On behalf of your Memphis-based flight crew...

This morning's flight was crewed by a distinctly Tennesseean crew. I was sitting near the front and was privy to this conversation:

Flight Attendant (strong Memphis accent): "On behalf of your (as if you hadn't guessed) Memphis-based flight crew, we'd like to welcome you aboard"

Front Row Guy: "I knew you must be from Tennessee. I love the accent."

FA: "You know, most of the time people just think I'm dumb. The looks up north in reaction to my accent are priceless. [turns to tend to something in the kitchen] I've got brains; I just don't sound like it. I have a master's and I'm working on my PhD."

FRG: "In what?"

FA: "Special Ed. Special Education. It helps a LOT with this job."

Front Section of Aircraft: [Eruption of Laughter]

FRG: "Maybe you should go into comedy."

FA: "Believe me. I could."

Anywhere, USA

My recent flight from New York to Indianapolis reminded me that airports are often distinctly non-descript. there are a few exceptions in the newer terminals, but in those built in a previous era, I might as well have flown in circles around the same airport, landed and then entered a different dimension when I left the building. The buildings are the same. Same old, stale carpet. Same toothless, pimpled, somewhat surly service staff at the restaurants. Same manicured, uniformed flight crews who always seem to know some sort of inside joke. Same Starbucks. (except in Idaho)

How To Speak New Yorker

In New York City, they're not convenience stores, they're Bodegas.
You don't stand in line; you stand on line.
You don't say OR-ange or HORR-ible; you say AR-ange and HARR-ible.
It's not Hew-ston like Texas, it's House-ton street.
It's not becauze, it's becausse.
Until next time...

Lower East Side Specialty

When I walk to work in the morning (the most awesome thing ever!), I pass closed metal garage door front gates. It's a ghost town. However when I walk home (also awesome) it's a whole new world. Suddenly spray painted garage doors become store fronts, restaurants, galleries, salons, laundromats, bars, dry cleaners, shisha lounges, and bodegas. It's wild that night is quite a lot less scary than morning.

November too...

It's been so long since I've posted here that when I went to type in the URL, Firefox didn't "remember" it for me. Thank goodness the old brain still has something on the computer, I guess.

This month, well last month, has been a whirlwind. Again. This time it was work that kept me so busy. September it was finding an apartment, dealing with the boyfriend issues, and getting ready to move. October it was moving, dealing with the boyfriend issues, coming to terms with the fact that my boss quit, and .... CRAP MY STUPID INTERNET CONNECTION BROKE AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! oh yeah, and preparing for Halloween.

I'm going to kill TimeWarner.

November brought with it the realization and reality that my job got a whole lot harder. We printed over 100,000 80-page prospectuses and sent out tens of thousands of in-house-designed direct mail related to our new fund launch. What the hell does all that mean, you ask? Well, that's what I was asking at the beginning, but we somehow managed to do all that, update our website reflecting the same, and put together a whole bunch of other material. Ok, enough of my boring life, but suffice it to say that because I was so busy, I was sending my laundry out to be washed (as in someone else washing my undies... yum). However, I wasn't in the neighborhood during the time that they were open, so by Friday, I was wearing my suit to go to a factory in New Jersey.

Yes, I was in a mailhouse in New Jersey at 8am with my driver... I told you it's been nuts. Only a few months ago I was plodding away at database management sitting with my headphones and working independently, and now I'm managing processes with multiple vendors, coordinating mailings across several different mailhouses and it is wildly different. Sometimes I just want to build a database... so I am in the background.

I told you I'd stop talking about work, didn't I? Maybe tomorrow.

How did I skip October?

I think this marks the first time since I started this blog in February 2005 that a month has completely passed without writing a post. My apologies.

Since September 27th, my life has gotten a little wilder, messier, but probably more fun. I guess that's why there's not much news here, but I'll try to be better now that I have a slightly more reliable internet connection.

Recap from October:

1. I moved out of the old lady house to a place that's a 20 minute walk from work.
2. I managed to lose my sewing machine. (Through incidents that I'd rather not discuss.)
3. My buddy Jill and her bird came to visit.
4. I started a fellowship with StartingBloc and my team managed to be a finalist in a competition that I desperately wanted to lose. It's getting a little more exciting now.
5. I represented my company all weekend in DC where on the way, my train had to get an engine replacement, my hotel couldn't check me in because the computers were broken, my booth had no furniture and I had to pay for all of the equipment services with my own credit card. When my hotel finally did check me in I was handed a working key to someone else's hotel room. However, it was a great experience and despite being absolutely exhausted by the end, I'd do it again... but differently.
6. My boyfriend and I got back together.
7. Choir picked up. (you should come to the concert. it's cheap.)
8. My boss quit.
9. My new boss started.
10. Halloween.

Curiouser and Curiouser

The woman I live with is a piece of work.

When I decided to live with her, people said "Chrystina, if there's anyone who can live with someone so different, it's you." Which I took with a fairly large grain of salt because I knew I was getting myself into some crazy shit. As it turns out, Lady X has managed to find someone perhaps even better suited to it than I am to live with her. When I told Lady X that I was leaving, she found my replacement in a day and he moved in the next day (to the guest room). Luckily, we get along and we'll now be singing together in a choir. More on that later...

Here are some clips from my life in the last two months:

• She's lived here for over 30 years--and you can tell. I don't know how many roommates she's had, but I've heard of at least 10 of them. However, the doormen tell me that no one really lives here for more than 3-4 months. I'm not setting any records with 2 months. She apparently kicked a guy out after a month because he opened the door and he was stark naked.
  

• She smoked for 40 years--up to as many as 5 packs a day. And the yellow ceiling in the kitchen can attest to that.

• I know you're wondering if there are any cats involved. I can thankfully tell you no on that one. However, if there had been a cat, that might have been the straw that broke this camel's back before I got into it. Oh well. Live and learn. Write blog posts.

• She likes to teach Asians. The reasons she lists are: They worship the ground the teacher walks on. They work themselves to the bone. And I think they "like me because I'm short". (So.... smart, hard working people like short teachers. Right.)

• She's constantly dropping the names of people who were famous in her world, but are entirely unknown to me. The only one I've ever recognized from her stories of her fancy friends is Aaron Copland--and he was admittedly just an acquaintance.

• She gets psychotically angry and sullen when I don't put my keys in the tray by the door.

• Once, when I mentioned something about if I change my Boston cell phone number, she corrected me with "when". I then made the mistake of explaining that I might not change it and she went ballistic telling me that I was "cutting off half the world" by not changing it.
  

• One time, I was walking in the door and I said hello, mentioned something about the paper she was reading, and then my phone rang. Since it was the girl who I am now going to live with and I didn't want to miss it, I excused myself and took the call in the other room. Then, graciously, I went back to talk to Lady X. By that point she was enraged that I had ignored her to take a call. I let her know that the call was important and I didn't mean to be so rude. She was not convinced and acted like I was the world's biggest bitch for taking a phone call. She topped it off with "so she's more important than me?"
  

• She refuses to call my new neighborhood anything other than in the Lower East Side when it's squarely in the East Village because she thinks I'll take it as an insult. She also constantly reminds me how very far away it is from the subway--it's 0.25 mi from the subway, which is .05 mi longer than her walk to the express stop.

• Lately, she's been clearing out her summer wardrobe to make room for the next season. With that task, she's decided to give away several shirts and other clothes. Since, strangely, we wear approximately the same shirt size, she's given me several of them. I knew better than to just say no, but as it turns out, I actually like them, and she loves it when I wear them. They're funny, but I kind of like funny.
  

• She (even though she was mad about the keys and such) just came over to offer me a box for the move.
  

And then she's nice. It's just so weird. She really is a nice person, but I don't think she's been treated very nicely all her life. She's a little out there and definitely had eccentric parents, so who knows which is the chicken or the egg, but she's more than I can handle and I'm glad to be out of it as of next Monday.

Environmentally Friendly

Socially Responsible, Ethical, Natural, Sustainable

Ah the buzz words abound, but what do they really mean?

I hate the part of my work that sounds like I exist in a fairy tale version of reality. The socially responsible investing crowd is generally pretty in touch with the financial realities of the stock (and bond) market, but people certainly aren't immune to the idealism that can accompany such lofty goals. On the other hand, it's a business, and it must be run like one--and businesses, when sustainable, are self-serving to a degree. As people at my company like to say: There are no responsible companies, just responsible investors.

The opposite feeling is also true however. Do you believe a label that says "natural" or "environmentally friendly"? What is that? Companies have realized that this is appealing to consumers and they have pasted the phrases and labels meant for truly innovative products on anything they can get away with. Luckily, there are some regulations on words like this. For example, there are USDA guidelines for Organic foods, but some would say these are not strong enough. In addition, the USDA will soon be under pressure from Wal-mart and other companies to relax those standards in order to more easily mass produce this type of agriculture. Unfortunately, mass production is one of the problems. It is a double-edged sword that Wal-mart now wants to make itself the most "green" company in the world. Their record shows that they water down and cheapen everything they come into contact with. Organics are riddled with problems including the idea that it is necessarily local agriculture, when it's not, and the problem with packaging things in tons of plastic in order to avoid using preservatives. This post was not meant to wax on about organics in particular. If you're interested, you can learn more about it here.

This sort of weakening of the words we use to indicate a low-impact product on resources is probably the reason for my distaste for what my industry appears to be on the surface, my hesitation to use such classifications, and my distrust for the labels. So I guess we can just blame it all on Wal-mart after all. Now we're happy.

O Sole Mio

One windy Friday afternoon, I had finished dropping off my friends at the Port Authority, and headed down to the Subway to go back home to the Upper West Side. Then I remembered I wanted to call my mom, so I decided to take the above ground route and came back up from the subway in order to take the bus. I walked over to the bus stop while calling mom, but she was busy, so I was waiting for the bus without a phone pressed to my ear. Before I get a chance to see this bus, along comes a horse-drawn carriage. (Yes, everything in my New York world is hyphenated). I look at the white carriage with red faux velvet interior and wonder what it is doing on 42nd and 10th, but otherwise pay it little attention until the guy in the passenger section turns around and calls for me to get in. I think he's teasing or just wants me to pay $50 for a $2 ride home, which no matter how comfortable the seats are, I'm not willing to pay. However, this persists and he insists on taking me at least a block. Mind you, there are other people waiting for this bus, but this guy's picking on me. So I run over and jump in because why not? It's New York, I'm considering it a free ride, and who doesn't want to ride in a horse-drawn carriage? Not even a vegetarian who doesn't eat vegetables, I would imagine.

Once in the carriage, Giovanni, the man in the back, and I start talking. As it turns out, he is also a carriage driver, but they're headed up to Central Park to meet up with the other carriages (58th and 7th). From the name, you can guess that he's Italian (actually from Italy). I always think I can speak Italian and then realize that when I try to speak I actually have no words except for music, so I tell him this (after all, if he's anything like my massage therapist, the longer you keep him talking, the longer the ride). So I say something like "quando m'en vo soletta per la via la gente sosta e mira, e la belleza mia tutta ricerca in me da capo a pie", which was actually appropriate considering it was Musetta's Waltz and they had stopped because "you are so beautiful, are you sure you're not Italian?". (The song is about a woman who can't help but to attract attention due to her beauty). However, considering that it isn't even close to modern Italian and my accent probably needs work, he didn't understand. So I sang it.

And then it started. Giovanni began his entire Italian repertoire. I didn't really know the songs, so I had to go mainstream on him to participate, since he insisted that I sing. In fact, he told me to make up Italian songs. I'm sorry, but I'm no Grant Damron. I can't just do that. So we settled for Andrea Bocelli, which we sang at the top of our lungs all the way to 58th and 8th, where I decided I had to get out. People noticed. It was hilarious.

Vegetarian Who Doesn't Eat Vegetables

My mom used to call me names when I was in highschool because I apparently didn't eat vegetables--and I called myself a vegetarian (but still managed to stay away from meat). Well, I am living with a variation on a theme. My 55-year-old Bronx-born, Italian Catholic, 5-foot-tall roommate (soon to be former roommate), is the English as a Second Language teacher who doesn't like foreigners.

It doesn't matter how often I tell her that it's offensive to me that she makes such blanket statements about what she perceives as a well-defined ethnic group (generally the HiPANics--she likes to draw out the middle syllable in a way only a native New Yorker can). It doesn't matter that I remind her from time to time that she lives with a Mexican. In fact, she corrected me and told me that my family was actually from Spain. Um, well, yeah...kinda like your family is from Italy. None of this matters. She doesn't stop.

And just today, she's telling me about her friend's class of "Nasty Rusky's" that think ESL is their conversation hour and they don't want to learn English Grammar.

When you can keep her off the subject of people from other cultures (not often), she really is a fine person. A little talkative, and completely self-absorbed, but generally ok. However, on the topic of people she thinks she doesn't like, she can be downright nasty.