Story Ideas from the Subconscious

Here's what was in my head this morning when I woke up:

• All the animals decide that the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics is their ideal platform to finally tell humanity to cut the crap.  They elect a single mare (named Winnie) to be their representative, and focus their willpower to grant her the power of speech for fifteen minutes.  During the ceremony, as planned, she breaks from the parade, shrugs off her rider, and walks up to the stands to address the stadium crowd and the viewers at home.  Everyone is impressed with the sophistication of what they think is an animatronic horse, and the animals' message to humanity is lost in a series of tweets and talking heads raving about Russian showmanship.
• A famed architect has developed a method of finding the living spirit of a building by building a model of it out of dried straw, which he then converses with.  
• The military convoy has gotten caught in a severe blizzard, and the soldiers have to find a way to survive in the frozen wastes for several days.

- D.

The 1 and Only

Like all epic quests of yore,
here is a map of the territory.

Normally, when I have business on the East Side, I park uptown around 116th and Lexington and take the 6 downtown.  Makes getting in and out quick and painless.  Yesterday, though, traffic across the GWB was slow and I felt like parking on the Upper West Side instead.  It's right around Columbia and I simply like the neighborhood better, and at the back of my mind was the possibility that we would grab dinner in the city and the area around 110th street and Broadway is packed to burstin' with great, diverse and not-too-pricey restaurants.

Of course, that complicates getting to the East Side, normally, with lots of transfers and adding a lot of time to your trip.  But we were meeting just east of Central Park (60th and Madison, to be exact), which is also right at the southern end of the park.  And there's a crosstown train right there, that you can conveniently pick up at Columbus Circle and 59th.  But I made great time coming in, and decided to simply walk from the Columbus Circle stop across town.  And it was lovely.

I met up with Yesenia, and on the way back, I asked if she wanted to walk back across town to get on the 1, or take the subway.  She opted for the walk.  And it was also lovely.

We got to the 1 at Columbus Circle around 4:30, so rush hour was just moving to full throng.  But we got on the train right away, and it was a partial express, up to 72nd.  Wonderful!  We'll be back at the car by 5:00, and home by 6:00 (if we don't eat in Manhattan, that is).

The train pulls in to 72nd street, and here's where the plan derails.  Not the train, of course - the train stays on the tracks.  It's just that it stops working and will not leave the station.  The doors close, the doors open.  They close, they open.

Pause.

Close, open.

Close, open.

The conductor, with increasing agitation after each series of attempts, calls on the P.A. for some unknown persons at the back of the train to stand clear of the doors.

The train, already packed full when we pulled into the station, keeps getting somehow even tighter as the train sits in the station.  The minutes pass, five, six.  Then, the conductor, again:

"This train is out of service.  THIS TRAIN is OUT of SERVICE!  All riders must exit the train.  RIDERS EXIT THE TRAIN!"

We move as one out to the platform.  It's the only way we actually can move, we're all packed so tightly together.  Yesenia and I and thousands of other riders wait outside the now empty train.  Inside, a pissed MTA employee strides the entire length of the train, checking (I presume) for stragglers.

A couple of more minutes pass.  Then the automated station announcer:

"The. Next.  Uptown.  One train.  Will arrive in.  Twenty-five.  Minutes."

The entire crowd groans.  Yesenia has had enough, and starts up the stairs.  I follow, trying to discuss a plan with her.  "We're not getting a cab," I point out, "I don't mean that I'm opposed to taking a cab, it means that there's no way we're going to be able to flag one, now."

Yesenia: "How about the bus?"

"It's about the same speed as walking."

"We can walk."

"Fine with me."

We climb up to Broadway and proceed to walk the forty-three blocks to the garage.  Slushy lakes ring small mountains of dirty snow at every crosswalk.  Night has fallen.  And it's a forced march, rather than a lark.  I have not had anything to eat all day, except a cup of tea about ten hours earlier.  It is most definitely not lovely.

Every ten blocks, I call out the number of blocks remaining.  We hold hands.  Well, our gloves cling to each other with our hands inside.   We discuss dinner options.  Eat uptown?  Get pizza up in Rockland?  A few balloons are floated, but the pizza option is the mutually agreed upon conclusion.

About an hour later - after pausing at a favorite bakery to pick up some dessert carbs - we reach the garage.  It's another ten minutes there, while the lone employee deals with five customers and moves all the cars himself.

Surprisingly, after all that, at least the drive home is pretty quick.  And we discover that well-earned pizza is pizza that tastes good.

D.

The Illicit Rambler

Very VERY slow day at work today, as about 70% of the department opted to work from home, today. Which option sounds quite nice, but since I live about five minutes from the office, I felt that if anyone should be in-house in case an emergency design situation arose, it might as well be me.  But since the work is so thin, I'm sneaking a little time for a Rambler.  Such a rebel!

BTW: I can't imagine a more first-world 'problem' than an emergency design situation, but they seem to happen with depressing frequency in every industry I've worked in, and always seem to have life-and-death level impact for those that come running to you with them, creative brief held aloft in one hand, flaming like an Olympic torch.  And the sweat they're covered in?  Flop sweat, of course.

Anyway^®, working from home would be wonderful, especially since Yesenia is also working from home today and the idea of both of us sitting on the couch by the fire firing off emails and tweaking code is almost painful to contemplate in light of where I'm actually sitting.  Which is a cube.  Under fluorescent lights.   Also a first-world problem, but you can still feel sorry for me.

D.

Teeny Tiny

Let me tell you what this ongoing cold weather has done to me: I'm composing tonight's Rambler on my iPhone.  Which is a first.  And the reason I'm putting up with the insane tedium of typing long form on my iPhone?  Because I don't want to get out of the tub.  That's right, I'm rambling to you live from the bath.  Which is also a first.

Hey, that's two firsts in one post!  Impressive, no?

As a side note, for those out there who (like me) are attempting to knock off the winter weight?  Don't eat Mexican food.  It's the food where all the calories from all the other healthier, leaner foods go.  They do it just to go somewhere they feel wanted.

All right.  Time to de-tub and get in that bed, now that Yesenia's gotten it all warm.  If only there were a way to go instantly from the bath to bed, without the steps in between that will lower my body temperature.  Someone smart should get on that.

D.

Infinite Recursion

For today's entry, I'm going to direct you to an appreciation I wrote about Dave Sim and his comic masterwork, Cerebus.  Since there's a chance that people reading that may come here, feel free to stroll around and also to visit my very outdated website at www.copper-man.net.  It's all part of my ongoing attempts to break the internet by creating an unending link-loop.

D.

Up Jumped the Devil in a White Nightgown

And BOOM, the whole place gets hit with snow and ice and it's crazy, crazy cold.  I'm of two minds about winter - fashion-wise, I love me some sweaters and I like when the weather agrees that it's a good time to wear one.  On the other hand O MY GOD IT'S FUCKING COLD.

Well, that sort of makes it sound like I don't like the cold.  I do, actually - I love being outside on cold, brisk days.  The white, heatless sun in the crystal blue sky, the overwhelming silence that is like no other season.  But I like winter to stay outside, and when it's as cold as it's been for as long as it's been, the house gets quite chilly.

I mean, of course it does - it's a 90 year old lathing and plaster job with no insulation in most of the outside walls.  But there's a deep set chill in some rooms that's kind of alarming.  I've taken to calling the first floor bathroom 'The Ice Cave', and it's not much of a surprise, as it's a small outside room with no heat and the entire wall given over to a window.  During the first half of the cold snap, the faucets actually froze shut.  I do not kid.

So all I want to do on nights like this is get into bed at 7:00 PM and stay under the covers for the next fourteen hours.  At least there's one great thing - when I renovated the master bedroom, I added insulation, and now it's not just the warmest room in the house, it's genuinely, actually warm by real-world standards. Naturally, the floor gets very cold, because it hangs over the front porch and there's nothing but cold air under there.  Because the house was built when people liked freezing their balls off.

D.

Stewed Air

I'm smack dab in the midst of the first real serious diet that I've done in about a decade.  It's going well (enough) - usually, the first ten pounds fall off pretty quickly, and then the next ten takes a little longer, and the last ten is basically like proving Zeno's Paradox with a bathroom scale.

Reading between the lines, there, I bet you can figure out the math - yes, I started this diet when the holiday season ended and I found myself about thirty pounds overweight.  What's especially annoying about finding myself on the north side of 200 pounds for the first time in about fifteen years is that back in June, I had hit 193 and I said (to Yesenia, but also apparently to some God of Irony), "Hey, I'm going to get down to 180!"

I did it wrong, though - rather than losing thirteen pounds in six months, I gained fifteen.  Oy.

So, now, the diet.  Which is going pretty well, thanks to the two factors of Yesenia (who is also dieting with me) and the startlingly excellent site/app "My Fitness Pal", which lets me be ridiculously obsessive about calories.  It's now not an uncommon event for me to log in my calories after dinner, and say, "Oh, I have to burn some!", and promptly head out the door for a half hour walk.

As I said, thus far, it's working.  The only problem with dieting in winter is that my body's native instinct is to eat as much as possible during these cold, dry and dreary months, along with sleeping and remaining as sessile as possible for as long as possible.

Well, at least there's plenty of snow to shovel for that cardiovascular workout.  Feel the burn.

D.