Tuesday, March 22, 2005

You know you're tired when...

I saw a bouquet on the front desk this morning. It had a "Happy Birthday" balloon tied to it. I wondered if it were for me. Yeah. A little more coffee's gonna be required.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

You Can Go Home again...

This morning I had to do a site visit in Sunset Park, my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. (By the way, harborfront industrial property is not necessarily where you want to be when it's 20 degrees and the wind is gusting to 50 mph.) However, after we finished walking the area we went up to 39[th Street] Donuts--coffee shop of fame which I believe several of you may have visited when visiting me, if only because Jen and I ate there 4 times a week. I was a little afraid it would be different and in a couple of ways it was: there are new menus and new waitresses, but the chopped steak sandwich tasted just as delicious as always, Mike the fry cook was still there AND he RECOGNIZED ME after 5 years. There were kisses, a chopped steak to take back for Greg and free donuts for my colleague and me. I'm still tickled to no end that he remembered me!

Anyway, I'm off to the homeland tomorrow...I have a flight booked for 7:30 pm (no, I have no idea what I was thinking) so I'll be attempting to fly standby on an 11:15 flight. Cross your fingers for me, folks.

Monday, March 07, 2005

"Historical Context," ever heard of it?

So, this guy from Entertainment Weekly, Chris Nashawaty, reviewed the new release of "Bambi" for NY1, the local news station. He goes off on how it's a wonder that we all weren't scarred for life given the darkness of the movie even before Bambi's mother is shot offscreen (wolves attack, bucks fight, there's a forest fire) and he can't imagine what the Disney people were thinking when they decided to show this much bad stuff to little kids.

Bambi was made in 1942. Ummm, it's pretty likely that the kids in the theaters already knew that the world was a pretty freakin' dark place. After all, a good number of them were living with the definite possiblity that they would have a parent killed, by a gun, offscreen. The point of Bambi is that even when terrible things happen, you can survive and be okay.

Friday, March 04, 2005

Flummoxed once again...

I went to book group last night (I don't know why they changed it to Thursday either.) and the book discussion was fine, but then we got into the "New Super Strain of HIV" discussion--HIV is often a topic when you have an AIDS researcher in the group. Anyone has a question or Rowena does a new conference and we're off and running.

We're all fairly well-educated individuals so imagine the reaction when the one guy in the group asked how women got it if they didn't shoot up since it can only be transmitted through blood. Ummmm...and semen. "It's not in semen!" he exclaimed with belligerent certainty.

I thought the researcher was going to cry simply because this 39-year-old attorney didn't understand what "sexually transmitted disease" meant. Oh, and then, because women are more likely get it than men from heterosexual sex he compounded his stupidity and asked if that's because we have an "open wound".

Suffice it to say, I now know an incredible lot about virus tissue preferences, cell layers in delicate areas, micro-frissions caused by intercourse and the virus killing action of saliva.

Mockery from everyone but the researcher aside, and there was quite a lot of it, it was not one of the more uplifting endings to a book group.