10/10/03 79 Friday Night's Pay Night Guys Fresh Out of Work
Just because I have to work tomorrow is no excuse to consider this Friday night a school night.  While I didn't stay out 'til dawn drinking Lowenbrau,  I did see "School of Rock" with the wife and ate some crappy food. Unfortunately, there was a pube in my popcorn. Oh well, the movie was good, a real crowd-pleaser.  I thought I had had my fill of Jack Black, but he was pretty entertaining. 

10/9/03 83 Looking Up
Yankees win, no centipedes. As it should be.

11:55pm addendum:  Just when a day almost slides by without any traumatic shit, I end up defeating a cockroach in a thrilling battle to the death as midnight approaches.  I want to add that our apartment is pretty clean and we have seen a grand total of about 8 bugs in two years here. Now two intruders in two days.  I grew up around cockroaches, but I never got used to the sickening little bastards.  Still, when one of these monsters violates the sanctity of your home and threatens your family, you just find strength.  You do superhuman things that you never could have imagined.  I can't explain it if you haven't been there.  Tonight, I grabbed a can of compressed air and flushed him out from under the fridge, then attempted to kick him with my sneakered foot. He escaped again, along a crack in the wall.  I applied the compressed air again and he eventually resurfaced, only to be crushed violently by a sugar box wielded by me.  As exhilarating as the final kill was, the episode has left me rattled and I think I will have to give this day an amended grade of 77.

10/7/03 74 Just a Day I'll forget within a week

10/6/03 82 Psycho Lady in the Elevator

There is a woman in my building who is out of her mind, creepy scary evil space monster whack job crazy.  About a year ago, before we realized she lived in our building (or perhaps before she moved in), my wife and I got in a physical confrontation with her on the street during which she swung a grocery bag at my wife and we got up in her face and it almost came to blows.  She was jam-packed with sarcastic barbs that always seemed to be frustratingly on point. She  is the worst person I have ever met, easily.  Anyway, it turns out she lives in our building, so now we run into her in the elevator about once a week.  She has no idea who we are; she probably wouldn't recognize her own government-experiment mutant parents.  So she will chat obnoxiously with us in the elevator as if we don't wish broken bones upon her.  When I say obnoxiously, I mean it -- I'm not one of those people who shies away from mindless elevator banter.  I like it.  ("What kind of dog is that?" "That's a nice bike." "Is it ever gonna stop raining?"  I eat that shit up.)  But this lady says stuff like, "You should pray to God it doesn't rain." You nod, and go, "Uh huh." Then she'll go, "No, I mean it.  You should pray to God.  Not that he's listening.  Or maybe he is."  Crazy ass crazy lady.  To quote Ethan Hawke, "Really crazy insane crazy." Anyway, tonight as we rode up and I tried not to punch her, she told me that she spent four and a half hours of our recent blackout stuck in that very same elevator.  That slice of information immediately lifted my day from a 66 or so to an 82.  She was still gabbing as I exited the elevator...she mentioned something about how she drank her own sweat to stay hydrated during the blackout, and she suggested I do the same if it ever happens to me.  OK, see ya, crazy lady.  Glad you got stuck in the elevator.  Hope you break all your toes tonight. 

10/5/03 85 A good weekend is any weekend you're alive

The Yankees and Cubs advanced, I won my fantasy football game, I ate my favorite salad at one of my favorite restaurants. I walked through the Village on a crisp Autumn afternoon, from the East Village with all the hipsters and street kids to the West Village and its cozy brownstones, with the lights on in the first floor apartments.  Is there a better intersection in NYC than West 12th Street and West 4th Street?  When I have $20 million, I'm buying one of those buildings. What an excellent Sunday -- I just wish there was no work tomorrow.

10/4/03 86 Saturday Surprise

This was a good Saturday.  I rested, I ate tasty food, and I went out for a few drinks.  Ambrose and Abby got engaged after 8 years, and the news made me genuinely happy.  Somehow, when you are married, you take great pleasure in other people getting married.  The optimist in me says that it's because I am excited for my friends to be entering a rewarding new phase of their lives.  And in all honesty, I am much happier since I got married -- it's been easy and fun and basically better than I ever would have hoped.   The cynic thinks it's that part in all of us that thinks somebody somewhere might be having more fun than we are.  Once your friends get married, they are only eligible for certain kinds of fun (the same kind you're having), so there's no point in being jealous of them anymore.  So you can be a little happier. Whatever, it made for an interesting Saturday night, and I made it home with a vague sense of intact sobriety.

10/3/03: 79 Disappointing Friday
Got stuck at work late on a Friday, came home and laid on the couch watching baseball, and managed to fall asleep TWICE between glances at the Cubs-Braves.  Woke up around 1am confused and sore.  Totally unrewarding day.  A day that should remind me how precious each day is, and should get me to stop wasting 'em like this.  If I wasn't so tired. Gets a few points for being a Friday.

10/2/03: 76 Nothing Special
Only got 2 hours of sleep last night, but somehow made it through the day OK, and the Yankees won.  I thought I was getting sick, but I feel much better now.  It was a cold damn day, though. 

10/1/03: 53 Excuse me for a moment...
Any day in which you have a diarrhea attack in public is, by definition, a bad day. If it happens at a work function, all the worse. If it comes on the heels of an already subpar day, you end up with a 53. I will spare you details, but it was no fun at all. My only hope is that nobody detected my squirming or sweating.

9/30/03: 79 Livin' Right
On the surface, today was a lot like yesterday. Didn't get enough sleep, was tired all day, and worked 11 hours. Not the makings of a great day, and it wasn't, but it was way better than yesterday. Sometimes when you're watching a basketball game, a guy will get the hot hand, and he'll be making everything he throws up. If he hits a particularly lucky and ill-advised shot, the announcer might say, "He's livin' right." This cliche is sort of a playful counterpart to another cliché, "If you work hard, good things will happen to you." Why do we hate cliches so much? They are usually brimming with truth. We should embrace them. Anyway, I must be livin' right, because at the end of a relatively shitty day today, I caught one of those small breaks that can turn a 62 into a 79. I busted my ass all day, and at around 7:30pm I was lamenting the fact that after ten years with this company I am somehow still the dude who stays after hours and runs a package to FedEx. Gary, our mailroom guy, had told me that FedEx usually stops by around 6:30pm, so if my package was ready by then, I could bring it down to the security desk and save myself a trip to FedEx. Of course, I was running behind, and I had just managed to seal up my package nice and good by about 7:30. So there I sat, wondering how I was going to ride my bike to FedEx with the box under my arm. I was still feeling slightly gratified despite the situation --  I had really gotten a lot done and I felt pleasantly exhausted. ("Hard work is its own reward.") Then suddenly my phone rang (actually, it rang with the same level of warning as it always does, but it seemed sudden because I wasn't expecting a call that late). It was the security guard, asking me if I had a package for FedEx. Gary, God Bless him, had notified the security guard in advance that I might have a late package, and the rest had fallen into place.  I sprinted downstairs to make the handoff, and not even a halfhearted truckside lecture from the FedEx guy could bring me down.  I ate spaghetti for dinner.  I am pretty excited about my 79. That's troubling.  Hard work.  Hard work is the key.