2-22-08 Wii Would Like to Play (with your balls)

Sighing with envy at work over the trailer for the newest video game/time waster, I turn to my fellow cube-dweller, Jonathan.

"I really want a Wii, but I know I wouldn't get anything done if I had one," I say.

"I had to start leaving my NintendoDS at home, 'cause it was worse than porn," he says. "At least with porn, you know when you're done."

2-21-08 This Old, Cold World

The bus lumbers up to the frozen morning busstop, packed to the windows with commuters on their way to work, bodies and jackets and blank, bored, sad faces. In spite of this, more people do their eager best to get on, earning looks of disgust and exasperation from their fellow passengers. I have decided that I am not an animal, and so I let this bus go. There will be another bus, and besides, I don't really want to go to work that badly anyway.

2-19-08 What's Going On Here?

I've missed several days. I turned off the internet at my house in anticipation of the move and now the people I was leeching wi-fi off of have gotten wise and I am bereft, able only to post between assignments at work. Ah, well.

I'm trying to get rid of as many of my books as possible, and currently they're sprawled across the living room floor like confetti, waiting for someone to pick them up and give them good homes, so I decided to take them to the library (like the Humane Society for books) and give them away there.

2-17-08 A Disturbing New Trend in Women's Shoes

Shopping for shoes for work with Katie today, we end up at the Brooklyn Mall on Atlantic Ave. Several of the women's shoes have a distinct profile I've never seen before. I've seen the usual slightly up-pointing tips of shoes that have been in fashion, but on these new shoes, the curve is so extreme as to point the toe toward the shin of the wearer, in an arc that the human foot was never meant to make.

Looking at the shoe I hold it up to Katie, saying "So, um, how long have you been participating in the Ren Faire?"

2-16-08b The Mouse has left the House

While I was writing the previous post, Katie came up and said "Could you help me get the mouse out of the trap?" It was one of those enclosed traps, so the mouse was discreetly splayed out with his little back broken. As I dumped him into the trash, I said a few words: "Thanks for being a good mouse and teaching us to keep the kitchen a little cleaner, and while you were a good mouse, you came where you shouldn't have and now you're dead."

I had Katie read the previous post to make sure that she didn't mind having people know about her, shall we say, off-beat sense of humor, and she said, "Well, as long as you don't say, 'When Katie is about to orgasm, she likes to scream the names of major-league baseball players.'"

2-16-08 A Cry for Attention

Yesterday, I met Katie near Penn Station to shop for new shoes, as my old shoes which I had bought last year while in Cortland, NY doing summer stock theatre had finally given up the ghost. In a store window, they were changing the display, and a dozen naked, skinny mannequins stood with their backs to the street.

"It's like the Holocaust, they're lining them up for the gas chambers," said Katie, a little too loud. I must have cringed a little, as she then explained, "I'm really just trying to get on 'Overheard in New York.'"

2-14-08 There is Nowhere That Does Not See You

A jostling tribe of Asian teenagers commandeer the 6-train car I'm riding, laughing and flirting and politely teasing each other. One of the lower-in-the-pecking-order girls (slightly less fashionably dressed, slightly less pretty) has a digital camera, and poses are posed all over the car: the shot of all their shoes, pointing together in a star, a couple of wide-eyed, goofy poses, two girls kissing the air, the ubiquitous "rock and roll" devil-horns hand-sign. As they took their dozens of pictures (always showing the subject their photo right away, eliciting either a laugh or a wince of pain, do I really look like that?), I wondered if anyone would ever look at them - so many pictures, how could they?

It suddenly came to me that the point wasn't the pictures themselves, but the act of taking them and the showing right after, a supreme self-conciousness and a constant sense of self-as-object - "This is what you look like when I see you, and aren't we having fun?"