Tag: subway

Fluffy Tufts

Tuesday morning and I have the day off for the holiday blog. Huzzah! Although it’s going to seriously fuck with my head once I return to work tomorrow. I love these short work weeks, quite frankly; but at the same time they inevitably disorient me and make me uncertain of both day and date. But I will survive and get through this.

Yesterday was a bit of a revelation. I slept deeply and well Sunday night for the first time since leaving for the trip (I did manage one good night’s sleep in Kentucky, but that’s another story involving a massive thunderstorm, a loud weather alert alarm in the other part of the house and a brief power outage) with the end result that returning to the office for the first time in over a week wasn’t an unpleasant experience. There were some things I had to get caught up because they’d slid while I was gone (I take care of so many little things that are nevertheless important that my co-workers don’t even realize need to be done), and of course it was a lame duck workday–wedged between a weekend and a holiday–so the energy was weird and and we had a lot of unexpected problems to handle for clients, which we did handle with aplomb, but I felt off-balance all day and the time just flew; next thing I knew it was time to pack up and leave for the day–but I never got tired. I usually am groggy and partially out of it all morning, and hit a wall in the middle of the afternoon, but yesterday I felt just as energetic and relaxed as I did when I got to the office at seven thirty yesterday morning. I had to run over to Midcity to pick up my PrEP prescription, then swung over to Uptown to get the mail (a check! a check!), stopped at CVS to pick up some Claritin-D and my Xanax prescription before heading down to Tchoupitoulas to make some groceries at Rouse’s. I also bought too much perishable food, as it my wont; I want to make watermelon soup today (because it’s cool and refreshing) and chicken salad…and I also want to make a bowl of salad. I was thinking about making Shrimp Creole for dinner–but again, hot. I also bought hamburgers to cook out; I’ll probably go ahead and do that anyway at some point this afternoon or in the early evening. (Paul got me a turkey sandwich from Subway for dinner that I’ll need to eat at some point today.)

I slept really well again last night, too. Paul and I finished watching The Suspect, which was interesting and disturbing at the same time, and then moved on to this week’s Platonic (which is hilarious; you should be watching this show) and finally to Deadline with James D’arcy, which is quite interesting. I stayed up later than I usually do–almost midnight–because I never felt tired, and yet once I went to bed I went into a deep sleep that lasted until around six, and then I was able to sleep again until seven thirty. I feel good today, too; rested and energetic and peaceful, which is nice. I honestly feel better than I have in months, for two days in a row now, which is lovely and marvelous. (I also have cut back on my caffeine the last two days…which also may have something to do with it.)

So, what are my big plans for this holiday? I have some chores to do, as always, and of course I need to rearrange the refrigerator from the Costco run on Sunday (Paul helped put things away, which I appreciated but…I am like my mother in that while I appreciate the help, it always means I’ll have to redo it at some point….it’s really frightening how like my mother I am), and I want to finish listening to Carol Goodman’s marvelous The Seduction of Water, which I have about an hour left on (I can do it while folding laundry and reorganizing and cleaning this morning), and then I want to get started on Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman. Also, one of my Alfred Hitchcock Presents volumes purchased on eBay opens with Daphne du Maurier’s superb story “The Birds” (yes, the story Hitchcock’s film was based upon) so I’ve been rereading that lately. Du Maurier was such a master; I’ll probably talk about the story more once I’ve finished rereading. At some point Paul will get up and we’ll probably watch some movies this afternoon. I’ve really only been in the mood lately for true crime documentaries or comedies (we watched Dirty Grandpa before I left for the north; wrong on so many levels and yet hilarious) lately, and much as I am enjoying the new Tom Holland series on Apple TV (The Crowded Room), it’s been much too heavy for me to watch lately. We may get caught up on it today, who knows?

I also have an out of nowhere unexpected offer to write another book, which is also lovely. But it will be from scratch, unless I can find something else to repurpose. I’ll spend some time brainstorming that today, too.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader…I’ll probably be back later.

New York City Boy

I really miss New York.

As I’ve gotten older and more set in my ways, I’ve grown to abhor travel for the most part. I have trouble sleeping in hotel beds, for one thing–and by the time I am finally used to the bed, it’s the last night of the trip and I inevitably will have to get up early the next morning, ensuring exhaustion when I arrive at Armstrong International here in New Orleans. I don’t like working on laptops anymore–my eyes have gotten so bad the small screen is a pain in the ass, and the difference in keyboard from my desktops (home and work) is too much of an adaptation, so getting writing done when I travel has become next to impossible as well; now when I travel I just try to keep up with deleting junk emails from my various inboxes to make catching up on those easier when I get back home.

New York always exhausts me when I visit; it seems like I catch the pace of the city and am constantly running from one meeting to another, grabbing lunch sometime and a coffee here and there. But I love it there, and every trip up to there always makes me feel kind of like a kid again. When I was a kid I used to dream about being an author and going to New York for authorial business; I always feel like an author when I am there–because I am always there primarily for writing or publishing business. Business trips to New York! That was the kind of glamour I dreamed about when I was a kid, both in the suburbs of Chicago and out in the small rural town in Kansas I grew up in, where the seeds of my writing dreams were planted and germinated. Part of the reason I agreed to become Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America was because that meant a minimum of two business trips up there per year–one in January for the annual board meeting, and another in late April/early May for all the Edgar Award festivities. The pandemic, of course, cancelled all those plans for this year and probably next; I wouldn’t be surprised if I am not able to get to New York again until January 2022.

There’s obviously no time frame on when this pandemic will end, or when i will become comfortable with traveling again. I generally don’t travel much, even though conferences and so forth are tax deductions for me; I generally make it to Bouchercon and that’s about it for my year. I was hoping to go to more events over the next few years–not the least of which would be related to trying to be more visible as an MWA executive, trying to meet as many members as possible and engaging with them about the organization. The position is a lot of work, and trying to keep as many plates spinning as possible at the same time, hoping against hope none of those plates will go crashing to the floor. My personality is this bizarre combination of Type A and laziness; probably has more to do with mood swings and possible manic phases than anything else, really. I never seem to be able to say no, for one thing, and so I always wind up with more plates spinning than need to be going at the same time. It’s also hard to prioritize plates–which ones matter more than others?–and inevitably, for some reason or another (subconscious self-destructive patterns, perhaps?) wind up prioritizing the ones that don’t matter as much and won’t make me any money.

But I miss New York so much. I have so many friends there that my short visits never allow me to see everyone that I would like to see–as much as I would love to cram as many people in as I can, of course, I barely have time to get everything done that needs to be done up there, and I am always tired from the hotel-induced insomnia as it is. I miss taking the subway. I miss Grand Central Station. I miss drinking dirty vodka martinis with extra olives with my friends; for some reason martinis always makes me feel posh and authorial; I think it’s because all the people in the 1950’s and 1960’s movies that firmly fixed the city in my imagination drank martinis. I marvel at the energy required to live there, the crowds of people on the streets and the subways, in the stores and the coffee shops, and the joys of going shopping–when I have the time. I had intended to visit the New York Public Library–just to look around–the next time I came up; I’ve always wanted to go inside and have a look around.

I already have resigned myself to the bitter reality that there will be no board meeting in New York in January, and probably no Edgar ceremony in May, either.

But someday, New York, someday.