Life Moves Pretty Fast

**Disclaimer: I'm not as cool as Ferris.**

It's been awhile since I've done this, so let's judge accordingly, OK? I used to be really good at coming up with an idea for a post and rocketing off a draft in no time. Based on how much I am struggling to glue this one together, however, I know I am way out of practice.

Once again, I've been thinking about restarting this blog. I've got a lot of time on my hands, I need a project, and I did like writing this thing when I first started it 3 years ago. Then it was easy because I knew I was going to go to Japan and it gave me an automatic framing device for posts: if it wasn't something stupid in class, it was something stupid I did in front of Japanese people, or you know, giant catastrophic earthquakes. Now at this point, it's just my daily life, which is a lot harder to mold and shape into a story that has a point. I come back to this Simpson's quote a lot.

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

I'm finding that keeping up with posting is a lot like double-dutch. If you've got a rhythm, you can keep going forever and ever. But if you've been outside the pattern for awhile, it's daunting to jump back in. Either you can't find a pace for yourself and you wind up tangled inside the ropes (i.e. how I got stymied a couple of years ago when I tried to recharge this blog after Japan), or you instead rock back and forth on your heels for awhile debating whether to take a leap. I can't promise this post means consistent writing, but I at least came up with a conceit for this post that at least gives me something to work with.

I figure a little catch-up is in order first since I'm not in the same place I was a year ago, let alone, let alone five. And this seems like a good point to start looking back because five years ago I was making moves to relocate to Seattle, an experience that as I have said a million times on this blog already changed me in some pretty unexpected ways. I'm also in a similar position in that I am planning a move to yet another faraway location. So I thought maybe I could do a status check 5 years on.

And you know what else I've been using pretty consistently for the last 5 years? Facebook. I spend way too much time on there. But I looked back through some of my posts, and if you read them chronologically from a period you haven't thought back on specifically in awhile, it gives you a good sense of who you were at that time and your frame of mind. In the effort to reconstruct who I am and where I've been, I've taken snapshots of statuses and photos I've posted (or had posted about me) to provide a little more context.

It was kind of a fun project. Here are the results.

June 2008
Age: 24 going on 7

Job Status: Recently promoted with a pay bump at a temp job. Making money is nice.

Location: New York
Roommates: My ma, my pa (damn, he was still around, huh), my bro, and my pookie (miss him)
Relationship Status: Single and chronically so

So single serial killers started looking good to me

Future Prospects: Planning a cross-continental move to Seattle to attend grad school (seemed like a good idea at the time)

Conclusion: I had a lot to look forward to. I make fun of the fact I decided to attend grad school now, but I still know it was a much needed step for me. I had a lot of growing left to do, and there wasn't much left in New York for me. However, I was inwardly panicking. A lot. I kind of assumed grad school would be a lonely, isolating experience, and I was OK with that. Mostly I was going back to school because I missed reading and writing about a subject I actually cared about; also, academia seemed like a really easy way to get myself back to Japan to study language. But I would have to interact with professors and other students on a semi-regular basis, and I was afraid I wouldn't get along with anyone. Things turned out just a might bit different.

June 2009
Age: 25
Job Status: Finished first year of grad school (it was hell getting there), and living off the government's dollar by studying Korean.

I was going slightly insane by the end of the quarter

So insane that I was posting graphs I was using in my papers.

Location: Seattle
Roommates: Kelly!!! And living in Deirdre's apartment for the summer

Oy

Relationship Status: Single, and smarting from a minor debacle with a very confused classmate. Mercifully he left for Japan before we had to continue being in classes together. Live 'n learn.

I wound up kiiiinda drunk at this event for the above-stated reason

Future Prospects:  A whole summer of Kelly cooking, Korean classes, and another year of graduate school.

Conclusion: 2009 was a lot rougher than I had bargained for. Though I did wind up having a lot of fun that summer, I was also in a fair amount of pain. There was some family drama going down throughout, and I will be the first to admit I had a really hard time dealing with it. The last time I spoke to my father was actually in June of that year (on Father's Day, no less), soooo there was that. I was looking for distractions everywhere.

June 2010
Age: 26
Job Status: Survived my second year of grad school, turned in my theses, and was for all intents and purposes, graduated. But I maintained student status with UW to remain entitled to governnment funding for the following year. Had also procured a temp job in Leschi prepping ticket packages for the assorted geeks, nerds, and weirdos (I say that with love) attending GenCon.

I really should've known I would not have cut it in academia much longer

Great work ethic, Troyer

Location: Seattle
Roommates: The voices in my head since I was living alone and subletting Lindsay's apartment while she was in China.

Relationship Status: Single

I'm going to guess that stuff like this on my wall was part of the reason why

Future Prospects: A summer to fill with more fun stuff around Seattle, and then off to Japan to finally attend IUC!

Conclusion: I don't remember the summer of 2010 as well; I was mostly just trying to fill time before I had to get on a plane to Japan. But that was a good thing for me! After the stresses of the summer before, I needed to take a load off and enjoy myself. And I really was freaking out about moving to Japan because I was convinced that one mistake in the planning process would mean THE END OF THE WORLD. But as you can see, it all turned out fine.

June 2011
Age: 27
Job Status: I officially graduated and became Master Troyer. And studying for the JLPT consumed my life at this point. I also was trying to enjoy myself since it was going to be my last time in Japan for the conceivable future, but I was also inwardly panicking about finding a job after graduate school.

Location: This was the time when I was most nomadic: I split my time between Seattle, and a couple of places in Japan.

I was still very, very angry at UW for pulling me back from IUC, obviously

Roommates: Random person from Seattle, then Syd and Micah were nice enough to let me stay with them for a bit when I arrived in Japan later in the month, then my host parents!

Relationship Status: Single

Seattle was a good stand-in for a boyfriend, however

Future Prospects:  Taking the JLPT, and then the abyss of job hunting
Conclusion: 2011 was another very rough year for me. I was still not over the shock of getting thrown out of Japan after the March 11th earthquake (as if living through an historically destructive earthquake and subsequent nuclear crisis weren't bad enough), I hadn't gotten into any Ph.D. programs (for the best, truly), and was facing dire news about the US economy at the time when I was desperate for a job. I think I made the most of it, but from where I was sitting in June of that year, things looked pretty bleak. There was another surgery in store for me by the end of the year, but I didn't know about that just yet.

Couldn't fit this anywhere, but I liked it and since this is my blog, you're going to like it too

June 2012 
Age: 28
Job Status: Less than enthusiastic about my job with a certain company (not sure how to handle career stuff in a blog, so I'm going to be very vague here) in New York.

So serious about my job

Location: New York

UGH IT WAS SO HOT LAST SUMMER

Roommates: My mom, like a true Millennial

Like anyone still living with their parents, I watched a LOT of TV

Relationship Status: Seeing someone I met online, but that would fizzle out before the end of the summer.

Future Prospects:  The 9-to-5 grind was all I had to look forward to, and I was beginning to really resent it at this point. But I was really looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight Rises in July.

Note: This was more than a month before the actual movie came out

Conclusion: I've never been terribly good at complacency and though I was happy with having a quieter, less anxiety-filled year compared to 2011, the seeds of discontent were planted and it was only a matter o time before I really felt the need to start changing things. A steady income was nice, but it was only going to keep me satisfied for so much longer. But much like 2010, this was a 'tweener year where there were things to keep me distracted (online dating still gets kind of a bad wrap, but I will come out as a defender), and I didn't have too many serious things on my mind. I also never would've guessed last June where I would've been in a year.

June 2013
Age: 29 and remembering every day that passes is one less day that I can say I am still in my 20s.
Job Status: Left dissatisfying full-time job for several reasons, and partially employed through a friend of a friend. Also attempting not too worry so much, which is perhaps the hardest task of all.
Location: Still New York
Roommates: Still a Millennial

And I still have a problem with watching too much TV

Relationship Status: Um, I actually have a serious boyfriend. He's awesome, he's a nerd, he loves me (for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, but sometimes it's best not to ask too many questions), and I love him to pieces. But he's not living here at the moment, and we're doing our best to work it out.

I should add that I give him shit like it's my job. I'm OK doing this pro bono

But he does cook for me, so maybe I should be nicer?

Future Prospects: This is where it gets fun because I don't have more than a sketch of where I'm headed. For personal reasons (which I won't get into here) I'm staying in New York through the summer to some undetermined point in the fall when I will hopefully rejoin the boyfriend either in Austin or in Seattle. There are many details that need to be worked out before that happens.

The first of many?

Perhaps I will need a pair of these one day

Conclusions: Well, here is where I come to the point of writing this post in the first place. And! I've got nothing for you really other than the fact I still use Facebook way too much, and that I've changed in ways that I can't really define. It's why I set up this post the way I did in the first place: to compare where I was, and who I was to figure out how I wound up where I am and who I am. 2013 has been yet another year that has decided to yank the rug out from under me (I have really bad luck with odd-numbered years, it seems), and I'm doing my best not to fall on my face again, and rather stick a landing as graceful as I can.

I mean, it's 5 years since I was first getting ready to leave New York for the first time, right? That ostensibly is the same, but the circumstances are completely different. And if a year ago you asked me if I would think about uprooting myself and possibly moving to Texas for a man, I would have given you the weirdest face. It probably would've looked like this:

It'll get stuck that way!

And yet, here I am. And though I'm without full-time employment, this is probably the happiest and most hopeful I've felt in a really long time. I've said this to a couple of people recently, but I am extremely fortunate: I have a wonderful boyfriend whom I love, and an amazing group of friends and family. Isn't surrounding yourself with warm, funny, affectionate people most of the battle? It's not to say that things won't change or get more difficult somewhere down the road, but I want to say I'm prepared for that. But my overall point is that you can't really prepare yourself for anything that comes your way. That's a daunting lesson for someone as Type A as I am, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't trying to prove myself wrong on this count. Of course I know what's going to happen! Look at me trying to control the future!

Schemers trying to control their little worlds

Not saying I want to be the Joker either in this scenario, but trying to plan for life doesn't always work. I tried to plan at least a couple of years into the future in 2008, and look at how that turned out. 5-year plans didn't really work too well for Stalin or Mao either. I guess what I am trying to say is that I'm ever so gradually learning to let go and take things as they come. My degree of success is pretty hit or miss at this point (I'm always going to be neurotic and pessimistic), but the most I can say for myself is that I'm working on it. If I spend too much time planning and don't look around once in awhile, I might miss something.

And hey, look! America is growing too and trying not to control at least some parts of our lives!

初夢 - First Dream of the New Year

The Japanese have this belief that the first dream of the New Year can portend either good or bad luck for the coming year. Since I had a particularly weird one last night, I'm wondering what exactly I should be expecting for 2012. I actually don't believe in this at all (duh), but for whatever reason the dream I had last night is particularly vivid right now and since I'm bored, I may as well write it down, right? Though really, it's gotten to the point where all of my dreams are so fucking weird that I don't bother to remember them any more. It's pretty much a given that every night my subconscious is doing some bizarre shit. But I guess that just means this one was particularly out there? Read on.

The dream started off in the woods, but I understood these weren't actually the woods. It was set up to be like an office with cubicles and everything, and Kelly (hi Kelly!) was there asking me a bunch of questions and giving me directions. I don't remember the exact words that transpired between us, but I spent some time in the office woods and eventually figured out where I was supposed to go. I proceeded out of the woods to my destination point, which was...

GRAD SCHOOL?!? NOOOO!!! I understood it was the first day of school and I needed to get myself to class. But I wasn't attending UW. Instead I found myself wandering the halls of my old elementary school (Church Street), which had been completely redone to be more like a college campus. I got completely lost  and I didn't even have a course schedule, so I had to wander into the registrar's office to get one. My first class of the day (even though I was in grad school, I still had this giant list of classes I had to attend for the entire day as though I were still in grade school) was apparently "20th Century US Presidents." Oddly enough, there was an accompanying photo to go with the class and it was Abraham Lincoln, which makes no sense. 

I never did find the class, even after asking for directions; I thought I found the room I needed to be in, but the class being held in that room was not the right one. It was some variant on the US Presidents' theme, but it wasn't 100%. So I wandered out of the building and back into the woods, which by this time was no longer an office but a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with the crumbling carcasses of buildings and civilization. I guess you can't really call it "the woods" any more, huh?

Um, and then I realized I was a werewolf and I started transforming? And a helicopter showed up to try and hunt me down, and it turned into the opening scene to John Carpenter's The Thing, except in a desolate urban landscape. 

And just before I ended up getting shot, I woke up.

I have been meaning to write a post-mortem for 2011, but I have been really delinquent in my blogging duties. I may try to write it later today, or at some point during the week. But rest assured, I plan to put 2011 in a shallow grave and kick over the headstone. It's been that kind of year. I felt like this most of the time:

I want to think 2012 will be somehow better, but a year full of school, cubicles, and werewolves? I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Drunk Girl Movie Reviews: Um, That New Twilight Movie

I feel pretty confident that there aren't many Twihards that read my blog, but for the sake of maintaining consistency in my anti-spoiler policy... SPOILERS AHEAD for whatever the hell the new Twilight movie is called. Though for fans of Twilight - given the nature of what is likely to follow - spoilers are the least of your worries.

And also a quick disclaimer about the post title: I was drunk during the screening of this movie. I am not drunk as I write this. Unfortunately I don't employ a full-time stenographer in my head so I do not have a transcript of everything I was thinking (though in truth, most of it would be "WHAT?! WHAAAAAAAT?!? IS. HAPPENING?!"), but I think I remember the more salient points. Plus, I wasn't that drunk.

Seems to be that the secret to making me see any of the Twilight movies involves two things: a) have it be a friend's birthday, and b) get me really drunk. That's the story behind how I saw the first movie; it was Deirdre's birthday and I got wasted on mostly sweet tea vodka (I recall also having a mint julep earlier in the night thanks to Cai), and not having any idea of what was going on. To this day I can't tell you the plot other than there was a car accident and a baseball game? I was told at the time that I would enjoy the movie because it is just so bad so as to be hilarious, but I was left scratching my head. I should've done like Kelly and fallen asleep in the first 15 minutes.

And now having seen the most recent movie, I feel I can say with some certainty that these movies speak their own language and exist in their own moral universe. And I neither speak the language nor do I have a clue as to what lesson these movies want to impart or the rules by which the universe exists. It is for this reason that I deny that anyone can like Twilight ironically. In order to get anything out of these movies, you have to understand them on some level. To me, the movies are a whole lot of words that don't make sense and a bunch of visuals that have little to no logical thread between one event and the next. Plus, the effort required to read those massive books and to sit through hours upon hours of film is beyond what any normal human being would go through to enjoy something for its badness. On some level, anyone who claims to watch Twilight because it's just so bad is lying to themselves. Just say you like it. I might have a marginal amount of respect for you for owning up to it already.

And in fairness, I missed the first like 15-20 minutes, and then fell asleep in the last 10-15. But I'm not sure that that matters very much. By the time we rolled into the theater, I was already 3 whiskey drinks deep plus a gin and tonic I ordered heavy on the gin. OH, and I just remembered that when we stepped into the bar and grill located in the movie theater (can't take your drinks outside of the bar's perimeter, however. American law is so fucking arbitrary with its puritanism) that we ran into a few Twilight mothers who also happen to be mothers of the students that my friend Kara works with up in Bedford Hills. So you know, bored women who have always wanted to save their virginity and marry a vampire. I don't know. But slightly tipsy while sipping my G&T, I decided to go on and on about Michael Fassbender (the current background to my phone) and I may not have been PG about it. But LOOK AT THIS MAN.

UNF. And once we got into the theater, I didn't realize we had sat near to those mothers until I started talking about shirtless dudes and 6-packs and Kara laughingly shushed me. I don't even remember what I said, but those women can suck it.

But once I was finally seated, I got bored and a little antsy. I then remembered that there was a grocery store put into the shopping complex that contains the movie theater, and I decided to head downstairs to grab a drink to sneak in in my purse. Yeah, I haven't changed at all.

Of course, this isn't Japan. I can't run into a convenience store and line my purse with Chu-hi's any more. I get to the alcohol section of the Shop-Rite and realize they do not sell single drinks. Well, there are beers, but you know how I feel about beer. I thought for a second about getting a six-pack of Smirnoffs, but realized how dumb that was. I settled on a giant bottle of hard cider and told myself I wouldn't drink the whole thing. I couldn't tell at the what kind of cap the bottle had (it was covered with gold foil) and I hoped it was a twist-off. I got up to the express lane where of course someone had more than double the maximum allowed, but I realized that I actually wanted the line to take as long as possible. I loaded my giant bottle of cider, two packs of gum and a bag of cough drops (those last 3 items were for my friends) onto the belt and waited my turn. Hilariously, once the cashier finished checking out the woman in front of me and my bottle moved to the front, one of the woman's kids turned to her and said:

"Mom, why are you buying wine?"

She was clearly embarrassed, and corrected her kid with, "That's not mine. And that's not wine."

I paid for my random single girl purchases, and made my way back up to the theater. I think you can guess that my bottle was not a twist-off. I thought maybe I could pry the cap off with a keychain or something, but I the cut on one of my fingers attests to the fact that those caps are on fucking tight. So... I had a choice. Sit with my Sisphyean bottle of cider, or go back downstairs and buy a bottle opener. Ummm... and I went back downstairs. This is how I missed the entire beginning of the movie. I guess they got married? The express check-out girl totally recognized me, but the thing about paying people minimum wage and making them work shit jobs is that they generally do not care about anything outside their basic job description. She wasn't going to ask my any questions in the same way that the ushers ripping tickets weren't going to check my purse for contraband.

And thus, I finally had my cider and sat down just in time to see that Edward and Bella were landing in Rio with a sweeping shot of the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Of course Jesus was watching.

Even with all I drank and my running MST3K commentary, I still managed to not be the most annoying person in theater. I tried really hard, but I'm just no competition for a pack of hormonal 14-year-old girls. I was also trying not to ruin the movie for my friends by constantly asking them questions, but at some points I was so lost that I had to. And I guess there was some humor in this movie since people seemed to be genuinely laughing at certain points, but I missed all the jokes.

What I don't understand is the overall message about sex and marriage. Bella waits until she's married, but winds up pregnant with some kind of demon spawn that destroys her body after only one night with Edward. It's also somehow significant that she decided to remain human for her wedding night. Is that a metaphor for something? Like birth control and the punishment for not being a vampire is to have the condom break? Is it only OK to have sex if you turn yourself into a vampire? I DON'T SEE A DEEPER METAPHOR HERE. Also, the love scenes were so BO-RING. They built up all that Mormon vampire chasteness for 3 movies and the most they can do is about 10 seconds with a couple of kisses and a broken headboard.

And so Bella somehow winds up pregnant? Which I find hilarious because aren't vampires dead and therefore have no pulse? Shouldn't that cause certain tumescence problems? I'm just sayin'.

Forgetting that: for all intents and purposes, this baby ends up killing Bella. Not before daddy vampire has to bite the fucking fetus out of her stomach, and in an effort to save her, stabs her in the chest fucking Pulp-Fiction style with a giant syringe full of vampire venom (vampires are like snakes?!). I DON'T GET IT. So Bella waits until marriage, gets pregnant in wedlock, refuses to abort the baby even though it is killing her and ends up killing her (do demon babies qualify under the Personhood Amendment?), and then dies on the table. That's the ideal family?

And then there's the racism. I don't know if this is something people wrote about for like the first movie and then left it alone, but I haven't heard much about about the blatant racism on display. Obviously the vampires are white. Whiter than white: and extremely rich. I mean, look at the Frank-Lloyd-Wright dream house they live in:

I have no idea what they do. Maybe it's established at some point, but for the purposes of this movie, they are inexplicably rich. They were probably the first vampires over on the Mayflower since their main antagonists are supposedly a tribe of Native Americans. Native Americans that include a dude that looks like this:

Not understanding that the werewolves (the inherent enemy of the vampire for some reason I don't know) were supposed to be Native American, I saw this kid come on screen and turned to my friends and asked, "So are all the minorities werewolves?"

I looked at this kid on screen and knew immediately he was Korean (his last name is Chon). And the rest of the "Native Americans"? They appeared Hispanic. There may have been one or two actual Native Americans on set, and I love how the Wikipedia page for Taylor Lautner states he can claim distant Native American history on his mother's side. You know that his PR agent wrote that.

So in contrast to that rarefied palace of the vamps, the Native Americans live in a couple of shacks on the riverside and quite literally turn into dogs. I don't know what it is with the mythology in these movies, but the werewolves don't look anything different from big wolves. And since the "climax" of the movie was when the wolves come after Bella's baby (who poses some sort of threat to them), the white people ultimately beat the minorities into submission. And the only-shows-his-abs-once-the-whole-movie Jacob sells out his family to support the dream of the white vampires. And then he falls in love with the demon infant. I shit you not. Apparently it's called "imprinting" in the Twilight universe, but that term only makes it even creepier for me since I understand it to mean when a mother imprints on her child. So Jacob is some kind of werewolf-mother figure that wants to bang an infant. That sounds healthy.

So sex is bad, pregnancy will kill you, and minorities are the enemy until they sell out their heritage to fall in love with white children. That's what I took away from this movie.

And yeah, I finished that bottle of cider. I'm assuming that's why I passed out at the end. I don't actually know how it ends. I don't understand how there's another story's worth of movie left to tell. I guess Jacob has sex with a child? Is this where they're going to make up for the lame love scene in this one?

I'm done. I kind of wish I'd gotten drunk to write this.

A Day At The Races

So full disclosure: this post has been sitting in my queue for a week. I started writing it, then stopped. Started again, then stopped. You can also see there are a couple of ETA's around in the post itself from where I picked up writing the post again. This is getting embarrassing; when did I get so bad at blogging?

It seems I am a bit behind in posting and now is as good a time as any to start writing again. It's not to say I haven't tried; you should see the graveyard of abandoned posts I have building up in my queue. I also started writing about my day yesterday at the NYC Marathon for our company blog, but I ran into the problem of being too damn wordy. It refused to save my post as a draft because I had too many individual characters (remember this is Japanese software; the Japanese don't do word counts, but instead character counts). So I hacked at it. And hacked at it and hacked at it until it basically didn't sound like me any more: short sentences, no descriptors, and no space for jokes and asides (and NO, I do not swear in the company blog, asshole). AND IT STILL WOULDN'T SAVE. Eventually the real problem revealed itself to be site maintenance, so I endured that editing headache for absolutely nothing. ETA: it is now Tuesday and I am STILL trying to get this blog post up on the company site. I am going to burn something.

So it's a toss-up as to whether I will spew every single little anecdote here or I am just to goddamn irritated writing the same stories twice. This post is image heavy, which also makes me inclined towards laziness.

Do you like the spiffy little number I got to wear all day Sunday? Aw dammit, now that I'm looking at this picture I'm remembering that I haven't returned it yet either:

I meant to get a photo of me actually in it, but oh well. I was not exactly pleased to have to drag my ass out of bed early on Sunday morning, but daylight savings provided me with a little more time to sleep. However, I still resent the fuck out of it being dark at 5pm every day. Much in the same way we still use the Imperial System of weights and measures (dude, I didn't even know what to call that system; I had to look it up on Wikipedia. I usually just think of it as that stupid system that requires me to remember there are 5,280 feet in a mile), Americans are fucking stubborn even when the rest of the world is using a system that makes life so much easier.

And of course my easiest method into Queens (our meeting point, which was at about the 14-mile mark on the marathon course) - the 7 train - is not running out of Manhattan. That meant I needed to get to the city earlier so as to catch another subway from a more distant station, and I wound up with about 30-40 minutes to kill. I figured I could go into a Starbucks or something, but as I walked by Bryant Park I remembered that they had set up their winter village (it has some official name related to Citibank, but I refuse to look it up) complete with shops and a skating rink. One of my coworkers had told me about a stand with hot apple cider and I figured I could sit outside for a bit and people-watch, which is exactly what I did.

Mmmm, cinnamon stick...

If you're looking to ice skate in NYC, Bryant Park is so much better than Rockefeller Center. If you ever go to Rockefeller Center to see the skating rink, you'll see it's this cheap, dinky thing. Bryant Parker is larger, there's no giant wait, and admission is free! Yeah skate rentals are $14, but Rockefeller Center charges you like $15 for entry and then another $10 for skate rentals.  I work in the tourism industry now; I'm supposed to tell you this stuff.

A bunch of shops have set up on Bryant Park's various patios, and there is some really cute stuff. I'm thinking of doing small Christmas shopping here for friends and such. Lots of shiny things.

I see this monstrosity every day and it just gets uglier and uglier. It's Bank of America's headquarters on 6th Ave and it is truly hideous. I don't know what it is about the current skyscrapers going up in NYC (see also Bear Sterns' former octagonal nightmare and pretty much every tower they're putting up around Ground Zero), but they are all shiny blue-glass things. I just don't get it. The skyline is getting hideous. Give me Gothic or Art Deco any day. Though nothing beats Verizon's concrete Big Brother concrete behemoth near the Brooklyn Bridge in the "beaten with an ugly stick" contest.

I then hopped the E train out to Queens, which is admittedly the first time I've ever headed into Queens other than to use LaGuardia Airport. I should get used to it; I'm thinking of getting an apartment out there. Rents are much more reasonable (the yuppies have ruined Brooklyn for poor people like me), and it's also much closer to midtown by subway.

Having never been to Queens before I worried whether I would be able to figure out where the hell I was going, but with all the barriers and people lined up along the street, I was assured I would get there eventually.

They were running really fast...

There was also a band cranking out your standard RUN FASTER JERK motivational songs. This one wasn't half bad, all things considered. 

I can't say this for certain, but based on the amount of applause this group got along with the police escort, my guess is that this is the leading men's group that battled it out for first place.

Kind of hard to see, but we were on a straight-away that allowed us a clear view of Manhattan to the east. The Chrysler building was particularly pretty (ART DECO NEW YORK, GET BACK ON THAT SHIT. I don't even know what you would call that trend towards glass these days... Greenhousing?).

We set up HIS banners on both sides of the street, which made it look like a course marker of sorts. Presumably it was to alert our Japanese clientele that we would be shouting がんばれ at them and to wave to us.

There were also a bunch of people running in costumes (man, you really have to hate yourself to do that), including the guy above dressed as a bunch of a grapes. On the day I also saw an Iron Man, a couple of Supermans, and someone in a full headdress. It just looks hot and uncomfortable. There was also a guy juggling (what eye-hand coordination!), a New York Times cartoonist who live-drew his entire marathon experience from the second he woke up to the moment his foot crossed the finish line, and a couple who got married along the way. I didn't notice those last two, however.

A couple of my coworkers came to our site carrying heavy bags full of chocolate and granola bars, and it never crossed my mind that we'd be handing them out to the passing runners. All I do is think about my stomach, apparently. I already wrote about this on Facebook, but someone gave me a mini Baby Ruth and my instinct was to crack that sucker open and chow down. She quickly told me that they were meant for the runners and I was like, DAMMIT. I did my best with it, but arm kept getting tired and I also had a tendency to flinch whenever someone came by since I was unsure of if they actually wanted candy or if I was just standing in their way. 

My coworker in the foreground of these pictures, however, was rather successful. As also noted on Facebook, dudes seem to like it when cute Japanese girls give them free snacks. She had a few dudes come by saying, "Hey beautiful, " and "Hi gorgeous." It also made me wonder how many of those guys hit the showers and then go out on the town using "I just finished the marathon" as their pick-up line. I'm sure if they do they are really successful. Some of those dudes were HOT. I pretty much got a lifetime's supply of eye candy on Sunday, so I guess I'm screwed for the rest of my days.

There was also a cop walking up and down the street who constantly yelled at people to step onto the sidewalk. He eventually stopped near us since we were the most flagrant violators (hard to get people to come over if they can't see you). You can see him standing behind my coworkers handing out chocolate in the photo above.

I didn't realize our day wouldn't end in Queens. Around 2pm we made the move toward the finish line in Central Park. Naturally it was packed with people, which made it rather difficult to set up our HIS flags. The last leg of the marathon goes up 5th Ave, which borders the east side of Central Park. You are allowed to cross the marathon path, but it's quite intimidating with all of these people coming at you - panting and sweating - from the side. I eventually did get across. By the time we got to this portion of the race, all of the professionals and anyone who finished the race in under 4 hours had already passed by. Those that were left were clearly exhausted and just wanted to make it over the hill toward the finish line in Central Park. 

Since we were getting paid for a 1/2 day, after 3pm (we started at 11), people started filtering out from our group. I decided that since I was already in the city and was too lazy to go to OWS events on Saturday that I would head down to Zuccotti Park and see what was up.

What I'm realizing is that for someone who is not naturally a joiner by nature (i.e. me), there isn't much for me to do at Liberty Plaza. The rallies they held in previous weeks have their own inherent purpose and agenda, whereas once you get to the Park it's either you join in to the smaller discussion groups or make chit-chat with the people around you. I'm not especially good at either of these, though I did stop and listen to what others were saying and snapped some pictures.

I hear that the OWS organizers have ordered military tents to help combat the cold. There is no way these small campers are ever going to make it through the winter. OWS has been lucky in the past couple of weeks since that freak snowstorm in October, but the temperature is dropping and winter is making its imminent arrival known. I still remain skeptical of how they are going to survive once the first real snowstorm makes it way through. 

The kitchen area

I did enjoy that they have a library set up on the northeast corner of the park. They have a surprising number of books and an unsurprising number of leftist propaganda. 

I did enjoy that they created their own library stamps, however.

Also very relieved to have found this among all the other books.

Pookies!

You see what I mean by glass monstrosities? Look at that thing going up in the background.

I hear that OWS is also planning to shut down the NYSE for its 2-month anniversary on the 17th. I'd love to be there, but that's a Thursday morning. A girl has gotta work...

Since I've got nothing else to flesh out this post with, I've stuck a bunch of photos I have sitting on my hard drive of when I went to the rally in Times Square. It was really quite an experience, and I'm kind of disappointed they stopped trying to hold events like this on the weekends. I'm not sure what happened (maybe a change of strategy?), but there were so many people there that I'm surprised OWS hasn't tried to do it again.

Oh Canada...

Umm, that's supposed to be a helicopter

Taking back TS from the tourists. I passed by one girl on her phone who kept saying, "There are all these fucking people out here. I hate them!" Don't worry, I hate you too.

Once the ranks of the protesters really started to expand, the police did their best to direct and limit foot traffic at certain streets and entrance ways to Times Square. I wanted to see how far up the protests went (I started my day at 42nd St and make my way north), but once I hit 46th street, the cops funneled us away from Times Square and weren't allowing anyone to enter the protests via 46th. I'd already been out in the street 3+ hours at this point, so I figured I may as well start heading home. But along the way we saw the scene above (sorry, really blurry, but everyone was moving and my camera isn't so great at picking up things in the dark) where a group of protesters had been penned in against a way by a ring of cops in riot gear. The White Shirts were standing on the outside of the melee, yelling at us to keep moving and to mind our own business. Of course, everyone is well equipped with recording devices, so people were stopping to take video and pictures. I'm still not sure what these people did, but seriously, seeing all the riot cops for an event that was very peaceful considering its numbers is kind of alarming. This is all we are to you, huh? A problem to be controlled?

Anyway, that's about all the effort I'm willing to expend on this. I'm trying to think of better ideas for this blog, but clearly I am having growing pains. But look! Fun GIFs for you!