I saw something today that I do not believe I will ever see again. Riding up 1st Avenue between 77th and 79th Streets, there were, in a row, a USPS truck, a UPS truck, and a regular delivery box truck all double parked, as per usual… but not blocking the bike lane. As if this were not borderline impossible enough, the driver of the delivery truck did something that I had come to regard as beyond their capability: he saw me in his mirror and waited for me to pass so that he didn’t door me.
I almost crashed from shock.
Almost a year ago now, I bought a Canon point-and-shoot camera from my friend. It was a useful sort of thing to have around. I did take a few pictures with it, but I quickly ran across a pretty serious problem: I didn’t get the charger with it, and it didn’t take long at all before the battery ran dry. Funny thing, I have repeatedly forgotten to either go get a charger or take the camera and have it charged.
There are a lot of people out there who use photography in the same way that I use writing. Generally speaking, a good photographer will give you just as much with a photo as a writer can give you with a short story. Photography tells stories in a different way, but it, like all art, is about storytelling.
Thinking that way, you would have assumed that I would have been more keen to use a camera to help tell my stories. But I haven’t been. I haven’t been telling any stories whatsoever, and that’s a serious problem. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot to remedy this problem, and another step I’ve got to take is getting that camera working.
The funny thing is, I don’t even know if I can tell a story through a camera lens. But I need to find out.
I took today to do a lot of chores (well, errands, more accurately) that had been piling up. Going to the post office, making a few phone calls, that sort of thing.
No one cares about any of that.
Chief among those errands, however, was getting my totally sweet bicycle back in working order.
It’s been almost a week now since I unceremoniously lost my job. I’ve only fallen asleep before 4am once in that time, and even then I was awake by 3am.
Things were going quite well. I was, for probably the first time in my life, content with all aspects of my being. Was it perfect? Not a chance. Are there several to many things that could have been improved? Absolutely. But I was happy.
A friend counseled me with the advice, “It will get better. It always gets worse before it gets better.”
“I didn’t need it to get better. It was perfectly peachy the way it was.”
It’s not every day that a new Wes Anderson movie opens on my birthday. Discuss.
There’s no clearer step back, I don’t think, than returning to the place you left when you took your last step forward. Now, I’m going to try twice as hard just to get back to where I was.
Such is life when everything decides to pull a full collapse.
I ride my bicycle around New York a lot. It is often faster than any other form of transportation and always more fun, plus it makes me feel a lot better about the fact that I don’t get any exercise, primarily because it’s, you know, exercise.
On Monday, I went to see Paprika, which was simultaneously excellent and bizarre beyond explanation. I rode my bike to the theater, which is stupid for several reasons. To start with, it was 85° (Fahrenheit, just in case it needed to be clarified) that day. I rode into Manhattan at midday, and I had to leave my bike chained up outside for a few hours. Nevertheless, I persevered. And my bike didn’t get stolen.
As we can all easily imagine, helping your boss to write his resignation letter is a bit depressing. The even better part is a couple days later, when the big boss receives the letter and calls you to tell you that you need to start looking for a new job.
Needless to say, this puts a further damper on my plans of, you know, enjoying my summer.
It could be worse. I could have scurvy.
I was in the middle of writing while listening to my iTunes on random. Of a moment, I realized that I had stumbled onto the overworld music from the original Legend of Zelda.
So, I am a huge geek. As if there were any debate.