat was sufficient to be unpleasant. I had to lug a bunch of broken printers up to Union Square. Not fun. It was hot enough that I could smell the tarmac melting on 4th Ave (newly paved). It seems like the whole city was out and about this weekend. There were orange-robed monks handing out literature by the Ghandi statue in the square and people on the steps and people who were just generally in the way of the old lady rolling cart I was using to lug the printers.

On a happier note, the weather also served to bring out the amusingly off-beat. There was an old lady in a kerchief sitting on the bench in my courtyard an animal but from our balcony we couldn't quite tell if it was a large cat or a small dog. I ran to get my opera glasses and we could then see that she was indeed out there with a big, orange Persian cat. Occasionally the cat would jump down and start to wander and the old lady would stand up, fetch it back to the bench, make it sit, and then sit back down herself. It was to dark out to get a good, focused picture so the one to the left is the best a could do. I felt like a paparazzi. If paparazzi stalked anonymous old ladies, and used teeny little digital cameras, that is.

Explosions in the Night and Other Happenings

There was what sounded like an explosion at three in the morning yesterday. I was having trouble sleeping anyway but succeeded in throwing water all over myself. Immediately after the bang, smoke started seeping in the windows--which were all open because maintenance is apparently trying to roast us alive and my apartment is absurdly hot--and there were sirens all over the damn place. From my roommate's window you could see smoke pouring out of an open manhole on the street. Occasionally there would be a sound like fireworks and sparks would come flying out.

There were two firetrucks worth of firemen trekking around the street and my apartment complex. A bit of a funny sight, because the only time I normally see firemen is in Key Foods. They park their truck on my street and there'll be six of them in the grocery store in their big fireman outfits trying to decide how much milk they need to buy because, "you know some jerk's going to have cereal in the morning and use more than his fair share."

It seems that the firemen decided it wasn't their responsibility because they called Con Ed and after talking to the men in the Con Ed truck, were on their way. The Con Ed men called a bigger Con Ed truck (Con Ed's version of S.W.A.T., my roommate says) and all the Con Ed employees proceeded to look very unhappy. I wasn't all that happy myself so I can't say I was too sympathetic to them. They'd been working on that part of the steet earlier in the year--complete with jackhammering at ridiculous hours, or course--so it's probably something they messed up themselves anyway.

Either way, I don't know what was wrong but they didn't finish fixing it until this evening.

On Sunday I went to see The Lives of Others. It was really very good. Better than I'd expected actually. I almost assumed it wouldn't have a satisfying ending and that's really not the case at all. Between this and Democracy, which I saw in London a couple years ago, one comes away quite impressed, in a disturbing manner, with the capability of the Stasi.

::IF YOU'RE CONCERNED ABOUT KNOWING THE ENDING STOP READING NOW::



What was particularly interesting to me though was that, while one (Democracy) is based on actual historical fact and the other, to my knowledge, is not, both center on spies who grow fond--even admiring--of the men they spy upon. In Democracy, for all the spy's admiration for his subject, he is loyal to his job. It is only in the fictional story that the Stasi member is free to save his subject, betraying the Stasi for the sake of a man he has come to like and respect. And despite this betrayal--or should one say choice of loyalties?--he remains unexposed to his subject. He sacrifices his career as well for the sake of a man he has never spoken to. One difference between fiction and reality there?