Today is Black Friday, but it is also Buy Nothing Day, an initiative against any shopping whatsoever. In years past, I didn't really spend any money on Black Friday, and I felt sort of proud of that, even if I wasn't intentionally aligning myself with the more proactive supporters of the shopping moratorium.
This year, however, Guitar Center, that (un)friendly neighborhood behemoth of a musical instrument retail store, did me in. Those calculating fiends! They sent me a 20%-off-any-one-item coupon in the mail, as if knowing that I'd been eying that new Electro Harmonix stompbox. Plus, they made the coupon valid for two hours only, between 8:00 and 10:00 this very morning.
So I woke at 9:00, rushed out to Guitar Center on 14th Street, and bought. I bought! For the first time in years, I bought something on Black Friday. And you know what? I can now make my guitar sound like an organ. Some things are worth getting up at nine on a holiday.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
So long, and thanks for all the turkey
Today is Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday that, to the outsider, appears to celebrate the deliciousness of turkey. In reality, it celebrates gluttony, the four-day weekend, and pre-Christmas shopping. Or something like that.
In keeping with recent tradition, we hightailed it to central New Jersey to have a Thanksgiving meal with Sarah's family. This year, due to my new interest in football, I actually enjoyed watching the Thanksgiving Day football game on Fox, in which the Green Bay Packers beat the Detroit Lions. Brett Favre was not the first football player I'd heard of while growing up in Malaysia (a gentler land where "football" means soccer and American football is about as popular as getting punched in the face). But Brett Favre and the Packers won the Superbowl the year I came to the United States, so his name is, to me, synonymous with Americana. Favre is 38 years old now. He's still the starting quarterback for the Packers. It's actually sort of amazing.
Here's the other thing about Thanksgiving: it's the day before Black Friday, ostensibly the biggest shopping day of the year. Today, apart from the areas surrounding the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Manhattan was a ghost town, the calm before the storm. Tomorrow, I expect pandemonium.
In keeping with recent tradition, we hightailed it to central New Jersey to have a Thanksgiving meal with Sarah's family. This year, due to my new interest in football, I actually enjoyed watching the Thanksgiving Day football game on Fox, in which the Green Bay Packers beat the Detroit Lions. Brett Favre was not the first football player I'd heard of while growing up in Malaysia (a gentler land where "football" means soccer and American football is about as popular as getting punched in the face). But Brett Favre and the Packers won the Superbowl the year I came to the United States, so his name is, to me, synonymous with Americana. Favre is 38 years old now. He's still the starting quarterback for the Packers. It's actually sort of amazing.
Here's the other thing about Thanksgiving: it's the day before Black Friday, ostensibly the biggest shopping day of the year. Today, apart from the areas surrounding the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Manhattan was a ghost town, the calm before the storm. Tomorrow, I expect pandemonium.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Goals, or lack thereof
Today I played my first football (soccer) game in a long time. In fact, today was the first time I did any sort of significant exercise in a long time. I know I wrote a few days ago that I was going to begin running, but in reality, my first run was immediately prior to the soccer game -- I would have been late to the game, so I ran nine blocks through Chinatown to get to the park.
The game was a blowout, and not in our favor. I was reduced to a stumbling, panting mess, which sort of meant that my team (comprised of my co-workers) was playing one man down. Granted, our opponents were large and skilled. Okay, they weren't that large, but they were swift and adroit with the ball. Still, a part of me is refusing to make that an excuse. The fact is that I'm dreadfully out of shape, and I need to do something about it.
So, my first goal is to be able to jog twenty minutes straight without having that, you know, dying feeling. I realize twenty minutes is hardly worth cheering, but I'm taking small steps here. Besides, having run frequently in high school, I realize that the leap from twenty minutes to, say, forty minutes is exponential. That was true when I was 16, at least.
And my second goal is to avoid being an embarrassment to my co-workers on the field. This, I suspect, will be harder to accomplish.
The game was a blowout, and not in our favor. I was reduced to a stumbling, panting mess, which sort of meant that my team (comprised of my co-workers) was playing one man down. Granted, our opponents were large and skilled. Okay, they weren't that large, but they were swift and adroit with the ball. Still, a part of me is refusing to make that an excuse. The fact is that I'm dreadfully out of shape, and I need to do something about it.
So, my first goal is to be able to jog twenty minutes straight without having that, you know, dying feeling. I realize twenty minutes is hardly worth cheering, but I'm taking small steps here. Besides, having run frequently in high school, I realize that the leap from twenty minutes to, say, forty minutes is exponential. That was true when I was 16, at least.
And my second goal is to avoid being an embarrassment to my co-workers on the field. This, I suspect, will be harder to accomplish.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The running man
For the first time since high school, I'm seriously and soberly attempting to engage in some form of consistent exercise. You have to be motivated to find proper places to exercise in the middle of Manhattan, and joining a gym is an extravagance for me at this point. So I've done two things: I bought a proper pair of running shoes and will begin running outdoors, and I joined my office's league soccer team.
I've been living in sloth for the last few years; my only exercise used to consist of walking to and from work, and walking up and down the four flights of stairs in my apartment building. I don't have any serious health problems, but I did have to see a doctor earlier this year for a condition at least partially caused by lack of mobility and circulation.
So what's it like to run in NYC? Um, I'll write about it when I actually get around to it, but I will say this: New York is a runner's city (Runner's World magazine apparently rated it the third best American city for running, according to this site). This year's New York City Marathon was run merely eleven days ago, and yet I still see runners tearing up the sidewalk at all times of the day, and in all kinds of weather. The fools. The healthy fools.
I've been living in sloth for the last few years; my only exercise used to consist of walking to and from work, and walking up and down the four flights of stairs in my apartment building. I don't have any serious health problems, but I did have to see a doctor earlier this year for a condition at least partially caused by lack of mobility and circulation.
So what's it like to run in NYC? Um, I'll write about it when I actually get around to it, but I will say this: New York is a runner's city (Runner's World magazine apparently rated it the third best American city for running, according to this site). This year's New York City Marathon was run merely eleven days ago, and yet I still see runners tearing up the sidewalk at all times of the day, and in all kinds of weather. The fools. The healthy fools.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Smell thy neighbor
I lived in an apartment building for the first three years of my life (back in Malaysia, where apartments are better known as flats). Then my parents bought a house, and suddenly we had a front yard where my brother and I could play with the garden hose on a hot afternoon, and a backyard where we grew mangoes and limes and four-angled beans. I lived in that house until I went to college.
Now, I live in an apartment again -- one about 12,000 miles away from where I grew up. And I wish I could remember what it was like to live in an apartment in Malaysia. Here's what it's like living in an apartment building in New York:
I never speak to my neighbors. In fact, I barely ever see my neighbors. New Yorkers are intensely private people, especially the twenty-something single ones, and getting to know your neighbor is pointless and inconvenient for the most part. There are some exceptions; I hear stories of summer cookouts on the roof of some apartments, and the whole building is invited. But for the most part, apartment living in NYC is characterized by isolation, punctuated by polite nods and hasty hello's as neighbors pass each other on the stairs.
The funny thing about living in an apartment is this: there are some things you just can't hide from people. My neighbors can conceal their faces, but they can't hide their odors. Since I live on the top floor of an elevator-less building, I have to walk past every door of every apartment. I made mental notes on my way up from work today. This is what each floor smells like:
1st Floor - hint of bleach, but very slight
2nd Floor - rotten cabbage
3rd Floor - something medicinal, like Chinese herbal tea
4th Floor - cooked carrots
5th Floor (my floor) - almost odorless
I could make this an ongoing series and report these odors daily, but the truth is the fourth floor always smells like cooked carrots.
Now, I live in an apartment again -- one about 12,000 miles away from where I grew up. And I wish I could remember what it was like to live in an apartment in Malaysia. Here's what it's like living in an apartment building in New York:
I never speak to my neighbors. In fact, I barely ever see my neighbors. New Yorkers are intensely private people, especially the twenty-something single ones, and getting to know your neighbor is pointless and inconvenient for the most part. There are some exceptions; I hear stories of summer cookouts on the roof of some apartments, and the whole building is invited. But for the most part, apartment living in NYC is characterized by isolation, punctuated by polite nods and hasty hello's as neighbors pass each other on the stairs.
The funny thing about living in an apartment is this: there are some things you just can't hide from people. My neighbors can conceal their faces, but they can't hide their odors. Since I live on the top floor of an elevator-less building, I have to walk past every door of every apartment. I made mental notes on my way up from work today. This is what each floor smells like:
1st Floor - hint of bleach, but very slight
2nd Floor - rotten cabbage
3rd Floor - something medicinal, like Chinese herbal tea
4th Floor - cooked carrots
5th Floor (my floor) - almost odorless
I could make this an ongoing series and report these odors daily, but the truth is the fourth floor always smells like cooked carrots.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Playing catch-up
Whaddaya know -- it's been three months since I started this blog, so I'm already a quarter of the way through my final year in New York City. Since I haven't written in a while (due to a confluence of factors as varied as cold weather, professional sports, and long work hours), here's a rundown of what's been happening in the last two weeks, starting with the most recent.
Friday, November 2: It's amazing how you can ignore certain things that are right under your nose. There's a restaurant just down the street from our apartment called The Kitchen Club, a cozy-looking corner joint that always looked a little too old and stuffy for our liking. But Sarah (who I'll begin to referring to as Sarah the Wife, unless she tells me not to) went there a couple of weeks ago and loved it! So we went back this Friday and everything was delicious, especially the duck-and-ginger dumpling appetizer. Unlike virtually every restaurant I've been to, the food at the Kitchen Club is under-seasoned, which delighted me to no end. One of my pet peeves is over-salted food, which I complained about in my entry on Babbo.
Tuesday and Wednesday, October 30-31: Halloween in New York is wild. For example, on my way to work on Wednesday, I walked by a woman dressed as a squid, talking nonchalantly to her friend, who was dressed in plainclothes. By then, I'd sort of had enough with Halloween, because the night before, the company had our annual Halloween Party, which, among other things, is an excuse to get drunk on a weeknight and then partake in what is simultaneously the best and the worst cultural activity in modern society: karaoke. But before things devolved so, I and four co-workers had to judge the group costume contest. Let's just say that the winning team beat out all others by sheer audacity and humor, in an NC-17 kind of way.
Thursday, October 25: I attended Black Ball 2007, a fundraising event held annually to honor people who've done significant work to battle AIDS and its effects in Africa. The only reason I got to go was because Anomaly does pro bono design and promotional work for Keep A Child Alive, the organizer of the event. I was not, unfortunately, one of the select few offered a seat at the $10,000-a-plate table, eating Korean spare-ribs just a few feet away from the likes of Bono, Gwen Stefani and Jay-Z. Most of us from the company were banished to the upstairs cocktail area, where we watched Alicia Keys duet with Sheryl Crow on stage, and reduced the open bar to their last bottle of vodka. But the real thrill was listening to Bono's speech, during which he imagined a world where a person's survival isn't dependent on where he is born. After five minutes listening to the guy, I understood his ability to sway rulers and rockers, policy-makers and proletariat: there is no discernible pretense in him.
Postscript: On the same night I was serenaded by Alicia Keys, Sarah the Wife bumped into celebrity chef Bobby Flay at a book signing, which explains why I now have a signed copy of Mesa Grill Cookbook. This was one ridiculous night.
Thursday, October 25: I had a long conversation with a cab driver. For the duration of my trip, which was between Madison Square Garden and my apartment at the corner of Mott and Houston, his meter refused to work, a consequence of those newfangled GPS systems that cabbies are now required to install. The broken meter was of no concern to me -- I'm well familiar with the route and his estimation of the fare was exactly what I'd had in mind. We chatted about the cabbie strike, and then about where he was from (El Salvador) and whether or not it was still lucrative to drive a cab in New York (it is decidedly not, due to higher maintenance and gas prices and stagnant ridership). He was the second cabbie I'd spoken to in two weeks who was seriously thinking about leaving New York and returning to his native country, which made me sort of sad. I tipped him extra.
Friday, November 2: It's amazing how you can ignore certain things that are right under your nose. There's a restaurant just down the street from our apartment called The Kitchen Club, a cozy-looking corner joint that always looked a little too old and stuffy for our liking. But Sarah (who I'll begin to referring to as Sarah the Wife, unless she tells me not to) went there a couple of weeks ago and loved it! So we went back this Friday and everything was delicious, especially the duck-and-ginger dumpling appetizer. Unlike virtually every restaurant I've been to, the food at the Kitchen Club is under-seasoned, which delighted me to no end. One of my pet peeves is over-salted food, which I complained about in my entry on Babbo.
Tuesday and Wednesday, October 30-31: Halloween in New York is wild. For example, on my way to work on Wednesday, I walked by a woman dressed as a squid, talking nonchalantly to her friend, who was dressed in plainclothes. By then, I'd sort of had enough with Halloween, because the night before, the company had our annual Halloween Party, which, among other things, is an excuse to get drunk on a weeknight and then partake in what is simultaneously the best and the worst cultural activity in modern society: karaoke. But before things devolved so, I and four co-workers had to judge the group costume contest. Let's just say that the winning team beat out all others by sheer audacity and humor, in an NC-17 kind of way.
Thursday, October 25: I attended Black Ball 2007, a fundraising event held annually to honor people who've done significant work to battle AIDS and its effects in Africa. The only reason I got to go was because Anomaly does pro bono design and promotional work for Keep A Child Alive, the organizer of the event. I was not, unfortunately, one of the select few offered a seat at the $10,000-a-plate table, eating Korean spare-ribs just a few feet away from the likes of Bono, Gwen Stefani and Jay-Z. Most of us from the company were banished to the upstairs cocktail area, where we watched Alicia Keys duet with Sheryl Crow on stage, and reduced the open bar to their last bottle of vodka. But the real thrill was listening to Bono's speech, during which he imagined a world where a person's survival isn't dependent on where he is born. After five minutes listening to the guy, I understood his ability to sway rulers and rockers, policy-makers and proletariat: there is no discernible pretense in him.
Postscript: On the same night I was serenaded by Alicia Keys, Sarah the Wife bumped into celebrity chef Bobby Flay at a book signing, which explains why I now have a signed copy of Mesa Grill Cookbook. This was one ridiculous night.
Thursday, October 25: I had a long conversation with a cab driver. For the duration of my trip, which was between Madison Square Garden and my apartment at the corner of Mott and Houston, his meter refused to work, a consequence of those newfangled GPS systems that cabbies are now required to install. The broken meter was of no concern to me -- I'm well familiar with the route and his estimation of the fare was exactly what I'd had in mind. We chatted about the cabbie strike, and then about where he was from (El Salvador) and whether or not it was still lucrative to drive a cab in New York (it is decidedly not, due to higher maintenance and gas prices and stagnant ridership). He was the second cabbie I'd spoken to in two weeks who was seriously thinking about leaving New York and returning to his native country, which made me sort of sad. I tipped him extra.
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