There is a guy at work, one of our subtenants actually, that always phrases his requests thusly: "Will you please kindly......." Fucking please kindly. That agitates me to no end. To make matters worse, the guy is a very mild-mannered Korean who speaks delicately, so the utter pretension of "please kindly" is even harder to pin down on him. Son of a bitch. It's not the aggressive type-A assholes that are hardest to deal with in offices, it's the calm ones who have the fortitude to keep up appearances.

My subway ride takes at least twice as long now that I live in Brooklyn. Also, I get on a busy line at the last stop in Brooklyn, so only about twice in the month I've been doing it have I gotten a seat.
Standing on a train is not so bad either in spurts or at irregular times, but every single morning is grating. So all the little subway etiquette annoyances are noticeable.
My absolute "favorite" subway pet peeve(1) is people not moving to the center of cars and jamming up the areas near the doors. This morning was a classic example of this: the car was very crowded right by the doors but empty over at the end. I was able to fight my way through and got to a roomy spot.(2) At the next stop a youngish Asian woman got on and replicated my path, taking a spot right behind me. What made it memorable is that this woman made a disgusted facial gesture while pushing through the assholes by the door. Watching this, I gave her a knowning smile followed by a shake of my head. She responded in kind. Thanks, lady, you made my morning.

I'm going to say here for the record how much I'm looking forward, not just to my wedding and honeymoon, but simply to having a chunk of time off from work. My work is not such that I actively dread coming in (sometimes I do but those times are relatively rare), but piling week and week on top of each other can burn out even the best of us. It's been almost a year since I've had anything more than a four-day weekend. Counting weekend days, I'll have 13 consecutive days away from the office.

Finally, a potentially unfortunate note on the weather. We are now inside the 10-day window so that weather.com has an actual forecast for the wedding day. As of now, they are predicting rain showers for both the day of and the day after (60% chance for each day), while the day before is sunny. There is a chance that the day-before sunniness proves to be the actual way the weekend shapes up (it's hard to tell this far ahead you know), but more likely the consecutive rainy days have more predictive power. I haven't said it to even Sara, but all along I've had a pretty strong feeling that the weather was not going to be good for this thing. And really, the weather is the only thing outside our control in the whole enterprise. More than that, it could be said without too much hyperbole--since we are getting married and having the reception outside on a beach--that the weather is single most important thing about the whole day.
I am a person who does pay attention to weather. My morning alarm is set to exactly coincide with the radio daily weather forecast. When I have an outdoor event coming up, I will check in online and hope the weather is nice. I did this twice recently for our canoe trip and then especially for my trip to Ohio. Both times there was this sense of holding my breath in hopes for good fortune. Well, you can take all the bated hopes I've had for any specific date to have good weather and the combined potential angst of all of them over most of my adult life might barely equal that which I feel for this one day, August 8th. And here it looks like it will be for shit. Nice. I know some of this may seem melodramatic. Maybe from your perspective it is. But you have to understand they way I approach my life. I'm happy to let the chips fall where they may for lots of occasions; I feel like it's a nice way to keep things interesting and spontaneous to not pin hopes on certain things sometimes. But most of the time, I try to organize myself so that every little thing that I can control is prepared for in the most positive way. So that then if something goes wrong, I'm never upset cause I know there is nothing I could do about it.(3) What I'm trying to say is that I don't ever ask for much from things I can't control, so it's kinda disheartening for it to (potentially) not go well this one time I do.
I'll try not to whine much next time. And maybe by then the forecast will have changed.

1. Narrowly outplacing these dickbag acts, from a longer list: barging into a car as soon as the doors open and not letting people out first, talking really loudly, and inexplicably standing up from a seat in the middle of a packed car while still at least half a stop away from his/her destination (you have the seat, so stay you ass in it and don't crowd up in my fact while I'm dangling from the bar above you, motherfucker. You lose the right to get a head start on the exit if you are seated while many others are not).
2. A corollary to this pet peeve is when the ignorant dicks who clog up the doors area have the fucking nerve to give me a dirty look or god forbid even say something when I bump them as I fight past. If I am ever to get into a physical fight with a stranger, this will be the cause.
3. A lot of this attitude comes from years of training for and competing in distance running. Running is a funny game in that the talent/effort dynamic can swing wildly from one side to the other. Meaning: some sports are dominated almost solely by the most talented (basketball) while some don't reward pure talent nearly as much (wrestling), bestowing success instead on the best combination of preparation, effort, and/or learned technique. Great runners come from both camps. Some are born and some are made. I was never quite good enough to know which category I belonged to, and so I always felt like if I did what I needed to do that everything would take care of itself, and even sometimes when I did everything perfectly, I could still get beat by better talent. Get your own shit in order and let the other guy worry about what might happen. No matter what anyone tells you, running is about the most individual sport there is.

So the knee is not 100% at all but it's pretty good. Ran 3.5 miles last night consecutively, though the first half of it was pretty slow. Once it got warm I was running almost unencumbered.
I do have a new injury to note now, unfortunately. And it's the kind of injury that will keep this post short, since it's my hand and it's slower typing. I jammed my left wrist pretty good but the more pressing concern right now is the large amount of skin that the Williamsburg sidewalk took from me when I slammed into it. I had a large section of my palm rendered as an open wound, which makes using the hand quite difficult but also the size of the wound makes the healing process a little more complicated than just covering it with some ointment and a band-aid and letting time do the work. This special powder stuff Sara gave me successfully got about half of the area of the wound covered in with fresh skin pretty quickly, but the other half (the inner rings naturally) is proving a little more resistant. Top priority is getting the palm side healed over so that I can fully grip or run my hand over something and also to prevent me crying like a baby when I jump in the ocean eleven days from now on my honeymoon. Having an open wound is sorta stressful but having an open wound for days and days is maddening.

I'm also gearing up for Sara's departure tomorrow, not to be seen again til next Friday, the day before the wedding. She's purposefully packing a big bag and so I had to sit down last night and make packing decisions for two weeks from now. My dresser is now lighter by several pairs of socks and underwear plus a handful of shirts and shorts. I have been strolling along in the planning phase for this wedding, not having to mentally or emotionally invest myself yet (that's the beauty of getting things mapped out and done in proper time: it's as if someone else is doing it for you since you can do it on auto-pilot), until last night when suddenly I was packing for it as though it were tomorrow. All along I've known how much time I have, and could ramp up accordingly. For instance, I haven't spent more than five seconds thinking about my vows (we are writing our own), knowing full well that I'd wait until a couple days before and then write them all at once. I knew I would likely do my laundry next Tuesday or Wednesday and then pack up my clothes then, saving the smaller items like books or suntan lotion for the last minute. I knew I would go get my hair cut next Wednesday. I knew how to plan out my work schedule for the last couple weeks so I got everything done in plenty of time. Anyway, packing up 75% of my clothes for the trip last night--ten days before the wedding and twelve before the start of the honeymoon--was not part of my nice smooth timeline. I'm glad I got it done; I mean, I'm not going to miss those five pair of underwear in the meantime, but still it's changed my mindset, if only a little. It's I'm no longer engaged, now I'm actually getting married. Which is a good thing of course.

Cold Calls

Due to a vacation of the regular person, I've been covering the reception desk at work a lot the last few days. I'm doing it right now, in fact. This entails pretty much what you would expect but in the contemporary world, where most people use email and any calls will often be made directly and not to a generic main company number, the types of calls we receive at reception skew heavily toward the cold calls. Cold calls, if you don't know, are calls wherein the caller doesn't have an actual contact at the company and instead is making the call in an attempt to acquire a contact which will then presumably lead to some sale. Cold callers are always trying to sell something. They are also often outsourced employees, meaning often they are foreigners,(1) and almost always that they are making the calls from some large room full of people with headsets all making similar calls.(2)
I have been covering reception for short stretches of each day for me entire tenure at my job and have gotten good at dealing with these callers to the point that it's like an autopilot switch. The basic is that no one gets through to the desired party. If the caller has a name, the best they will get is that person's voicemail. If no name (the most common start to a cold call is like this: "I need to speak to the person in charge of........."), the best they will get is an opportunity to leave a message with me, which consists of me reading something sports-related online while they dictate their callback number(3) to me slowly and sometimes twice so I can presumably transcribe it correctly.(4)
Anyway, the reason I'm writing about this now is that if you don't just sit back and mindlessly accept the practice for what it is, and instead think about it in a larger way, it becomes rather interesting.
1. What is the business model for the companies that make these calls?(5) Do they really think that this kind of old-school contact-gathering still works in 2009? How much time are they really willing to invest? Many of these are basic questions pertaining to marketers, but I guess I can't even begin to figure out how it could be profitable to market yourself this way.(6) The more you think about this, the more you can realize that there must be something, which leads me to:
2. Why would a business being solicited by a cold caller ever play into the sale?(7) It's extremely easy to pick out these cold calls and almost as easy to get rid of them. Still, there must be enough instances where recipients of these calls take the bait and the seller ends up with a client or at least just a one-time sale. As someone who has dealt with their menace for years now, I can still say that I am dumbfounded daily by the futility of the whole enterprise. Further, I often pity the poor souls who are making the calls. Usually, they are just following a script and doing their jobs. I try to let these people down easy or to be somewhat respectable or professional. I can't imagine what it would be like to fish around for leads constantly like that. It's about the worst thing I can imagine having to do from a personal-dignity standpoint.


1. Yes, the stereotype is true: lots of cold calls are made from Asia and of course especially India. Often, the caller can't really speak the language very well and/or the call quality will be so bad I have to hang up. This can't be good for the seller's image. What I find particularly amusing is when the callers have been taught only enough English words and phrasing to get through a basic cold call. I mean, they have certain word cues that allow them to understand but if you answer a question differently than they expect, they will be totally lost. This happens more often than you might expect actually. And I can sorta respect that aspect of this whole enterprise: why waste time teaching people more than they need to know. Efficiency. Of the perhaps 10% of the calls where the caller will go blank because the party will go off-script, those will surely not outweigh the cost and effort to further educate the workforce.
2. A recent wrinkle of the last year or two is that more and more of these calls are now automated, so you can simply hang up on them.
3. Many times the cold callers won't have a callback number. I mean, literally they are calling from a dialing center that doesn't have the function activated to receive calls. This happens with the outsourced callers primarily, and I can have fun with it because the clueless callers will usually have a tough time explaining why it is that I can't just call them back when it's convenient for me.
4. I think I actually write down the person's info maybe 5% of the time. Perhaps 1% of those times is the info actually ever used. So one out of every two thousand times a cold caller is patient enough to actually leave a message with me will the message actually get to its recipient. No, this represents me doing a good job and not a bad one.
5. I'm talking not about the outsourced calling groups but the sellers themselves.
6. I share similar disbelief for anyone who still pays money to advertise in the actual physical yellow pages. If you do this, you are too far behind the curve to be saved.
7. Pause now for your regularly-scheduled arrogance: I know I'm not the typical receptionist who would be fielding these calls, and that the people who do can't analyze this stuff as sufficiently and just generally are more prone to doing dumb things. But surely simple receptionist stupidity can't explain this?

Embracing It

Jesus. I just realized it's been more than two weeks since my last post--nearly five weeks since the incident--and still I feel the need to provide another knee update. I ran about 3/4 of a mile on Monday and was proud of myself. I was home in Steubenville for a walk with Sara and decided to run the uphills and walk the rest, since the uphills are ok. Actually I even ran backwards down one hill too, but I'm not counting that distance. The interesting thing is how naive I was through the whole process about the need to rehab; I just assumed the knee would heal and I'd hop back into running. Well, the knee has 98% healed(1), but the couple weeks of stiff limping sent my too-weak patella into a tailspin, and since I wasn't doing anything to keep those muscles and tendons active, I'm now recovering from a patella problem. Fortunately(2), I had tendonitis in my right patella in college, so now I know how to handle my balky left one.

Now, I would like to address something that I never do, and my never addressing it has been not just a conscious decision but almost a defensive mechanism to keep from embracing what is to be my destiny. That's a lot of bluster there but when you find out what I'm talking about it will make sense.
I don't ever, with anyone, talk about kids. Let's consider why this is:
A. Because I am not a kid
B. Because I don't know many kids.
C. Because my daily routine rarely ever includes kids so why talk about them.
D. Because I am afraid of kids.(3)
Technically, those answers are all correct, but as we all know from the SAT, there is always one best answer, and here it is:
E. Because at some point in the semi-near future I will myself produce a kid, and until that time comes I am not terribly interested in having my conversation be dominated by the topic of kids.

Sara is very much interested in kids ("babies," specifically). She's interested in other people's kids, kids she knows, kids she sees on the street, kids on TV, and kids she will have with me. She has known, for quite a while now, that she wants to have a kid more or less as soon as possible.
I haven't exactly shared this enthusiasm. I don't particularly care for kids. That sounded harsh. I mean, I am not interested by them. Sure, I like a little kid playing with a dog as much as anybody, and I can appreciate an attractive baby, but I don't get much out of them personally. And as for my own kid-having prospects, let's just say that I'm patient.
I haven't liked to talk about kids basically because it's coming closer to a tangible thing in my life. The step between liking/dating/loving to getting married has never really meant terribly much to me. When dealing with your life mate, they're all just labels because it's the same person and the same feelings. Moving into an apartment together was a little step and moving to another city together will be another little step. For some reason (who am I kidding--for giant and very good reasons), the step between where I am now and having a kid seems vast, like here I am now in America, and there I am with a kid in Africa.(4)
It's an idea that has taken and will continue to take time to become real for me.
As a secondary concern, not addressing the kid issue is one last way for me to continue to embrace the collegial part of my life. It's the last domino to fall. Also, not any of my friends would ever really want to hear me or anyone else talk about kids. Kids are what happens to other people, people on the other side of the age divide. We are New Yorkers, after all, and New Yorkers around our age don't have kids.

I don't know why I'm choosing now to mention any of this. I guess I've crossed enough ground and gotten just comfortable enough with the idea that I can say it openly. I don't know exactly when it will happen, but it's gonna happen. I will have a kid with Sara at some point not too far in the future(5). It's kinda nice. I guess I'm a big boy and everything.



1. What the hell do I know? 75%? 99.5%? 83%? The ligaments are better enough that I don't think about them.
2. Fortunate now. At the time, that little injury that popped up in the third race of my junior year cross country season proved to be the first in a series of things that caused that third race to be my last organized competitive race. Alas.
3. This should probably read "kids' parents." I think we can all agree that kids' parents are pretty goddamned awful.
4. Note to unborn, unconceived kid: no, you can't go to Africa. First, it's expensive, and second, it's dangerous. You could get eaten by a lion. But mostly, it's too expensive.
5. No, she isn't pregnant or anything and she isn't going off the pill. I'm being vague. But I'm not talking about several years from now

Let's start with a knee update. I've reached the phase in my recovery where the healing stops accelerating, so while I continue to get better, it's not at the same speedy rate as before, so I can get tricked into feeling like I've taken a step back.
I'm getting more little pops and cracks in the knee in the last several days, and I'm pretty sure that's actually a good thing, meaning that the swelling has finally gone down so much that the tendons and ligaments are actually sliding directly over bone and such, with the pops representing the inflammation still there.
I tested it out with some running-like activity(1) on Monday (that's 16 days post-injury) and to my dismay, the patella tendon is nowhere near strong enough to support real running. It is strong enough to support all the weight it receives when walking, but running requires each leg to absorb almost all of the body's weight with each step, and I'm not ready for that unfortunately. I'm going to give it until perhaps next Tuesday or Wednesday and try again.
Sara actually took the time to ask her doctor about my knee during a visit this week and the response(2), while typical, actually reminded me that I was forgetting something: therapy. Since I'm no longer an "athlete," it's easy for me to forget that when I hurt myself like I did, I actually need to rehab the muscles and tendons around the injury or else I will never fully heal.
But I did notice this morning for the first time that I'm back to being aggressive with the flashing Don't Walk signs, so at least my head has come all the way back.

Our move to Brooklyn finally happens this afternoon. I say "finally" because Sara started packing things about a week ago, so it's felt like a neverending exercise. Basically, Sara moves backwards from everyone else: she lives out of boxes for a week prior to moving, then unpacks all at once as soon as she moves in. Clearly this is exactly the opposite way I do things so it's been a little stressful lately. Also, I'm a little unsure about how everything will situate itself. We've gotten used to extra space over the past year and suddenly it will be an issue. To complicate things, my sacred measurements were just a few inches off in a couple spots but those few inches will be enough to wreck some havoc.

Finally, from the Please Move Out of NYC file: a younger woman called out from a point where she could not be seen to "hold that elevator" this morning just as the doors were closing(3). So the other guy in the elevator with me reaches out and saves the damsel from a purgatorial 20 second wait. She barges in with two large purses/bags flailing and a large coffee in one hand and a bottle of water and a large set of keys in the other. Exactly two seconds after the doors finally close she sneezes twice, both times with mouth open and naturally without even feigning like she was trying to cover it. Thanks.


1. I did three round trip jogs from the front to the back of the apartment. This may sound pathetic but remember our apartment is huge, especially front to back.
2. Huge props to this doctor for actually answering Sara's question, since most doctors would naturally straight refuse to consider giving advice outside of the comfort of a billed visit. The actual advice given was far less impressive: for me to come in so she could show me therapy exercises. No shit. As luck would have it, I actually had tendinitis in my right patella in college and so already know exactly the right exercises to work it properly, so I'll do it myself. Josh Folger: keeping FMCG's insurance premiums down, zero doctor's appointments at a time.
3. Please note there are six functional elevators in my bank serving a total of 17 floors. What I'm saying is that missing an elevator ain't like missing the L train back in the day.