this is my 23rd birthday – wednesday, october 31, 2007

the day starts at when my alarm goes off at 6:30 am. i should be out of bed before seven, but most days that rarely happens. i am really not a morning person. and i happen to be a multiple snooze button offender.

i walk downstairs to find my room mate in the bathroom (note the closed door).

so i use this time to start making my lunch. good old pb&j on wheat. yep. same lunch for how many years now?

nino’s out of the bathroom, so in i head to shower. this is me pre-shower.

post shower with the traditional teeth brushing photograph.

i get back upstairs and open my computer. to which i find a lot of facebook messages greeting me (thanks guys! ♥) i don’t read any of them because then i would never leave. the chat window is my mother, the person i chat with most often. note the time, this means i’m running late especially because i still have to get dressed.

so even though it’s halloween, the whole working in an office not conducive to halloween costumes. so, i decided to wear my normal i feel like liz lemmon outfit. not the definitely bi-curious shoes.

downstairs time check. on time would mean leaving at 7:45. i throw the rest of my lunch together and take off.

i walk down to the corner, which is broadway. i would tell you it doesn’t give me a small thrill to live off broadway, even this far up and away from times square. but i would be lying.

so it’s a solid fifteen to twenty minute walk to the subway stop, but a five minute bus ride and the bus comes every five to ten minutes. and i have an unlimited monthly metro card. so i walk pretty much never.

get on the 1 at 242.

and i settle in with book and ipod for the ride.

after transferring to the A line at 168th i get off the subway at columbus circle. these are the stairs of doom at columbus circle. in the mornings the up escalator is too full of people, so i take the stairs, and feel a little like rocky.

up the stairs and off into the city.

time check after getting out of the subway. this means i’ll probably be about ten minutes late but i try to hurry. which involves walking to 57th and getting on the n/r/w.

get off at 60th and 3rd ave, and walk over to 61st and 1st.

ah work.

time check outside the elevators. yep. fifteen minutes late.

mm. morning coffee. elixir of life. thank god the office provides coffee.

drinking the coffee back at the desk and checking my work email in the morning.

after i check my work email, i check in with the really important stuff. like lj/sb (a message board) to make sure nothing earth shattering has happened while i was commuting. (cough:offical gypsy announcement:cough)

lunch time. i mostly just eat lunch at my desk, because then i make them pay me for 8 hours instead of 7. good. and my mom sent me that sandwich container, yep one of those i used to take in high school.

a card and doughnuts for my birthday from the office. yay!

my productivity drops dramatically after lunch. so it’s time to break out the google reader.

five o’clock. i change, walk back to 3rd. and get on the n/r/w.

get off at 49th. obligatory walking through times square shot.

i meet up with some friends in a starbucks. this involves some crazy lady who thinks i’m a tourist because of my camera.

time check.

i walk up to columbus circle to get on the A. i love columbus circle at night.

uptown and the bronx. the local is really local but thank god the express is amazingly express. 59th to 125th.

transferring to the 1 at 168th.

end up finding nino at the bus stop which was weird. then it’s back to home sweet home. the stairs to apt. 3.

we break out the wine and there’s my computer in the kitchen.

and i cook myself some pasta.

nino is really excited about the wine.

gifts from my mom opened. i talk with some more people on the phone.

mini room tour – that’s my bed. an air mattress borrowed from my grandmother.

and my desk area. that desk is more like a table, but it was sitting in my closet when i moved in, so i have appropriated it for use.

a close up of my bulletin board, which i have nicknamed ‘the why i work board.’ (2 sets of tickets to next to normal, cirque du soleil tickets [which i did not buy, they were a birthday gift] and an iou from my parents for a bed.)

and then it’s time for bed. at this point our heat had not been turned on, so i’m wearing my big ‘grey gardens’ hoodie i got at the broadway flea market.

however i was prompted to do buy these books in part because i have reached an interesting point; i am currently chapters away from finishing two books, the time traveler’s wife and the patron saint of liars.

i can not bear to bring myself to finish either of them, because once that happens they will both be over. i’m in love with the time traveler’s wife for many reasons. (henry is quickly moving up the ranks of favorite fictional boyfriends) and not finishing it allows me to savor it, keep it with me, and most importantly i would be crushed if it ended badly. normally i read very quickly, especially when i am enjoying something, and it’s not uncommon for me to blow through an two hundred page novel in two or three hours.  so maybe this is in compensation for that. and i want the characters to stay suspended as they are.

i’m not as in love with the patron st. of liars, but i like it. and i like ann patchett’s writing so much. i know that when i finish it there will be one less ann patchett book i have not read, and that saddens me greatly. as much as i love rereading it’s nothing like your first time. also why i have not even purchased her latest book, i’m going to try and hold out until i really need it.

the room mate thinks i am nuts. she’s even threatened to read both of them and spoil the endings for me. luckily i read much faster than her, and she has other books to keep her occupied.

does anyone else feel this way? or does the cheese stand alone?

seems to be a valid question, if you are protesting the legality of abortion. yet notice how none of these people have thought their position through. seriously no one. never took it to the next step. this almost gets embarrassing after a while. almost.

they have taken how they feel about abortion and extrapolated, and this blatantly illustrates that many of them are really concerned about religious issues / moral issues.

one of the many things the pro-choice movement seems powerless in doing on a larger scale is controlling the debate. and demonstrating that moral descisions are different from legal ones. which if it wasn’t obvious before, becomes pretty obvious after watching the video.

remember how i love her writing more than life? and i think she’s amazing?

i was just reading the new york times review of her new book, and i was thinking to myself – i wonder if she is doing a book tour – so i go to check her website and bam. thursday night 7:30.

does anyone want to go with me? aka does anyone else love her as much and will be in the area? i don’t even know what she will be doing, but i assume maybe reading, answering questions and signing maybe? i don’t even know what i would say to her, clearly babble something at her like an idiot. but clearly, i’m going.

i actually got to the second to last chapter and stopped for a bit. i didn’t want it to end. i just wanted the leave the characters there, where they were. but then i had to finish it and know how it ended.

i love ann patchett eternally now. she has won my love. i would follow her to the ends of the earth i think.

it made me want to go listen to opera. but also the way she describes the opera is pretty much the same way i feel about amazing musical theater singers. it’s the same sort of beauty i think.

i do have this one paragraph which keeps haunting me, which could also be subtitled break my heart ann patchett;

her skin, the night, the grass, to be outside and then to be inside carmen.

he doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this. at the very moment he could have been taking her far away, he is pulling her closer. her hair is tangled around his neck. on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more. his fingers slip into the soft indentations between her ribs, the delicate gullies carved out by hunger. he feels her teeth, takes her tounge. carmen, carmen, carmen, carmen.

in the future, he will try and say her name enough, but he never can.

so last friday at the strand when i couldn’t find any of the books i was looking for, i happened upon a copy of on beauty, which while researching new books to read on amazon, i had come across the reviews for. all of the reviews i read on the book were amazing, although senior year of high school i had tried to read her other book, white teeth and got no where fast.

i’m glad i decided to give zadie smith another shot. everything that’s written about how amazing she is? fully deserved. the book is amazing and heartbreaking without necessarily being about anything in particular – it follows a family and as one review put it “one hell of a mid-life crisis.” the plot is secondary to her descriptions of these characters interacting with each other.

like every other page there was an amazing description of someone or something, which you hadn’t thought about that way before but is absolutely true, often with such unforgiving truth you wince. there is plenty about beauty of course, but there’s also a lot about love.

my favorite line, hands down bar none, and one that has stuck with me since reading it:

time is how you spend your love.

one of those things i’ve always felt to be true, but seemed incapable of fully expressing or articulating. something i tried at length to explain to one of my ex-boyfriends, and several friends who are bad about returning phone calls or emails.

the best way to express love is through time. it’s an attitude and approach i learned from my mother, to be honest. who every once in a while will as she says “just calling all the people i love.” this list is short and has included since i can remember, my father (though since he’s normally home it’s not much of a phone call) me, my brothers, her sister, and her parents. it’s the same mother who also always calls me when she is pumping gas at kroger’s because for some reason she always thinks of me there. she also sent me a card a day my freshman year of college, and a healthy amount the rest of the time. clearly there are degrees, and not everyone you love or care about has to receive that much of your time. but in the end time is how you spend your love.

- ann patchett, truth & beauty.

c did this program at smith over j-term, and they read this book. she was telling us about it. and probably cause i was the most receptive / thought i might actually read it, she gave me her copy and told me to read it. this is when i was up to my eye balls in thesis / regular course readings. and it sat on top of my fridge for a month or two, then got packed with the rest of my books. nino had requested some books, so when i was in ct i routed through my grandmother’s attic (aka my storage space), this book was sitting on top of some other ones and i grabbed it thinking i needed commuting books anyway. i started it this morning on the train. and it has consumed my day.

that quote has haunted me all day, mainly because it’s so beautiful and true.

it was also an interesting book to read while starting your first day at a job you need desperately to pay the bills but is painfully clear you are over qualified for. especially before they sort of “make it” – the narrator is working as a waitress and living with her mother. and talking about keeping her desire to write going. and it’s so damn palpable. i tried to read bel canto two summers ago and could never get started, but i love her writing so much here, maybe i will try again. and now j has recommended it to me and confirmed the hard to start beautiful at the end diagnosis.

i will end with one of my other favorite quotes from the book:

lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. if she emptied out grand central station and filled it with people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there. but a hundred people in such a huge space just rattle around…you could pack in thousands and thousands more people, and still it wouldn’t feel full, not full enough to take up every square inch of her loneliness. lucy thought that all she needed was one person, the right person, and all the empty space would be taken away from her. but there was no one in the world who was big enough for that.

(i originally wrote this on 8.06.07 but i’m reposting here pretty much entirely. hence the first day of work reference)

this is an on-going list of the books i’ve read since july ’07 [the approximate time i started working.] other book related thoughts will get their own posts as we go.

1. dune.
2. the fountainhead.
3. truth and beauty.
4. on beauty.
5. bel canto.
6. a man without a country.

and finally…a new yorker.