Strongly Worded

Sex and the City, Without the Sex

I am back from a long weekend in NYC, and I am full of shame because I do not have much to report, much less really witty observations. I am worried that this blog is becoming one of those boring accounts of my daily activities. You'd be amazed how many blogs just cover day to day events and are deadly for this reason.

But I've been out of the loop for a while, so here are some fascinating highlights of the last few days:

Thursday night: implementation of a stressful, somewhat-high-profile work-related event that I planned. I had to moderate a panel discussion and get the higher-ups to say impressive things about our work. I prepared elaborate talking points for all involved, "planted" questions in the audience, and STILL people said what they wanted to say and did NOT say the things I wanted them to say. In general it was as succesful as it could have been under the circumstances (meaning: my controlling tendencies were curtailed by other people's self-determination), but I wasn't so delighted with it, and afterwards I was told that I "winced" during some of the discussion period, AND that a black couple (big supporters of our work) were denied access to the event by some fascist person standing near the door, so that sucks unbelievably.

Friday-Sunday: a trip to New York City with my mom, aunt, and cousin (visiting from abroad). The trip included a total of about 10 hours in transit, on the lovely Peter Pan bus, which was made bearable only by the best CD I have acquired in a really long time, Hurricane, by Kris Delmhorst. My favorite tracks are 1 and 7. I pretty much listened to these tracks for the first four hours of the trip.

The trip mainly consisted of wandering around various neighborhoods and eating extraordinary amounts of food, including grape gelato at the Laboratorio del Gelato. We also went on a tour of the Lower East Side's Tenement Musuem, which could have been great, but was ruined by "educator's" horrible, horrible narration; the entire tour was essentially a guessing game:

[about hazardous working conditions in the garment industry]: "anyone know why it would be dangerous to lock all the workers in the workshop?"

[about home piecework]: "anyone know why it would be dangerous to operate a hot iron for 12 hours every day in an unventilated apartment?" At least I got a sense of tenement hell.

That's it, really.

When I got home there was a message from the Guy I am Dating: "just wanted to say hi. I know you won't get this until you get back on Sunday, but we met a month ago today, so I'm just remembering that." Sigh. How sweet is that? And yet, also, a little scary: a one-month anniversary is a little like a "first annual" event. We really hope it will become annual.

Posted by Dori at 7:01 AM