penfield | Crossing the Stream of Consciousness

"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Random observations and other miscellany:

It is bloody freezing outside today. Or so I suspect. My tenderloins are still thawing out after yesterday, when J. and I wandered around downtown Silver Spring looking at potential neighborhoods. I haven't actually left my building yet today, but I can hear the wind slamming against the window panes of my apartment, like a howling ghost begging to be let inside because its #@&%ing cold outside. It makes me feel a little soft, given that I grew up in Western New York, America's climatological answer to Siberia. Since I moved away from my hometown nearly a decade ago, my blood has warmed to the point where I actually get chilly at 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Thirty degrees! That used to be barbeque weather. Now I just want to stay inside and eat soup. Maybe that's why...

I never play football anymore. It used to be that Sunday pickup football games were like a spiritual obligation. Of course, that started when I was 25 and not only somewhat immune to the elements but also reasonably quick and shifty. At first, since I was joining a weekly game that had already been a neighborhood tradition for decades, I was commonly tasked with "blocking," which in pickup terms is basically the crappy assignment to guys that can't be trusted with actually touching the ball. For a year I attempted to prove myself by doing little more than absorbing mild physical battery. After a while the other guys started to consider me as an actual offensive weapon, and for the few years after that I was a relative star. But then a few things happened: I became fussier about the weather, declining to play not only in cold weather but snowy weather, hot weather or wet weather; my fellow players started getting younger, meaning that I wasn't the fastest guy on the field anymore; and I settled down with a girlfriend, making me both busier and fatter. For the past couple of years I could feel myself slowing down and enjoying the game less. I've only been on the field once this season, and while I sort of had the itch to play today, I didn't want to risk getting hurt or getting sick, especially not right before ...

I go on vacation this week. That's a funny word, when you think about it: literally, when you go on vacation you are vacating something or someplace, i.e. getting the hell out of town so fast that you leave an empty space where you used to be. For Christmas this year J and I are meeting my grandparents, my parents and my brother and his fiancee in Las Vegas. My hope is that it will be at least a little warmer there, although apparently they had up to six inches of snow in Las Vegas last week. Snow in Las Vegas. Global warming, my ass. At any rate, I am looking forward to the vacation time and the family time -- even if those two things sound like mutually exclusive concepts. I briefly considered taking the week off from this journal, as well, but dismissed the notion since I only have two more weeks before this year-long experiment is over. It would be silly to come this far and not finish out the year strong. It will be enough for me to vacate my office for a little while, since ...

Work is driving me bananas. December -- and the whole post-election season, really -- is supposed to be a quiet time, divided between holiday parties and those mindless housekeeping jobs that always end up on the back burner during the congressional session. But this has been an unusual year, what with the economic meltdown, administrative transition and legislative hand-wringing, and we are still hip-deep in policy wonkery. January is already shaping up to be one long headache. So I have that freight train coming at me. The last thing I needed was static from my boss about our office's holiday card. Last year I came up with a fun, creative concept, and the pressure was on to at least approach that level of creativity in 2008. So I wrote what I thought was a fairly clever poem, bemoaning our current financial quagmire but expressing optimism for the year ahead. BossMan liked the poem, but felt the need to "make a few tweaks." These "tweaks" included lawyerly fine-tuning of the language, as if the verse represented some kind of official policy memorandum. This, of course, totally messed with my rhythm and rhyme scheme, which for a poet is like crumpling it up and using it as toilet paper. The final product required extensive, delicate negotiations with a guy who basically holds my entire livelihood in his hands, taking time that could have been better spent picking my nose. But I'll say this for work: at least ...

They gave me a brand-new Blackberry. And when I say "brand-new," I don't mean that it's just new to me. I mean that they gave me a Blackberry Storm, the just-released top-of-the-line new-fangled next-big-thing in the world of mobile communications. As I told my friend

dl004d, going from the Blackberry RIM 7950 to the Blackberry Storm is like going from a Ford Pinto to the Milennium Falcon. When I explained to dl004d -- who is so technology-forward that he's already on the waiting list to have the forthcoming Blackberry Lobe implanted directly into his brain -- that I wasn't even sure if I'd need my cell phone anymore, he scoffed. (At the concept of a "cell phone," I guess. I'm not really sure.) The point is, this is some brave new shit I'm dealing with here. I remain a little uneasy with the idea of a work-issued Blackberry, thinking of it as a shiny electronic Lojack. The irony is, the sheer number of features on this new item will make it practically impossible for me to sit attentively in a meeting ever again. I only wish I could have imported my BrickBreaker high score.