Midnight Recap

I cannot believe I haven’t posted since Monday. Honestly, it doesn’t feel like that many days have gone by but I was actually on my blog today grabbing a link and I saw that my last post was on the 4th! Heavens! One of my many challenge goals was to start posting everyday or almost everyday, but it doesn’t seem like that’s been happening all too often lately.

Among the many things I’ve been doing this week was a trip to Manhattan for the day on Wednesday. Of course, I was working for most of it, though I did manage to snap a few pictures to recap the day.

I start out the day waking up a full hour and a half before I usually wake up, so I groggily shower and dress before grabbing my bag and driving the quarter of a mile to the train station. It’s a thirty-five minute train ride to Penn Station, followed by a five minute walk to the subway station followed by another five minute ride to Rockefeller Center. Timing is never perfect with public transportation and on this particular morning I arrived twenty minutes before our Manhattan office opened. Whenever I work in the city, I always get my breakfast at Pret A Manger, which makes delicious bowls of granola, yogurt and fruit preserves (this particular morning I had mine with blueberries). I added a mango tea to the menu and it’s a healthy yet yummy breakfast. I finished about five minutes before nine o’clock.

Before I head up to the office, I take a couple more pictures of my surroundings:

Sixth Avenue, looking uptown - that’s Radio City Music Hall on the right

The News Corporation Building, which is directly across from my office building

The morning was filled with emails and some blogging pitching followed by lots of research. Finally, around 11:30, I scurried out of the office and headed downtown for my lunch meeting which was the entire reason I was working in the city that day.

However, this wasn’t your typical work meeting. My meeting was about a new blogger project I’m working on with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, so I arrived at Fraunces Tavern and was greeted by some folks from the national office along with Gina Capone, who was there to give her feedback on how JDRF interacts with adults with type 1 diabetes (more details about the project coming soon, I promise!).

Of course, being the shutterbug that I am and keeping the Diabetes 365 project in the back of my mind, I asked one of the staff to snap a picture of Gina and I before we headed back to our respective offices:

After lunch, I hopped on the subway and headed back uptown to finish my afternoon at work. When I left work, it was unseasonably warm out so I decided to stroll down Sixth Avenue towards Penn Station.

On my way, I stumbled on some ridiculously well-dressed and well-groomed fashionistas outside of the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week at Bryant Park. Although the lighting was terrible, I snapped a quick picture as memento. This is probably the closest I will ever get to Fashion Week, and it was certainly an experience looking at so many high-fashion journalists, fashion gurus and socialites all in one place. I didn’t recognize anyone, but there were also throngs of people and it was very dark, so I very well could have been standing near someone famous. I wanted to avoid having my feet smashed by four-inch heels, so I crossed the street before taking a picture

Once I passed by the Fashion Week extravaganza (which is actually held all over Manhattan, I believe), I continued walking along Sixth Avenue, people-watching and window-shopping. These are my two favorite pastimes when I’m in the city. I find it fascinating how you can find such diverse people within such a small area of space. Not everyone is dressed up to the nines, as I could tell from the girl wearing a black fleece, ankle-length jean skirt and sneakers. I do find it fascinating watching people and how they put outfits together. I think that’s why I’m so fascinated by shows like What Not To Wear because there are so many ways to put together a look. There are so many options that you can choose from, which I think for some people is very attractive because oftentimes we don’t have nearly as many options in our day-to-day life. The way you dress is one of the few things you have full control over. Might be why people get so addicted to shopping.

Anyway, that was another adventure of mine in the city that I wanted to share. Now it’s 12:30 a.m. so I should probably crawl into bed. I have so much I need to accomplish this weekend, including cleaning my disastrous apartment (considering I’m hardly here during the week it’s amazing how much it falls apart from weekend to weekend!), return a pair of pants, do a bit of grocery shopping, starting a new freelance project, finish another freelance project, update the Directory (maybe… I’ve been saying that for months and it still hasn’t happened), laundry and call my parents and my best friend and go to an Ethiopian restaurant on Sunday with the New Jersey restaurant group I was telling you all about last month.

Wish me luck getting everything done!

So Much For That.

This week’s Weight Watchers didn’t go so well.

I gained two pounds, which didn’t at all surprise me consider I made cookies over the weekend and ate quite a few of them. I also wasn’t able to make it to the gym as much and went low a few times, so I added all the calories from the juice.

Anyway, I’m okay with it because I’ve just started and the amount of weight I lost last week kind of surprised me, so I don’t know if maybe that was just water weight I lost or what happened. But I’ve still lost a pound and a half, so that’s good. As the leader said, at least you’re still below you’re starting weight.

So I have that.

Oh, and if you haven’t heard, the Giants won. Yes, I watched the game. That was actually why I made the cookies. I brought them off to a little gathering that I went to.

While I am glad we won, it once again reinforced why I don’t watch football. I’m sorry but four hours is way to long to sit around and watch nothing happen. Okay, okay, I know the game was supposedly good, but for someone who is uneducated and unenthusiastic, it was dull. They had the same score for three hours! THREE! The last quarter was great because that’s when people actually started scoring and, like, doing stuff. I just can’t get into this whole throwing, catching, tackling, STOP thing that football has. Too slow. Move it along.

But, uh, yeah. Go Giants. Woot woot.

Fabulous Destiny

Last week I signed up for Netflix, which I have a feeling may be a revolutionary move for me. There are so many movies that I haven’t seen (and I have quite a list of suggestions courtesy of my wonderful friends and readers!) and I am sure I’m going to learn a lot from them.

I just finished watching the movie Amelie for the first time. Even though the movie came out almost seven years ago, I never got around to seeing it. When I was in college, one of my best friends loved the movie and we always planned on watching it together, but for some reason, it just never happened.

Watching Amelie was an interesting experience, I suppose, to put it lightly. I certainly liked it very much, and I had been told (or perhaps warned) that it has rather eccentric characters and a quirky style.

Despite the obvious stark difference between Amelie’s life and my own, throughout the movie I actually started feeling a connection growing between myself and her. I have had these moment before while watching movies, moments that catch me off-guard and I contemplate pausing the movie when my mind starts to wander, these moments where I’m watching a character living in a completely different city with a completely different lifestyle coming from a completely different childhood but I can’t get rid of this pit of my stomach that I am just like her.

Throughout the movie, Amelie struggles to find the courage to approach the person she cares about the most, while casually meddling in the lives of co-workers and complete strangers. I feel like most people are either completely comfortable in approaching people and making friends, they are absolutely terrified about making friends but they’re rather indifferent about people who don’t (to them) matter as much, or they don’t like anyone.

I think I fall in the second category, which may or may not surprise you. I have always, since I was a little girl, had a difficult time making friends. When I was a child I would wait for other children to approach me and invite me to play with them, but I would never ever approach anyone. As I became older, I became more comfortable talking with grown-ups and having conversations with people but I always knew what I was going to say. I think one of the reasons I enjoy making friends with diabetes is because I know how the conversation will go and I’m not as anxious. In the movie, every time I saw Amelie run away from the guy she was falling in love with, I thought about all the times I had done that with people I knew in high school or in college or even now. I thought about how many times I have watched people hanging out or having lunch and wishing I had the nerve to approach them or say something and just turning around and walking away because it was easier.

At the end (I hope you don’t mind me ruining it for you), Amelie is encouraged to take the risk or, as she is warned, her heart will dry up like the skeleton of her elderly neighbor. Taking risks seems to be the theme of my life right now. I know I took a huge risk in coming here, and I sometimes wonder if the risk was worth it.

The actual title of the movie, in French, is “Fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain, Le” which mean “The Fabulous Destiny of Audrey Poulain.” I love that title because I feel like all of our lives have this fabulous destiny that we’ll have if we just take the risk to find it.