Life Listed Chronologically

Last Friday I went to the horses. That sounds so cool. I should have been wear heels and a fur coat tettering on my boyfriend's arm as he was in a suit. Instead, I was the "best dressed" of the boy, his old high school friend and that guys girl friend only because I was not wear jeans. However, we were not underdressed. We were overdressed in as much as we shower, had all our teeth and weren't blatant degenerate gamblers. Plus, there is nothing glamourous about the Meadowlands, especially not betting on horses trotting around a 1 mile track with a guy whipping them on the but from a cart behind them.

I was still fun, looking at the program and randomly picking horses on whatever criteria seemed to make sense at the moment. I had sucessfully managed to lose all the money I brought with me, smoked a handful of cigarettes and bet the boy $200 that he could not get into the winner's circle photo for the last race. He positioned himself to hop over the fence as the winning horse pulled into the winner's circle but chickened-out the last minute. But we got the driver's whip (and nothing momre needs to be read into that).

Tomorrow night, it's back to the Meadowlands for a basketball game. Although I am not a huge fan of the Meadowlands Arena, or particularly the Nets, I am a big fan of basketball and always, always have wanted to sit close to the court during a professional game. And the boy got a hold of some kick-back tickets for the 12th row. Friday, we're going to Atlantic City. I guess even in graduate school you can still party.

The nice weather has had an obvious affect on me. I see hope in the world, I see things changing. I have had enough of this winter and can't wait to see things blossom and grow again. Much of me feels as if a good chunk of last year was stolen from me, taken away for me not to relish in and enjoy and I am looking forward to another Spring, another Summer.

There are some things that make me instantly nauseous, there are some subjects that make me close up and shorter tempered. There are some topics that are so close to home that living at home makes more difficult to handle. I am not sure how to go about dealing with these things, I am not sure how to present them, but I feel them and I know my family feels them. But that type of pain, you just hide because you never want to bring it on your family. Feeling that way isn't something you want to share. Instead, it stays inside and makes me sick.
Monday, February 23, 2004

I was talking the other day with one of my fellow classmates who is also currently working with my boss. We weren't talking about school or our boss though. We were talking about the one thing that we love and miss, the city. He had just finished a 1 year master program at my favorite insitution of higher education in Manhattan and moved to New Jersey for the free ride for his second master's. We chatted about how everything is there and nothing at all is here.

About how you manage to avoid falling asleep on the subway, and when you decide it would be better just to take a cab. We agreed that Brooklyn is the best place on earth and the city isn't just some place you leave. You need a damn good reason to go. Our reason was the same and it's a pretty good one. And part of the reason why you think about getting another degree is you want to get a better job, afford a better life. When you are living in the city making this decision, the better life is a life in the city you are thinking about.

I was, however, stolen from the city and led to believe that once you get a damn good reason out, you don't really have to go back. The truth is, you do go back. You just don't leave and never return. You need a lifetime of damned good reasons to not return and the second that damned good reason goes away, it's searching classifieds in the Voice for sublets.

The only other option is to move to another, inferior, city chasing employment and trying to prove there is something else other than New York (even though there is nothing else like it). In thinking of other places to live, I have been listing the trade-offs because every place is just a comparasion.

There are only so many times that I can go past the Ford Factory in Edison, there is only so many times I can stand on an overlook at watch the city miles in the distance. My eyes are beginning to grow weary from seeing "EZ Pass Paid" too many times a week. There is no place that you can wake up on a Saturday and walk for 4 hours along endless stretches of sidewalk. I want to believe that you don't have to go back, but know that I will always prefer to be there.
Sunday, February 22, 2004

I am going to complain, which shouldn't come as a surprise. I am also going to put down myself as well which is somewhat surprising outside of self-deprecating jokes. When you go to a large state college, you get some of that state college quality. I am all for adults better their lot by taking graduate courses but I wish that they weren't the ones htat I was paired with in group activities. I would give anything to have to deal with the obnoxious Ivy boy that I was in every group activity with last semester over the middle-aged woman I am currently trying to deal with. Seriously, I almost threw up in my mouth this morning it's that bad.

She has children and therefore needs to be treated differently, or at least I need to consider her lifestyle in as much as see wanted to "take the lead" and write up two recent memos. She wanted to work now as later she'd wanted the free time to deal with other work and the family. As if I have nothing going on with my life since i have no kids. Her memos were not so great, however. The first was mediocre, the second was down-right embarassing. The second was supposed to be a focused distillation of the first. Instead it appeared to me to be confused, unclear and generally not of the quality I wanted my name on.

So I fretted about what to do. The grammar was off, the presentation was off. I know I can be a downright bitch, or at least come off in a manner that is inconsistent to my intentions. I did not want to have it appear this way and ruin a collarborative relationship. I became stressed and got that pukey feeling all day. Finally at 5 I caleld a classmate at work and asked what he thought would be the best way to approach this person given that the memo can't really be amended but needed to be completely redone.

In the end, I restructured it. I added to paragraphs and clarified sentences. I worked on this for about 3 hours. She had put about an hours work into it as the first version appeared in my inbox 75 minutes after we had finished our discussion on what it should be about. And then I sent it out upon the suggestion of the woman I am working with to the professor.

This morning I get a long-winded scathing about the fact that she couldn't open the attachment, about how she was unhappy that I sent it without her seeing it first, about how if I needed to work until the last minute, I should have called her.

You know what, I just needed to vent that.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004

I rock. I am the one and only hit on google for "crazy city gal"

I just spent the past hour and a half of my life making a "decision tree" for a class which weighs what should be done and has stupid requirements like circles to denote options. It was devised by some folks at Harvard. This is the second stupid thing presented in this one class by folks at Harvard. I have decided:
a) my professor has a thing for Harvard
b) Harvard suffers from a severe case of "our shit don't stink", but I knew this already.
c) A high school student could sit in on any lecture for this class not only be able to understand the material but be mildly bored by it. Said high school student would probably also come to the conclusion that Harvard is a bit full of itself.

My school is housed in one of the newest buildings, a multi-million dollar project signed into law by a governor that now teaches the same class every semester, every Monday at 9:50 am. As mentioned many times, the overall structure is shared with the arts school, but the floors are separated after the ground floor. Given that the building is for policy, planning and art students, I would think that it would be a bit, um, better designed.

Surely we have state-of-the-art "smart" class rooms with ceiling-mounted projectors that can display information from computers directly onto automatic screens that go up and down with the touch of a light switch (since pulling them down was always for difficult). We have a nice auditorium that isn't used for classes as they are in other parts of the schools but for special events. Some of the bathrooms even have automatic-flush toilets.

However, not one classroom on my side of the building has windows. Most of the walls are painted an insanity producing white. The ceilings are the dropped, sound absorbing style you see in department stores. All of the lights are fluorescent tubes. Everything is carpeted in high-traffic carpets in shades of blue and gray. The desks appear comfy with the ability for the back to tilt slightly but I have heard about 50% of the student population complain about how uncomfortable they are. The place is oozing institutional when it should be sprouting airs of academic bliss.

I guess that is where Harvard gets its attitude from. I'm going to generalize this from my undergraduate school and what I have seen of Harvard. I can't say exactly where the Kennedy School has its classrooms as they very well be in a similar building. My undergraduate school inspired me to learn. I was beautiful and filled me with awe and a fear / humility to the information in this world.

The public policy school at Columbia is in a newer building as well, although it is well designed with classrooms having views of all of Queens or of the main open area in campus that is featured in such movies as "Price of Tides" and "Ghostbusters." The school has buildings with stone, inscriptions and statues. The rooms have tall ceilings and air moves through them because there are windows that open. In the summer, it is stifling. In the winter, it is frigid or occasionally boiling. There are smells of old books in the libraries, of which there were about 15 of various sizes from small ones with 30 of so book cases to the main one with 12 floors packed with stacks. The floors were worn marble from countless intellectuals passing over them year after year. The entire place exuded this academically serious air.

I believe that the building where you go to school in effects how you feel about the school. And my school does not inspire me that way. Maybe that’s why students from further west where nothing is older than 1960 or something seems to thrive as they are used to the institutional feeling.

And the old part of campus that has been around for hundreds of years? The part that would make my heart pound upon entering the iron gates, walking through arch stone doorways and wearing layers to protect myself against drafty old windows
Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Reading older entries is depressing when you realized that it is possibly true that you were happier a year ago. It is possibly true that in Manhattan, on the subway, in your own apartment, you were a happier person. It seems that way but who knows that I was really thinking, how I really felt. I know though the blue, brown and white of winter in Brooklyn was beautiful to me. These days its kind of depressing. I was a different person then, in a way, a better person. I was someone who didn't fret each day about not smoking. And maybe that is the difference.
Monday, February 9, 2004

My grandmother is a crazy old bat. Sometimes this gets to me and makes me angry. When she kicked me out of the house, it made me cry. But most of the time, I try my hardest to make it all amusing. Laughing at her being a crazy old bat is the best way to deal with the fact that she's nuts.

That said, it's also important to note that she likes to tell you the same thing about 50 times. In any given dinner conversation, she'll tell you about the same event that happen at "the club" where she goes each day to hang out with other crazy old bats about 4 times. It's really funny, if you are in the mood to let something like that be funny. When I was printing out a paper for school one day, she came home from the crazy-old-bat-hangout and shouted down the stairs to me, "Is anyone there?" and I let her know I was down there. That usually means she won't come down the stairs and shut off all the lights but will rather go to another part of the house to shut off all the lights or make sure every light it off. However, this particular day, she came down the stairs while still taking off her coat.

"Oh, you're here," she said to me once she saw me sitting in front of my father's computer.
"Yes grandma, you just asked me if I was down here and I said yes."
"Oh, he he he he he (the silly giggle she'll occasionally do when you point out she's forgotten something; the other possible response is nasty and mean and more typical of her being a crazy old bat), let me tell you that bus went all over Newark before ever getting here. It went everywhere. I don't know what that bus driver was doing."
"The bus from the club, grandma?" Because she has gotten lost in the ghetto on a few senior moments and I was hoping she hadn't spent the day exploring the tough streets instead of hanging out with crazy old bats playing bingo and trying to recall their grandchildren's names.
"Yes, where do think I just was?" and then she walked away because she was apparently done talking to me. I finished printing out my paper and had to get ready to leave for school since I was about 4 hours late before I even left the house, or something. She was messing around with the hangers in the coat closet, I guess putting away her coat but I can't say what goes on in a crazy old bat's head.

"You know that bus driver took so long to get home today. I don't know why they were going all over Newark. I've never gone around Newark in the bus before."
"Was it the same bus driver grandma?"
"Oh, no, I don't know who it was."
"Was it the same people on the bus with you like usually?"
"Um, I don't think so."
"Maybe it was you that got on the wrong bus and they dropped you off last since you weren't supposed to be on that bus at all."
"He he he he he, could be, I don't know." And then she went off to eat some cake because, even though she'll forget to eat for days, as long as there is cake in the house, she always thinks it's cake time. One day she seroiusly had a cupcake and then a piece of cake and then asked me if I minded if she had a cupcake. Since she's lost about 20 pounds in the past 5 years, I let her eat as much cake as makes her happy.

When I returned from class that day, she told me about how the bus took her all over Newark.

The only thing funnier that I have heard all week was a newsperson describing an oil spill. She was trying to be dramatic and paint a picture of the devastation that the oil spill brought to the beach in a softer, slower tone than newspeople generally speak in. It was all dramatic with wide-sweeping pictures of the beach. And then she said this and I knew right then that she had no chance in ever becomming Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters.
"Before rescue workers could get to the scene, the spill had already taken its toll on wild life." (cut to picture of seagull affected by spill) "This seagull, one gray and white, was now black and dead."
Now that's fucking hilarious. I hope when I am a crazy old bat that newsperson is at my crazy old bat club. I will never forget that and I'll torture her with it.
Friday, February 6, 2004

I have no ability to concentrate. I cannot seem to get anything done. I cannot "get into the swing of things". School starts up so fast. I can never understand when professors have readings for the first day of class so before everything starts, you are already a week behind in the readings. Handling 4 classes instead of 3 is difficult. Not smoking is not really difficult but I wish everyone else had to suffer through it as well rather than blissfully sucking down cigarettes in my presence just, purposely, all the time, I know it, to make me feel bad. I am working on a short fuse. And speaking of short fuses, Jesse got me hooked on Rocket Mania, which I generally play instead of doing all the work I am already 4 months behind on.

I've been really irritated lately. Everything annoys me. I blame it on the piles of pale gray to completely black snow, the lack of sunlight, the inability to be outside of more than 20 minutes without risking frostbite or windburn and the general endlessness of winter. Wasn't Groundhog Day yesterday? Funny how I read the whole paper and didn't see one mention of it. Everyone is too busy talking about the budget and Iraq and poor people to spend any time telling me what a groundhog had to say about how much longer this whole bitter winter will last.

p.s. It seems as if the goddamned groundhogs did see their shawdows!
Tuesday, February 3, 2004