Tres Geek: Whitney Steen's randomly updated blog

Bye, bye Journalscape

Mon, 21 Feb 11 01:19:00 UT

So if you're here you may have noticed that I haven't written in a while. Some of that was just the sheer chaos of this past summer, but a lot of it was boredom with this blog and my inability to do with it what I wanted (the fact that I didn't always know what I wanted this blog to be didn't help).

For the past few months I've been kicking around the idea of moving over to Wordpress -- Ladies... is already run from there and I like the platform. I'm also ready for some features that better integrate with THE WAY PEOPLE USE THE INTERNET NOW. When I moved over here, I didn't even have a Facebook account -- now I can write (and read) blog entries on my phone. It's time to move on.

This site will probably stay up for some time, since Wordpress's automatic import feature won't work for XML files, and I'm not exactly keen on manually importing 10 years worth of blogging. So come on over to the new blog and have a look around. There's a whole entry on my new Murder, She Wrote obsession. It'll be great.

Tales of the UES, Vol. 1

Mon, 28 Jun 10 22:25:00 UT

So I'm a little over a month in to my Manhattan residency. The apartment is coming along -- I'm still waiting for my new couch to arrive, which is making the living room feel a bit incomplete, especially since I'm waiting to see how it fits before I decide about a few other storage/shelving units I think I'm going to need. But my morning routine is starting to feel a bit like an actual routine and not like each morning is a new adventure in remembering where my shoes are.

After years of avoiding buses unless I had to go to LaGuardia, I've discovered I actually kind of love the bus system. Of course it helps that 1) I'm a lot closer to several bus routes than the subway and 2) I usually only take the bus when I'm not in a hurry, so traffic delays don't bug me. That said, I love the M31 which leaves practically from my door and takes me very close to Boyfriend's and Columbus Circle (more specifically, the Whole Foods therein).

I've not been real impressed with the grocery stores around here. Sunday evening I actually made a salad (I know!) and discovered the olive oil and red pepper flakes had not survived the move. (Sidebar: I swear I saved one of those bottles of olive oil -- this is exactly why when I cleaned out the cabinet in the old apartment there were four half-empty bottles in the back.) So where did I find these fairly standard ingredients at 8 pm on a Sunday? Not at the (incredibly crowded) Food Emporium up the street. (OK, they had olive oil but only the really, really expensive kind.) At the Duane Reade. (This is a drugstore, for my non-NY readers. The one on my corner happens to have a small grocery section.) I'm actually going to the Whole Foods to save money, most of the time.

In Which My Mother is Totally Right, As Usual

Mon, 31 May 10 02:49:00 UT

I was having a conversation with my mom in late April, discussing everything I had coming up in the next month.

"May is going to eat your lunch," she said. "But you know that, so you can get through it."

Which is how I come to be here, just in time to get one blog entry for the month of May, typing on a borrowed laptop* from my new apartment in Manhattan. A month that included a long-planned visit from Jac, Meesh, and Yoda in celebration of our 30th birthdays, several big work events and/or crises (including the turning off of our A/C for construction purposes the week the temperature nearly hit 100, and only just barely rescuing the servers before they overheated, a ton of birthdays, and loads of events I couldn't get to because they haven't perfected cloning yet, including my godsister's wedding in Oklahoma yesterday. Oh, and an ongoing email discussion about handling this.

Consider my lunch duly eaten, May.

The new apartment is great, so far. Much smaller (had to get rid of my beloved oversized purple sofa), but more recently renovated, and with a surprising amount of storage space. Having been officially in residence for a week, I can also say that walking to work is fantastic (though check back when it gets cold and see if I've amended that statement). It's almost disorienting, to live in a neighborhood where there are so many shops and restaurants right on the corner not several blocks or a subway ride away.

I was never one of those people who moved out to Brooklyn as a temporary thing, until they had enough money/luck to get a Manhattan apartment. I love Brooklyn. I loved living there, even the odd little corners I settled in over the last six (!) years. By far the hardest part of this move was relinquishing the "Brooklyn girl" label I'd claimed for myself. (I'm trying not to think of myself as an Uptown girl, now, because I just get Billy Joel stuck in my head.)

Good-bye, May. Good-bye, Brooklyn. Hello, summer. Can we maybe take it slow for a while?

*The Boyfriend has loaned me his spare laptop and wireless connect card since I won't have my broadband hooked up until next weekend. Dating a computer guy has its advantages. Also now I really want a laptop.

What I Remember

Mon, 19 Apr 10 12:05:00 UT

I don't think I can condense my thoughts about the OKC bombing into a single Facebook status. (Which is not to demean those who did; reading everyone's memories this morning made me want to write this.)

I remember having a very normal biology class in Mr. Pittinger's room until the last five minutes, when the teacher of the other ARC science class came in to ask if we wanted to see "the building that had blown up." (The TV in the other classroom worked and ours did not.) Jac was in that class, so I wandered over to her seat. I still didn't quite get that this was an immediate event.

"Where is this?" I asked Jac.

"Oklahoma City," she said. The bell rang, we went out into the hallway. The usual noise of 1,500 students rumbling through the halls seemed both muted and more intense, as the half of the students that had learned the news already briefed the other half in advance of the principal's official announcement early the next period. I've never heard a hallway full of students sound like that before or since, though I suspect had I been in school on 9-11 it would have been similar.

But somehow what I have always remembered even clearer than that day was the afternoon McVeigh's death penalty was officially announced. I was heading to get my senior pictures taken; the radio was on in the studio and the photographer made an allusion to it in between instructing me to straighten my pant leg and directing me to smile. I think that was the day I started to realize that the events of April 19, 1995 would never really be over; that when violence and hatred erupt in a massive tragedy it will embed itself under your skin, resurfacing into your daily life long past the point at which you have supposedly moved on. It's less present, with time, but never completely gone.

I wish I had not had so many chances to relearn that lesson in the last fifteen years.

This morning, my sister-in-law is teaching her 9th grade biology class right down the hall from where I watched the news 15 years ago. My peers and I are old enough now not to be the consoled, but the ones consoling, should we have to face, yet again, human loss and suffering on such a scale. We have come of age at a time when the phrase "unimaginable tragedy" seems to have lost all meaning. And yet we are here. And yet we love. And yet we remember.

Everything I Did During Saturday's Cardinal Game

Sun, 18 Apr 10 01:53:00 UT

(That's this game, for those of you with better things to do than spend 7 hours watching baseball.)

*Ordered Chinese food for a late lunch.
*Started a tally of how many times Tim McCarver worked the Yankees into the conversation and then gave up after he hit the Torre/Jeter/ARod trifecta before the end of the first inning.
*Ate said Chinese food.
*Knitted part of a sweater.
*Browsed the $5 MP3 albums on Amazon, downloading two (Iron and Wine and Roy Orbison). Decided against purchasing The Bird and the Bee's album of Hall and Oates covers, fearing the novelty would wear off too fast.
*Made and uploaded some new playlists for the iNot2.0.
*Did three loads of laundry. (Between the 9th and 15th innings.)
*Talked to the Boyfriend on the phone.
*Started boiling a pot of water for pasta, got distracted, and remembered it only minutes before it boiled dry.
*Boiled another pot of water for pasta, successfully getting the pasta into the pot.
*Ate dinner.
*Had a few simultaneous conversations about the game on GTalk, while following a couple of game-related Facebook threads, and texting Chuckles. Actually typed the sentence "I think we should have let Felipe Lopez pitch another inning" and meant it.

So that's 20 innings, 6 hours and 53 minutes official game time, 2 meals, 3 loads of laundry, and 0% of the closet sorting project I was going to do after the game. At least it was kind of gloomy, damp, chilly day so I didn't have to feel like I should have been outdoors.

Holy Crap

Mon, 12 Apr 10 22:44:00 UT

Apparently it was ten years ago today that I wrote my very first blog entry*. Now, granted, this has not exactly been ten years of continuous blogging, but still -- one third of my life I have been blathering away on the Internet.

Unlike my other electronic media efforts, which I sort of stumbled into on my own, it was the professor of my Creative Non-Fiction class at OU who first presented this mysterious thing called "web logs" to me (and my classmates). Our class was in one of the few computer classrooms on campus and a good part of the semester was spent looking at various "new media" forms of non-fiction. I wasn't really an early adopter, but I was enough ahead of the curve that most of the people I tried to explain it to didn't quite understand. ("Wait, so you're like, putting your journal on the Internet for anyone to read? Why?")

I've obviously moved on to more structured and more specialized efforts in blogging, and I've certainly had less time for this site in the last several months, but I kind of like keeping it around. I'm too verbose (and too infrequently inspired) to make a go of Twitter, but it's nice to have a place to shake the crumbs out of my brain every so often.

If you happen to be out there, Dr. Gudis, this is all your fault. Thank you.

*-If you happen to go back and peek at those early entries, keep in mind that I was barely 20, about to graduate college, and of course knew everything there was to know about how the world worked. I do not miss those days.

Dance Film FAIL

Wed, 24 Mar 10 22:27:00 UT

Great Performances is showing the New York City Ballet's film of Jerome Robbins' NY Export:Opus Jazz this month, and here in New York it was on Thirteen tonight at 8. I was so excited about this after seeing the trailer three weeks ago that I wrote it on my wall calendar, then yesterday I double-checked the time to make sure I wouldn't forget.

So what did I watch this evening?

You know, 'cause for some reason I was in the mood for a movie about teenagers dancing on the streets of New York. Sigh.

And Just How Distracted Was I This Week?

Fri, 5 Mar 10 23:39:00 UT

March has turned out to be the busy month at the new job -- in addition to the usual slate of lectures and exhibition related events, we're hosting a few different outside groups (one of which involves the kind of people the acronym VIP was created for), several international visitors, and the final candidates for next year's graduate class are here for interviews (we only take two new students a year and it's fully funded with no teaching assignments so it's extremely competitive). Oh, and the housekeeper needed two days off to move so Guess Who was in charge of tea and coffee?

Then there were exchanges like this:
Exhibitions Coordinator: Um, where's the library rug?
My Officemate: In the library?
EC: You'd think ...but no.

The rug turned out to be in the lecture hall, rolled up on a cart, which was where it had been left by our architect after he apparently tried to move it to the office of the woman who controls most of our funding (hereafter referred to as She)and found it didn't fit. Why he didn't 1)put it back in the library or 2)tell someone he had stashed it in the lecture hall has yet to be determined.

Anyway, all this might explain why, when I got home today (Friday) I discovered a smashed glass on the floor of the living room ... and suddenly remembered hearing a living room-adjacent crashing noise while I was trying to go to sleep. On Tuesday night. I have been in and out of that room multiple times in three days without either noticing the glass or impaling the sole of my foot on a sliver, despite the mess being only inches from my usual path on and off the couch. Honestly, sometimes I'm amazed they let me live by myself.

Saturday with the Sock Drawer

Sat, 20 Feb 10 23:46:00 UT

Just as I was starting to feel a little more normal after the mono, I managed to catch a nasty cold from the Boyfriend (including losing my voice for three days -- that made answering the phone at work a LOT of fun). So waking up this morning and feeling better than I have in months made me determined not to waste it, just in case it didn't last long.

So, I organized my sock drawer.

Actually, that was just the first of many small, mundane household tasks I did today in the aim of ridding the apartment of some of the dissolute, sickbed feel it has taken on while I've been stringing together various illnesses. Mostly I concentrated on all the things that I usually ignore when I'm cleaning because the apartment will still look clean. (No one but me has to know when it takes a good ten seconds and a few sharp tugs to get my sock drawer open, after all.)

These other tasks included some shredding, some filing of old bills, and packing away the last few bags of items that had been displaced during my skirmish with the bedbugs and had since been languishing in piles in the bottom of the closet. In the process I had to go through items that more or less encompassed my entire year. Here was the envelope of a wedding invitation, there were the sandals I wore on the second date with the Boyfriend. On the top of one pile was the UPS envelope in which the appointment letter to the new job arrived; at the bottom of another was the photo album from my trip to Europe with Sus.

In about three weeks, I am turning 30. I'm a little ambivalent about it, not because I'm having some sort of third-life crisis (What? I'm planning on seeing at least 90), but because 29 has been such an amazing, crazy, jam-packed roller-coaster of a year, and it's not going to be easy to top. It wasn't a perfect year, by any means (I doubt those exist, outside of sports), but I don't regret any of it.* Part of me wouldn't mind at least half a year of relative calm as a follow up (which isn't going to happen anyway, as I'll be apartment hunting soon); part of me wants to see, if my life continues as is, what can possibly happen next.

So that was my productive, if mundane, Saturday, with its high navel-gazing quotient. I need to find a household chore that will spark this amount of brainstorming for my fiction. Also, I should probably clean my place more often.

*Well, maybe I regret drinking out of that water fountain at ballet class, assuming that's how I caught mono. But that's all.

Work Stories

Sat, 30 Jan 10 12:30:00 UT

It's past time that I wrote down some new job stories, huh? This week is a good time to start, since it was certainly the most varied of my work weeks so far. Most of the things here are not tasks I do in a "normal" week -- although I'm starting to think we don't really have normal weeks Uptown, just different levels of urgency.

Monday and Tuesday our housekeeper was out to tend to her sick daughter. Monday we just canceled coffee and tea service, but Tuesday one of the other admins and I attempted to cover them. This resulted in the discovery that I don't know how to make coffee (not a surprise since I don't really drink it). Then, while we were clearing away the dirty cups and saucers, my coworker held up a cup to show me how the saucer was suctioned to the bottom -- at which point the saucer fell off and splashed old coffee all over the kitchen. "This is why we don't make the coffee," she said.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, our chef was out to attend to a family matter of his own, so I helped the housekeeper set things out for lunch. It was mostly just sandwich and salad fixings, plus a few ready made trays of things that the chef had ordered from Fresh Direct before he left, so the prep wasn't that difficult. The biggest problem was making sure we had enough food for the next day (including when I realized at 4:30 Friday afternoon that we didn't have enough for Monday). You have no idea how much food 30 academics are capable of eating in one sitting. Seriously. No idea.

Thursday, the coworker from the coffee incident actually covered the lunch prep while I went downtown to pick up some Very Important checks from the university accounting department (the amounts were too big to be trusted to campus mail), and also wrangle with the Bursar's office over petty cash receipts. (I lost the battle over the restaurant receipts, but did win the skirmishes over the florist and housekeeping staff Christmas presents, which given how nitpicky accounts payable is about receipts lately, was no small feat.) Plus, I got a slice from the Bleecker St. Two Boots. Yum.

My official university purchasing card finally arrived too, so on the way home yesterday I was able to buy a 3.5 lb bag of Jolly Ranchers for our candy dish. This job is a lot of things, but it's certainly not boring.

An Apology to Everyone I've Seen In the Last Month

Wed, 20 Jan 10 10:41:00 UT

Two months shy of my 30th birthday, I have apparently contracted mono. I have not been feeling well since shortly after Christmas, but was pretty sure it was a bad sinus infection (and tonsillitis), as the symptoms were exactly the same as the last sinus infection/tonsillitis combo I had back in college. (In college. Where most people get mono. I am doing this backwards.) I've been feeling so much better since the antibiotics kicked in that I was sure the blood test my doctor sent me to get was just a precaution.

Guess not.

Anyway, I'd like to sincerely apologize to everyone I've been around the last month or so, while thinking I was not contagious. (Unfortunately, as the last month included assorted holiday parties and gatherings, that's almost everyone I know. Of course.) If I get any of you all sick, I'm going to feel way worse than I physically do right now, believe me. And if any of you are hypochondriacs and I have just unnecessarily caused you to go see your doctor for no reason, I apologize for that, too.

The worst part (okay, second worst, after the possibility of becoming Typhoid Mary to my friends and family) is that I was just this week feeling well enough to go back to ballet class, and now I have been advised to avoid any strenuous activity for the time being. Ironically, the leading candidate in the how-the-hell-did-I-contract-mono sweepstakes is the drinking fountain at my dance school, which is pretty much the only place where I might come into regular contact with teenage germs. Guess I'll be bringing my own water once I finally get cleared for exercise again.

Please excuse me while I indulge in a hearty THIS. SUCKS.

A Good Week for the Ladies

Fri, 4 Dec 09 22:53:00 UT

Apparently, if you write for a ladies oriented sports blog and maybe in a past entry one of your writers singled out Tiger Woods as a hottie and included mention of his wife, you can only benefit from any subsequent scandal involving said Tiger and said wife. We've had over 70,000 page views of that entry today. Also, our top search terms for the past few days have all been Tiger Woods related -- except for people looking for "derek jeter" and "adrian peterson."

In (possibly) unrelated developments, my post for this week got highlighted on a NBC Sports blog, which was kind of awesome. I love the little community of loyal readers and commenters we've got at Ladies..., but it's always nice to feel like we're not just ranting on the Internet for our own amusement. Well, we are doing it for our own amusement, but apparently also for other people's, which is gratifying.

I do have new job stories, but I'm saving them for a more relevant post, which will be soon, I promise.

The Final Countdown

Tue, 17 Nov 09 22:44:00 UT

(Y'all are welcome to any hair metal bands or Arrested Development references you want to take from the post title, by the way.)

This is my last week at the old job... and everyone else in the office is in Atlanta for our big conference and won't be in for the rest of the week. I am simultaneously holding down the fort and planning my escape. It's a very weird feeling. On the plus side, I've had a lot of time to reorganize my files for people who aren't familiar with the inner workings of my mind and clean out my secret junk food stash without anyone interrupting.

Of course, I'm also counting down to Thanksgiving vacation, which will mark my first visit back to Oklahoma in 11 1/2 months. I have been obsessing over eating at El Tequila and Taco Bueno so much, The Boyfriend really wants to try them, too. (Not this trip, though, so my OK people can calm down.) Boyfriend also pointed out the other day that my voice changed when talking about the fried mushrooms at Hideaway, but c'mon -- it is fried mushrooms and honey mustard sauce. I'm going to a Homer Simpson place just thinking about them. And my dog! My dog will be there! (Not at the restaurants, obviously.)

Yes, of course there will be people there I want to see, but I can't call/email/Facebook any of the above mentioned things so it doesn't feel like it's been so long. (Besides, 3/5 of the family was here in August. It actually hasn't been so long.) Now I've got myself all worked up and I still have a week to go. Guess I'll just have to go dream about Mexican food.

Today I Was a Good Girl

Thu, 5 Nov 09 17:36:00 UT

Nov 17:I drafted this entry and left it on private so I could come back and check it over and then --oops-- never came to check it. So here it is two weeks late.

I got a flu shot at lunch today (just for seasonal, not H1N1). The university always has them available for students and staff since universities are hotbeds of germs and all. I never got one before because I don't spend a lot of time with the students (and, I'll confess, the last couple of years getting a few days off work, even if I was in bed sick the whole time was not unappealing) -- but with the switching jobs/holiday travel/potential interactions with small children I have coming up over the next several months, it felt like the time to get over my feelings about needles and be responsible about my health, for once.

Anyway, since it was my first flu shot ever, they made me hang around for about ten minutes just in case I had an adverse reaction or something, and while I waited I had my choice of lollipops. Specifically Dum-Dum lollipops, which were the candy my teachers always handed out in elementary school for good behavior. I picked a butterscotch one.

So I sit there enjoying my lollipop, possibly overly alert for any weird physical signs (Ohmigod, is my left arm muscle achy all of a sudden?) and somehow feeling simultaneously six years old and like my own parent.

This feeling only intensifies later, when I force myself to finish all the green beans in my frozen dinner.

Finally!

Wed, 28 Oct 09 23:11:00 UT

Number of jobs I applied for from April 2008-June 2009: approximately 45.

Number of interviews: 3

Number of job offers: 0

Number of jobs I applied for from July 2009 (when I decided to take a break from job searching for six months) through October 2009: 1, on a whim

Number of interviews: 1

Number of job offers: 1

So the new job: still at the university, just an official administrative position (as opposed to "staff") and I'll be working for an independent center within the university. It's a relatively new center, so there's lots of room to grow and figure things out as we go along, which suits me perfectly; it also has it's own endowment, independent of the university, so there are certain perks like the gorgeous Upper East Side brownstone in which I will now be working, and the soon-to-be-hired chef who will be making our common meal for lunch every day. And much of the small staff is closer to my age, which makes it a bit more like the old days at CTE when I was working with Emm and the graduate students.

I don't think the commute will be as bad as it appears: it's obviously further away, and I'll have to change trains, but I can take the 4/5 so I'm hoping it will only be an extra 15-20 minutes, not a full half hour. I'm also excited about being a block from the Met and Central Park, and within walking distance of the 92nd St. Y, which may become my new place for ballet class if it gets to be too difficult to get back to Brooklyn on time on Thursdays.

Anyway, I still have about three weeks left at my current job, which was going to be busy enough with all the events we have coming up, and is now going to include lots of extra planning, organizing, and making sure someone knows how to cover the projects I've been in charge of. I was crazy excited yesterday; today I'm a bit more realistic about how much there is to be done. Still, I'm feeling pretty good about life this week.