The New York Flux

I love New York City (and the New Jersey boroughs of Hoboken and Jersey City, both of which are pretty much extensions of NYC, in my opinion). I love the energy, I love the diversity, I love the availability, and most of all, I love the people.

Of course, I don’t love all of the people. I definitely do not love the people who walk four abreast on the sidewalk and glare as if I am in their way as I struggle to haul three gigantic, overflowing bags of laundry past them up the street. I do not love the people who stand outside bodegas, bars, or restaurants and blow cigarette smoke directly into my eyes as I pass by on the sidewalk. I do not love people who allow their children ride hilly-nilly around the street and run into me on their scooters, and I also do not love people who ask me how to do something and then, as I am telling them, act as if they already know the answer.

Alternatively, I do love people who agree to get up before the sun rises on a Saturday morning to ride bikes or go swimming. (And I especially love those people when they offer to pick me up in their car!) I love people who say, “Yes you can,” and, “I believe in you,” and, “Thank you for working so hard on this.” I love people who selflessly offer to come to my apartment and help me snake my stuffed-up toilet, and people who drive me to Home Depot to pick out supplies to repair a hold in my apartment wall. I love people who are willing to lend me shoe polish, yoga mats, and a whole variety of other odds-and-ends that I am lacking. I love people who love to go on “coffee walks” at work just to be outside and catch up on each other’s lives. I love people who care about the things I care about.

Living in New York (okay, okay, New Jersey, but like I said, Jersey City counts), I have had the opportunity to meet all of sorts of people from all over: people from Israel, Australia, Italy, Japan, China, Canada, California, Wisconsin, Queens (NY), and Long Branch (NJ)--all of whom are gathered right here in this one spot to live and eat and exercise and smile. Nowhere else in America--or maybe even the world--would this be possible.

With so many people gathered from so many other cities and states and countries, however, there is an inevitable flux. People come; people go. Some visit for a week, others stay for a year or two or three. Eventually, though, it seems that everyone leaves.

I am not an exception to this trend. At two-and-a-half years, I have been here longer than some, although probably not most. In that time, I have formed relationships with coworkers and fellow athletes that I would not trade for the world. Yet, I cannot envision myself staying in this place any longer than five years. If I do stay for the full five, most of my friends will have come and gone. At that time, I will follow their examples: taking a week or two to check activities off of my “bucket list,” give away most of my belongings, and say the most lasting farewells that I can.

I do not look forward to that time, nor do I dread it; I simply know it is coming. Yet selfishly, I hope my time comes earlier rather than later, because I find it easier to wave farewell from the balcony of a ship setting sail than to wave while standing behind, on the shore.

A Reprieve

The best way to make corporate employees happy is to give them a half-day on the Friday before a holiday weekend. The second-best way is to break the e-mail server.

Every day, when I get to work, I log into my computer, turn on the light above my desk, change my shoes, and promptly log into Outlook. I then spend the first 10-15 minutes looking through new messages, determining which ones must be answered immediately (i.e. emails from my boss or other supervisors), which ones will need to wait until I have more time (i.e. emails from outside the company, where a typo might be critical), which ones will require at least an hour's worth of work (often about a quarter of the emails), and which ones I probably don't have to read until tomorrow, or Friday, or next week. Once I have mentally sorted these emails and written myself a few post-it note reminders, I go make myself a cup of tea. The daily panic has begun.

Yesterday, for what I believe was the first time since I started working at Wiley, I arrived at work to an Inbox empty of new messages and a phone message informing me of the following:

"Good morning. This is Technology Report Services. The email client in North American offices is currently out of service. We are working hard to fix the problem and will--"

At this point I hit the *-3 key combination on my phone to delete the message. No email? Great! Now I could finally get some work done! And when I had a question to ask a colleague, I would . . . instant message them. Phone them. God forbid . . . get up from my desk and walk over to ask them in person.

It felt like a revolution had taken place. In those four hours free from incoming emails, I packaged and shipped eight boxes of conference materials, wrote copy for five fliers, generated a book list in Excel, researched articles for the blog (WiSci), faxed reservation packets to two conferences, and paid in-person visits to three different colleagues. More importantly, during those four hours, I felt completely focused and at ease. There were no phantom messages popping up in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen to alert me that someone needed something ASAP. I did not feel the compulsion to click into Outlook every five minutes to check and see what urgent messages I might be missing. Instead, I worked steadily through the morning and cleared three layers of paper off of my desk. Then, I went for a short run, made my lunch, and returned to my desk to find that "North American email service was back in operation." Fortunately, since most of my other colleagues hadn't had email all morning, either, there weren't too many messages awaiting me, and I had a moderately productive afternoon, as well.

I don't know if this experience has implications about the advent of technology and modern communication or if it just demonstrates that I am easily distracted by email and feel undue stress by constant string of demands from others that arrive via email. However, in either case, it makes me wonder what the office place felt like before the arrival of Internet and email. After all, that revolution only occurred about twenty years ago (or at least that was when the Internet became publicly available; its widespread use and dependence probably occurred even more recently). Were people stuck on the phone all day long? Did they silently do work at their desks? Was there more office chatter and less click-clack of keyboards? And most of all: would I have liked it better?

Snapshot Book Review: Bossypants

Bossypants by Tina Fey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amusing, although not as good as I guess I had hoped. I needed more structure from the book (it wasn't quite a collection of vignettes, nor was it a chronological narrative), and as a close friend said, "This is a book that would have been better written ten years from now."

However, I did hear an interview with Fey on a NPR: Fresh Air podcast, and hearing her read passages from this book made me love it 100x more than when I read it on paper. So my advice, for those intending to read this book, is to get the audio version. I'd wager that it will be worth the auditory performance.

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Going Clipless: First Ride

I am beginning to think that winning the NYC Triathlon lottery is more similar to winning the lottery in that ___ short story where the winner gets stoned to death than to winning a million dollars. My quest to compete is bringing me closer to death than to money, anyway.

So as you probably know by now, I am a triathlete-minus-one. I tell runners that I am a swimmer. I tell swimmers that I am a runner. But to neither group would I ever deign to classify myself as a cyclist.

Thus, winning the lottery to enter the NYC Triathlon is pretty much the only reason I now own a Cannondale racing bike, complete with speedometer, tire repair kit, and—as of yesterday—clipless pedals. And to think, I really only wanted to buy a lighter-weight bike so I could carry it up and down from my apartment. . . .

Although I have owned the bike and most of the accoutrements since late last September, I only just bought clipless pedals (and the cleats and shoes to go with them) yesterday. I might have procrastinated even longer in making this scary, expensive (perhaps also scarily expensive) purchase had my caged pedal—the kind where you fit the front of your shoe inside a plastic cage and tighten a stirrup to keep it on—not broken on my last ride. Actually, the stirrup might have broken the ride before without my noticing, but when I got on my bike this last time, I quickly realized that the noisy flapping going on at my ankle was not an untied shoelace, but a broken stirrup. The entire thing had pulled free from one side of the pedal and was flapping wildly in the wind.

“This,” I told myself, “is a sign.” I had been meaning to get more advanced pedals, anyway, since my racing bike almost seemed to require them. Plus, if I wanted to get good at this sport before the race, I had better start practicing with the gear sooner rather than later.

With all of these factors in mind, I grit my teeth, took my Visa out of its vault (okay, make that out of my wallet), and sallied on down to the Grove Street Bike shop. Of course, I had to return to my apartment soon afterward, because they needed the bike in order to install the pedals . . . but as I said, I never claimed to be a bike pro.

Which leads me to today: my first ride with the new pedals.

For those of you who are as clueless as I was about competitive cycling, here is how clipless pedals work: first, you buy special shoes and cleats that you then screw into the bottom of those shoes. These cleats attach to special pedals, which you could never use with regular shoes. You get the cleat into them by sliding the toe of the shoe forward until the cleat catches the pedal; then, you push downward through a revolution to clip in the heel. Once you have done this with both of your feet, you are successfully attached to your bike. The bike and you are one. To get out, you have to twist your heel away from the bike to “un-clip.”

Sound pretty straightforward? I didn’t think so, either.

Here is the sum total of my first clipless pedal ride:

• 5 falls while dismounting
  
• 2 falls while mounting
  
• 1 chain dislodgement (for which I had to ask for help from a man passing by on his bike)
  
• 1 seat bent sideways
  
• 1 skinned elbow
  
• 1 pair of lost sunglasses

The scary part is that this list could easily include items such as:

• almost hit by bus
  
• collision with pedestrian
  
• boken _______ (tibula/fibia/ulna/scapula/cranium/etc.)
  
• broken bike!

So all in all, I guess I got away lightly with just a scraped elbow and sore shoulder. I am definitely going to have to take one of those bike repair classes, though. Because try as I might, I cannot get the seat back into alignment!

Snapshot Book Review: The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As distressing as the Holocaust is, this book--unlike most WWII novels--was more a tale of the beauty of human kindness than an account of a gruesome war.

The Hiding Place is the true account of Corrie Ten Boom's experience during WWII, first as a key player in the Dutch underground resistance to the Nazis and then as a prisoner shipped off to a concentration camp. Yet despite the violent drama that typically surrounds these sorts of narratives, Corrie's account is one of love and admiration for those around her.

As a character and as a narrator, I especially related to Corrie because her sister Betsie is the "perfect Christian" who always seems to think of God and others first, while Corrie, the narrator, always finds herself falling short and wondering how Betsie can manage to be so selfless. This is one of the truer, more heartfelt accounts of the struggle that not just Christians, but anyone who upholds a moral code faces when they are confronted with horrific, all-consuming evil on one side and seemingly perfect selflessness and kindness on the other. Few if any of us fit into one category or the other, and Corrie's observations about each are worth reading.

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