Ten years down the road

This weekend marked my 10-year anniversary at my company. Our standard celebration calls for the anniversaree (?) to bring in bagels for the office, so I hit the Bagel Train this morning and treated my coworkers to some magic.

Since our lives consist of milestones, this anniversary led me to reflect on my workplace and The Workplace, and how this morning’s Montaigne post was about the inconsistency of our lives, but here I am, 10 years from being hired as an associate editor on a magazine called Happi. The irony, of course, being that I was a depressive at 26 years old. Oh, and that my editor and I were voted most likely to take a sniper rifle to the rooftop.

But that was 10 years ago. We’re both still here, much more at ease with who and where we are. I’ve grown up a ton in that span, but I remain pretty childish about some things.

In general, I don’t like to write about the goings-on at work. I find it interminable when people tell stories about their offices, because those tales are so wrapped up in an intimate knowledge of the people and processes in place. So, if I provide a pretty scant take on what goes on from day to day at work, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to do; it just means that it can be esoteric and would likely bore you.

That doesn’t explain why I persist with those Montaigne posts, but hey.

“Good design” = bad cities

I meant to post this James Lileks bleat a while ago. He engaged in some “wretched, slanted cherry-picking of selected quotes” from a newspaper interview with professor Thomas Fisher, the dean of University of Minnesota’s new School of Design. The interview discusses “the Design Economy,” and Lileks uses some of Fisher’s quotes as a springboard to discuss cities (starting with Minneapolis), suburbs, and the economies that are tied to them. Starting point:

[I]f all you have is a degree in Design, everything looks like a design problem.

It’s a long post, but I recommend giving it a read, if only because it helps me justify my own life in the suburbs:

Boring people live everywhere. Interesting people live everywhere. People have reasons for wanting to live in certain places, and if someone wants to live in the city, it’s his business. If he wants to live in the burbs, it’s his business. I could argue that people who confine themselves to the city are removing themselves from the experience of suburbia, which is actually more germaine to understanding America’s future than experiencing some of the lousy blocks I drive through daily.

So there’s some Friday afternoon reading for ya, in case it’s a slow day at the office.

Home Improvement

Not much blogging this weekend, dear readers, between the NBA playoffs (I only watched two full games, and bits of two others) and our repainting of the guest bedroom. It’ll look awfully nice when complete (Amy gets to blog about it and post the pix), so any of you who come to visit and get completely trashed will have a nice room to crash in! Yay!

Room-painting soundtrack thus far (I’m treading on Mad Mix territory here, but hey):

Night and Day – Joe Jackson

Simple Things – Zero 7

Lexicon of Love – ABC

Mind How You Go – Skye

Ray of Light – Madonna

Ta-Dah – Scissor Sisters

Greatest Love Songs – Tom Jones

The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle – Bruce Springsteen

Amazingly, we’re not painting the room in glitter.

Lazy Sunday

It’s a quiet Sunday here at Chez VM. Well, it was louder earlier in the day, when I was shredding bills and records as part of the process of rearranging my home office. The process started when I bought a new desk on Wednesday, replacing the two tables that occupied a wall of my room. The process continued yesterday, when I picked up a leaning bookcase from C&B, a desk organizer from Pottery Barn (they don’t list it on their site), and a couple of bulletin boards and paper drawers from the Container Store. Today involved figuring out where to put everything (hence the bill-shredding). If there’s good light tomorrow morning, I’ll take some pix and post them for those of you who are obsessed interested in such things.

Before buying up this stuff, Amy & I finally got to the local (within 30 miles) Imax to catch 300. It was

  1. a hoot
  2. utterly insane
  3. possibly the gayest movie ever (okay, the Gayest. Movie. Ever.)

I enjoyed it a bunch, even if it did overplay the “we’re fighting to defend reason and logic” angle. Gerard Butler was fascinating to look at, and this hearkens back to my original post about this flick: I’m more interested in the stylization of the movie, and the filmmakers managed to get the lead to resemble classical Greek art. I’m not talking about the chiseled abs phenomenon, which are major contributors to the “gayest movie ever” trophy, but the angles of his face, his beard, and his hair somehow gestalted into this living representation of a Greek bust, to me.

We had a laugh later in the day, when we noted that Gerard Butler’s filmography includes Beowulf (where I thought he looked a little like Paul Rodgers) and Attila the Hun. Looks like he can’t get away from historic slaughter flicks. Still, he did a great job in this one, making the Spartan king a, um, raging Scot. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously as history, but it was a thrill ride. My biggest problem with it is that it’s success means that the director is going to get the greenlight to make a movie of The Watchmen, which will be a disaster.

This morning, I realized that I’ve had a pretty strange run of Easter-weekend trips to the movies. I don’t tend to go to the movies often, but I guess there’s something about Easter: Hellboy in 2004, Sin City in 2005 and 300 in 2007. Can’t remember if I saw anything last year, and I’m not finding any references in the blog, which as we know is a backup drive for my brain.

Anyway, I hope all my Christian readers have a good Easter today.

Look to the skies

If I had the patience, I’d fix up this pic in Lightroom. So you’re stuck with my attempt at catching a little bit of glory from the vantage of the Home Depot parking lot in Paramus, NJ.

Atlantis Acres

A township near my home plans to buy out 33 houses on River Road near the Pompton River, level them, and “return the land to its natural state.” The state and feds are kicking in a couple million to do this, since

A federal spokeswoman said Hoffman Grove ranked second in New Jersey — Ocean City is first — in ongoing loss claims. The state ranks fourth in the country.

If you live on “River Road” or in “Ocean City”, you should probably expect to get flooded every so often.

Random Seattle Stuff

Last night I remembered that, on my first trip to Seattle (August 2001), I almost decided to stay based solely on two factors: the summer weather here is gorgeous, and the sell Cherry Coke in 1-liter bottles.

On that first trip, it took me three days before I saw any black people. I’ve seen a bunch already this trip, even though the first black guy I saw that time, Sonics coach Nate McMillan, has moved on to Portland. Not sure if there’s been any demographic shift, or if the downtown area I’m staying in is more “urban” than the neighborhoods I generally hung out in on my other trips.

There’s a lot of construction downtown.

Ambien will help you get 7-8 hours of sleep even if you took a 5-hour nap earlier in the day.

That is all. We’re heading out soon to meet up with my buddy, the Brooding Persian, for lunch. Later, it’s on to the Flying Fish to drink and dine with a bunch of Amy’s friends, along with a cameo by another of my buddies from Annapolis.

I took a couple of pictures yesterday, but haven’t had time to process them and post, so you’ll have to wait on that. Our hotel’s kinda near the Space Needle, so I promise to get a bunch of pix of that and the EMP before long. And, of course, we’ll visit the co-located Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, even though the balloting is totally driven by RBI totals. . .

Mall crawl

A lot of my years were spent in malls. Most of my friends detest malls, or at least profess to, but I embrace them. I enjoy meandering through high-end ones with quirky boutique shops, and I enjoy visiting the occasional Mall of the Living Dead, if only to see how it can all go wrong, and how a new highway can leave a landmark in the dust. I am unabashedly obsessed with retail in its many shapes and guises.

Fortunately, I live and work close to Paramus, NJ, which puts me in proximity of a broader array of retail than you can imagine. One of the neat things about Paramus is that, despite having a mind-blowingly huge amount of malls and strips, everything is shut down on Sunday. Here’s a neat newspaper article about the town, its evolution, and just how much the locals treasure that day off.

Morning stroll

Amy thought it’d be a nice idea this morning if we lit out for Ringwood Manor and snapped some pix while the 8am light was going on. She wasn’t happy with her photos, but here’s the first image in the photoset I posted:

IMG_0325.JPG

Enjoy the set.