Also:
Has McCain totally given up on getting any votes in New York? Sure, it's traditionally full of super-liberal commie-pinko pro-gay-marriage nutjobs, but between the Palin "pro-America" thing and the "elites live in D.C. and New York" thing, it still seems a bit much. No?

Today I experienced a rare but delightful commuter joy. While riding the A to work this morning (late, because I'm increasingly unmotivated to get out of bed, or rather increasingly inclined to grant myself a reprieve from going to the gym in honor of CMJ...) I heard what sounded like Le Tigre "Deceptacon," but a tinny version, like it was coming through my headphones and my iPod had secretly turned itself on* while jostling around my purse with notepads and nail files and cell phones and my Kindle, which it likes to do sometimes, resulting in things like a dead battery at the gym the next morning (which, of course, was not a problem this morning because of CMJ, even though I stayed home and watched "The Office" last night instead of going out and so had no excuse to sleep in). So I fished around in my purse, only to find that my iPod was not, in fact, on and playing "Deceptacon." But it was still playing, and it was definitely Le Tigre. So I looked around, and determined that the music was actually coming from the headphones of a boy across the aisle who was pretty well obstructed by the other subway passengers, but who seemed to be pretending to sleep (pretending, because if his music was loud enough for me to hear it and identify the song, there's no way he was asleep -- that said, normally people whose music you overhear on the subway are listening to something really terrible that you'd rather not hear and/or are singing along absentmindedly, so I'm willing to forgive this small transgression because he avoided so many other, larger ones).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU1CDSP7FRk

*Confession: For a long time, when my iPod would turn itself on it would play "Girlfriend" by N'Sync and Nelly, because I had N'Sync in my iPod as *NSync, and the asterisk apparently appears before all the letters in the alphabet. Eventually, I changed the punctuation so that A.C. Newman "Miracle Drug" now plays when it's turned itself on.

I think it says a lot about the venue/guitar pedal manufacturer Death by Audio that the first time I went there I didn't know where I was (both geographically and in name) and the second time I went there I didn't know where I was going (only geographically this time) or that I'd been there before. Walking east on South 2nd, my companion and I decided it must be coming up in the next block because we were rapidly approaching the water. Then we happened upon a youngster in a red lumberjack jacket smoking a cigarette outside a lit doorway. Peeking through the door, there was a paint splattered wall which we assumed must signify our destination. Inside, I was surprised to find familiar the loft/quasi-warehouse/office space with it's enormous hanging ventilation ducts. What really clinched it, though, were the temporary walls that separate the bathroom from the back room, as if, were it not for this semi-organized assemblage of unemployed hipsters who smoke inside because this isn't a real venue, the toilet would just be in the corner of the room for people to use without concealment.

Also, yesterday my friend got laid off. We all agreed, to varying levels, that it was probably lucky because he hated his job (a lot) and had stayed there long enough for it to look good on his resume, without the blemish of quitting (which he was constantly considering). It's hard to say how this makes me feel about the economy: On one hand, someone I know has lost his job! On the other hand, it was the best possible way he could get out of that job! He may even make unemployment for a few months! Mostly I think it makes me feel better about my job (which I don't hate, even if it's not everything I could hope for) and worse about jobs in general.

It seems to me that my perception of "major news" is slightly (and perhaps more-than-slightly) skewed by the fact that I ride the subway towards the end of rush hour every morning, and as such see the cover of AM New York and Metro several hundred times, whereas I rarely if ever see a hard copy of the New York Times or the Wall Street journal* (presumably because their readership gets to work earlier or takes cabs or doesn't take the A or doesn't sit near me or something). Which is, presumably, why I'm aware that there is an outcry among some number of musicians (quite possibly just the five or six actually pictured on the AM New York cover) asking the presidential candidates to stop using their songs without permission.

Which made me think that it's a sad (or just new! and different!) state of intellectual property rights when even candidates for the presidency can't be bothered to ask permission. I think a couple of years ago there was a rumbling going around that people who played at open mic nights should have to pay for the rights to perform a song and this, while obviously different (though it might be fun to hear "Times They are a Changin'" from one of the candidates -- either, really), is also obviously farther down the fair use road. It doesn't necessarily mean that Barack Obama or John McCain think people should be able to download songs for free, but it feels a little inconsistent nonetheless.

* Then again, if everyone's reading AM New York and absolutely no one's reading NYTimes, maybe this just is the state of news for the average consumer.

I'm beginning to feel as if there are certain unquantifiable (or at least unforeseeable) perks about an apartment that make a significant difference in your quality of life. The most significant one for me, this week, is that my bathroom seems to get dirty really quickly. There's probably some aspect of this that can be blamed on my roommates, on the fact that there's three of us using this bathroom in comparison to two last year, and on my cat. But more problematic, I think, is that my current bathroom has no window or ventilation (which would be illegal in PA and promotes mildew growth) and also that we have white tile and also also that there are four normal size light bulb sockets over the vanity which previously had large low wattage bulbs that I've replaced with normal high wattage bulbs revealing secret dirt that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Other similar anomalies:
1- My old apartment had super slanty floors, which was funny but more or less fine. The floors in my current apartment are wavy and it feels weird when you're walking around barefoot, which you would never ever due while apartment shopping.
2- There were crotchless panties (blessedly still in their package) under my oven, which my mom found because she is a saint and cleaned under my oven.
3- The outside door to our apartment is set back about 2 feet from the street. The other buildings on my block are commercial and don't seem to offer similar coverage. So people who have to pee on my block inevitably pee in my doorway.

This has been a rather bathroom-centric post.

The problem with having a blog and working all the time (or, alternately, the problem that having this blog has revealed to me about working all the time) is that pretty much the only things that happen to me happen at work (with the rare exception, like being almost killed by a bicyclist on my way to a work event). And, given that my contract with the temp agency specifically precludes "running a website" during work hours, probably I should avoid blogging about work (though I'll occasionally indulge in transgressions of the "here is what having my job is like" sort which is different then the "here's what my office is like" sort, which ends up as an expose and a pink slip, except that because I'm a temp there probably wouldn't be much paperwork involved in firing me).

Of course, this dilemma permeates other aspects of life as well. A lot of the time I feel like I have to talk about is work, and I have to go through and describe everyone and explain the subtle dynamics and then on the rare occasion work life collides with the outside world and your roommate asks you "Who was that?" it seems like it should be obvious who it is because you talk about them all the time because you spend all your time with them, but of course it's not. And furthermore, this whole problem is self-perpetuating because only the people at work know the people at your work so if you want someone to understand the subtle dynamics the only people you can discuss them with are other people from work and so you further insulate yourself in the work world, and so on and so forth.

It's a daunting prospect.

Today, I woke up at 7:25, then 7:34, then 7:43 then 8:15 then 9:15 (because after I got up and got ready I was still too early to go to work since everyone else in the office was almost certainly going to be as hungover as I was, if not more so, since I wasn't very [ah the beauty of fancy drinks at a fancy bar that is totally out of your price range but paid for by bosses]). Then I came to the office -- still too early -- ordered a breakfast burrito, and was joined by my boss approximately two hours later. Then I wallowed, and waited, and answered about three phone calls (and a surprising number of hangups) and then it was lunch time. And then the finance guy who normally yells at everyone came up and sat on our couch reading Rolling Stone and some people watched an episode of Friends that had been cut into three pieces and posted on YouTube.

Although I do prefer the Jewish holidays (when our predominantly Jewish department more or less empties out) to days when things are crazy and the office is packed and everyone's having meetings and conference calls and so forth, I'm not so good at sitting in place for 10 hours doing practically nothing. But the ultimate good of this is that at least I HAVE a job or every day would be like a Jewish holiday and I'd sit in front of my computer for 14 hours a day and have even less human interaction and my laptop is older and slower than my work computer anyway. So at least there's that.

Update: I just introduced my boss to icanhascheezburger.com

This has been a weekend of transit snafus:
1. On Thursday, en route from work to a showcase by State of Shock at the Mercury Lounge, I was almost hit by a bicyclist while getting out of a cab, and she maybe got hurt a little because she had to break so fast and the bike kind of tipped over and he hoe fell off so I felt bad and apologized but what I mostly felt bad for (she was, after all, being something of a moron trying to bike through a red light and squeeze between a cab and the curb) was that she looked at me like I was the source of all global pollution because I was taking a cab and not biking myself, and this is something you'd feel bad about if you were reading Thomas Friedman's new book, which I am (see below).
2. Going to Penn State is a source of enormous anxiety because there's only one bus on Friday night and none on Saturday so if you miss it (or so you'll think when it's running late and you begin to wonder if you've missed it by waiting in the same spot since no one seems to know where you ought to be waiting or have heard of the bus company in question) you'll have to either pay another $50+ to take an Amtrak train the next morning or give up the whole trip as a loss, since even arriving at 1am Friday night I felt like I spent nearly as much time in transit as I did conscious in State College, Pa.
3. Not so much a snafu, but I'm currently on the 4+ hour Fullington trailways bus back from State College and I got pretty sick of trying to read Thomas Friedman's new "Hot, Flat and Crowded" (bored precisely because I agree with his general views and several of his specific ones and so read his editorials twice a week when I'm boed at work and, as such, am already more or less familiar with the whole thesis of his book [the main excitement thusfar being the I-guess-predictable but nonetheless surprising quote from an exes' father on biodiversity loss]) so I turned on the wireless on my Kindle only to find that I had downloaded an e-book (or e-article? e-version-of-the-original-uncut-article?) by David Forste Wallace about following John McCain as a journalist on the campaign trail. The book/article/whatever is of course characteristically delightful and insightful and timely to boot since McCain is once again on the campaign trail, and as such more-than-characteristically devastating because Wallace killed himself so it's maybe more or less the last new thing of his I'll get to read.
4. So in my delight, I decide to pretend to be a campaign journalist myself and edit my most recent article for Performer on the bus and instantly encounter what Wallace describes as the scourge of laptop journalists -- natural light glare from the windows -- and I only even think to pull down the shade, which kind of doesn't help, because I'm reading the article in the first place.

Yesterday, two monumental technology-related things happened to me in rapid succession.

1) I realized that my Yale email had been officially shut off. As anticipated, I realized this because I didn't get the NYTimes headlines or Word of the Day in the morning like I'm accustomed to. Not that it mattered so much, I guess, because I was so busy at work that I didn't even have time to read the four or five articles I'd opened tabs for in Firefox. Also, I was sort of a little lucky, as I know at least one person had their account shut off the day before mine was, so another day with Yale mail (which, among other things, initiated my departure from AOL email) was weaseled out of The Man, though I'm not quite sure why (maybe it's hard to shut off everybody's final tangible connection to the University all at once).

2) I received, under somewhat dubious circumstances, a wireless headset. The person who gave it to me claimed it had been a fluke, so I thought maybe strings were pulled, then they were maybe going to have to take it away and then they let me keep it! Hooray. I feel like I work in a call center now, but whatever. Also, I kind of do. Especially on days I'm booking travel.