Sometimes it's okay to just chill...

First big snow of the year and I'm hanging in tonight.  I had to work this morning at TruTV and was planning on getting a little Christmas shopping done at the holiday markets until this happened: 

 

So then, I was compelled to go straight to DSW and spend what I would have spent on shoes for the Nicaragua trip on a new pair of boots.  This is not the first time this week I've had a wardrobe malfunction either.  I was sitting on the edge of my bed putting socks on before I left for work and one over zealous lift of my leg caused me to rip the jeans I was wearing in an unfortunate place.  And of course, this led to me changing said pants but forgetting to retrieve my apartment keys from my front pocket.  Hence leaving the apartment without my keys for the first time in a long time.

There are times when rushing around does me good and I'm able to cram a lot into one day (just the other day I managed to wake up early enough to squeeze in a voice over audition and still get to work on time and didn't have to eat out for dinner that day because I had prepared way in advance...never mind that I'm pretty sure this was the same day I forgot my keys) but there are other times when I just feel like life is catching up with me and I just need to chill for a bit to regroup.

Like today.  I just bought those shoes and came home because I figured I deserved a break...and some gluten free beer and home cooking.  Although, I did swing through the market at Columbus Circle for a look.  I only stayed long enough to get a pile of snow dropped on my head from the roof of one of the stalls just for standing in one spot for too long.  That and the slushy slippery snow accumulating on the walk between stalls convinced me it was time to just give up, go buy new boots and go home.

And sometimes it takes a while to quell the noise in my head telling me that, just because I have some downtime that I should be making the most of it by advancing one or more of the projects I have on the docket but then, I realize that I'm home and I'm tired and I've been working like a dog.  I haven't had a day off since Thanksgiving weekend and I won't have one off until Christmas.  I have even been squeezing in more voice over auditions to prove to myself that there's no reason to slack off there and that even a little bit of progress is worthwhile.  So maybe, I should just take a break.  Right?

I've even talked about this before on some level, I'm sure.  How it's important to put downtime on your to do list.  So, here I am, enjoying my downtime. And what do I do?  I pick up my guitar, put on some Smashing Pumpkins to reminisce and then text a friend to see what he's up to.

Blurb #27

I must be insane…that or I'm determined to never have a quiet trip to Philadelphia.  I have to leave work early and catch a train at Penn Station and hope that this weather will do no more than wet my guitar case a little.  They are calling for snow though.  Wish me luck at Lacy's concert tonight!

2 years gone...

I've been in NYC for 2 years exactly today. The time really feels like it flew by when I look back and it also sort of snuck up on me, too, this date. But I don't want to spend too much time thinking on it. I've got a lot to think about as far as what's coming up this next year and I think I'll spend a good bit of time tonight on my next steps. Once Collapsing Elbows' score is really finished, instructions for electronics and improvisational sections included, it's time to start rehearsing with Tania. Soon I'll have that laptop and I'll start working on new electronic music incorporating the guitar and the ideas should flow like wine. Soon the website will be up and I'll feel like I can really start to push the voice over thing. But before any of this can happen, I feel like I need to sleep for 10 hours and have a real day off before I burn out.

Incidentally, speaking of voice over, I did my first reading test at Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic last Wednesday and tomorrow I should have some idea of how I did. I'm going in for another volunteer session at 3:30pm, something I'm going to be doing every Wednesday from now on. When I can. In two Wednesdays, Lacy is coming up and we're going to jam on some of her songs and bounce ideas off each other for live performance. So that'll be fun.

On another unrelated note, I do still remember to take pictures of my experiences up here, just so you know. The problem is remembering to post them. That and they're almost exclusively taken with my phone. But here are a few from the past month:

Misc. Jan-Feb

I was thinking about it and it might just be that I'm not a tourist so much anymore. Or I could be just so pressed for time these days that stopping to take pictures of beautiful and interesting things is not always the first thing on my agenda. When I first moved here and I had buckets of free time, it was no problem to just hop the train up to Prospect Park or some Manhattan neighborhood I hadn't yet visited on my day off and take the camera with me. But now, not so much. Also, factor in that the camera I own now is a bit bulkier than a point-and-shoot, albeit much nicer. It became a hassle to remember to bring it with me on my every day trips into the city.

Either way, as you'll see from this album, and though I may have expressed sentiments to the contrary, snowfall still warrants pictures due to the lingering novelty of it all. I think I'm ready for spring however. We're about to hit a record amount of snowfall for a winter season here in the city and it's all banking on how much the next one drops on us.

Right now it's raining and the piles of muddy crusty slimy snow and ice are slowly shrinking and dark brown mud is covering everything. Also, bits of flotsam and jetsam are slowly being revealed as the ice disappears. On my walk to the subway to head home in the mornings, there is a car that has been parked on 15th Street halfway between 8th and 9th Avenues on the north side of the street for several months now. It was never dug out which leads me to believe it was abandoned. There's also the fact that it's full to the brim with newspapers and trash and covered in graffiti. I'm not sure why this car is so intriguing to me but seeing it get completely buried and then slowly emerging again like all the other trash in the city just gives a measure to the scope of how dirty this city can get. Maybe it could serve as some kind of extended metaphor for our own personal problems and how hard it is to truly bury them. The ice will always melt and reveal what it was hiding underneath.

So, I'm not really sure where I'm going with that but it does lead me to something I've been thinking of lately. How sometimes you just have to let go of things from your past, old behaviors and things you clung to, even old relationships that no longer function or have run their course. Maybe in order to make room for new things or to get out of old patterns. But ultimately, they'll keep coming back to stare you in the face unless you sincerely do let go...as opposed to just burying them under the ice.

That's enough profundity for this morning. I should get back to work. I promise to reveal my new website soon...and even sooner you may all be able to buy some of my music. More on that later. Goodbye for now.

Snow over your head...

I really have never seen this much snow on the ground in person in my entire life...I'm pretty sure. Winter of '88 was pretty bad and we were almost stuck in upstate NY in the ugliest conversion van in the world but this might top that. Especially vis a vis my inconvenience from the storm as compared with '88. There was the time I went to Niagara Falls in March but these were 4 foot snow drifts and there was almost no inconvenience to me except for the biting cold as the storm had already passed by the time we got to the Buffalo area.

I'm currently watching people shoveling in vain outside my window against some of the largest snow drifts I've ever seen. 3 to 5 feet. Just think about that. Last night on the way to work it had gotten pretty bad, maybe up to about a foot and the L train was delayed half an hour when I got to Union Square, so I thought, "screw that! I can make it to the west side in less than a half an hour. I could have made it in 15 if not for the massive amount of snow I had to trudge through and the automatic slow down effected by gargantuan wind gusts that get worse the closer you get to the Hudson River. All in all, it took me about 20, plus trip to the Duane Reade to pick up a snack for work. I had to go back underground at one point and use the tunnel at 6th Avenue and 14th Street. See, the 6th Avenue lines are connected to the 7th Avenue lines at 14th Street by a tunnel that goes the length of the avenue block. Convenient too because I got to go on to the L train platform while I was down there and check to make sure the countdown clock at Union Square wasn't broken. Sure enough, it still said around 29 minutes until the next 8th Avenue bound train. Of course this little excursion cost me a swipe of my metro card but, hey, that's why I buy an unlimited monthly pass...for times like these.

After getting to work, I proclaimed that I now hated snow...but I still had the commute home, little did I know. And it didn't stop all night long. My co workers were in and out all night and everyone seemed to be working a worse shift than me, some were working 12 hour shifts and crashing at the Maritime Hotel across the street (where NY1 puts us up in times like these) only to come back a few hours later. Me, I just had to stay until 8am, an extra hour.

When I left, I couldn't believe how much added snow there was. Even from the windows of the break room on the 6th floor it didn't look that high. The roads weren't even plowed all that well yet and there seemed to be almost no one out. And the wind. I had missed the worse of it being inside during the height of the storm. But there were still leftover gusts every once in a while. The highest recorded gust was 59 mph and I even overheard on NY1 that there was thunder snow! I guess that means someone reported hearing thunder while it was snowing...still sounds cool as hell though.

Anyway, I braced for a terribly slow train ride home but was met with probably the worst relative platform wait in the history of train riding. I managed to get the F to Jay St. and I transferred using the new connection to the R train(I couldn't have gone down to 4th Avenue/9th Street because all Coney Island bound trains that go above ground had been cancelled). After about half an hour waiting for that damned R train at Metro Tech, I started to curse out loud. In the strangest of coincidences though, I was in earshot of an MTA employee who overheard me saying to another straphanger that I'd been waiting for 30 #$@#$^! minutes. So she whips her radio out of her tool bag and calls the dispatcher to find out where the train was. Two stops away at Whitehall St., the last stop in Manhattan. It's almost 9am at this point, but I calm myself. There was after all, no other way to get home. I had even poked my head above ground to see what the cab situation was. There was no cab situation. There was no anything situation. The roads in downtown Brooklyn were nowhere near plowed and there was a smattering of people trudging through the middle of the street looking more bewildered than me who had been up all night.

When the R finally came, I hopped on and we lumbered out of the station, me thinking, "can this train go any slower?" One stop away from 25th Street at Prospect Avenue, the train conductor announces train traffic and says we'll be moving shortly. Then I hear the hum of the train's engines wind down, which usually mean, shortly isn't shortly at all. I waited a minute, then with an audible curse jumped up and walked out of the train. For a moment, I thought I might get some kind of overheard information, as the same MTA employee from the platform at Lawrence St. was out on the platform too, asking the brakeman what was up. But having little patience, I ejected myself through the turnstiles and began to scale the snow encrusted stairs out of the subway. And this is about what I saw when I came up:

Even More December Snow 2010

I even snapped a few more of the courtyard so you could see a comparison from last night's photos.

I slept until about 3:30 this afternoon, which doesn't sound like much but I'm rested and I think I want to go outside and snap some more photos the Canon camera before it's totally wrecked. Maybe I'll go to Prospect Park. Although it is windy out there. Very windy.

Blurb #22

Snow is now piling up on the window screens so that I can no longer watch the accumulation from inside. I just have to guess what it's doing out there. It started around 9:30 this morning, or shortly after. That's when I first woke up and there was no snow on the ground. Two hours later there was about two inches and it was picking up quite a bit. I keep hearing lines from "Let it Snow" in my head, mainly because it doesn't show signs of stopping, but also because I actually do have some corn for popping (been doing it on the stove top with olive oil, salt and pepper). There is no fire but last night's at Dawn's house was delightful. Unfortunately, I don't have "no place to go" (proper use of double negative, ha!) since I have the overnight shift tonight. I have to work an extra hour tomorrow morning too because of all the extra coverage the station does.

I tried going out in the snow earlier to take some photos and maybe grab a tea at Has Beans, the coffee shop up the street but I couldn't make it. It was just too windy and my camera was soaked. But here are the pics I took:

More snow December 2010

New Apartment...

There's a line in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey is narrating after he dies in the end of the movie that I love. Living here for the last few years in a city that I love I feel like I know exactly what his character means. The line is:

"...it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry...You will someday."

(Gotta love it when they post the scripts on the internet...makes it so much easier to quote)

I'm especially talking about the beginning when he talks about feeling like he's seeing it all at once. I get that way about the things I want to do and experience, specifically. As in, I want to do everything, be awake every second of the day (probably the reason why I've stayed up for 24 hours straight the past few Sundays with choir rehearsal and the overnight shift). I think up all this stuff at once and realize I have no time to fit it all in unless I don't sleep and even then, I still couldn't do everything...then I remember to let go. Let the experiences come to me, as it were. There's just too much to do and if I get to experience any of it, it should be enough. I tend to just stop at these moments and try to take in what's around me and how awesome that is, whatever it is. Tonight it was leaving the diner with the snow coming down and saying goodbye to my friend, thinking how a a little less than a year ago, I was wondering when I would find that routine and start to have things like yoga and friends, late night diner food, a consistent paycheck and medical benefits, places I like to hang out and being able to make plans with friends to go hang out there. I remember all those lonely months of trolling around New York by myself with a camera, chronicling it all, a perpetual live-in tourist. Now, I feel like I'm really living here, a resident New Yorker, a Brooklynite.

Right now it's snowing, accuweather.com says for tomorrow's forecast simply, "blizzard," and I'm loving it. Between being home in Raleigh last week (fun trip by the way) and diving back into work right away, apartment hunting and carrying on with choir rehearsal in the morning and then an overnight shift and no sleep between the two...I'm having the time of my life still but I feel like my head is going to explode, or maybe all of me is. Thankfully, most of that stuff is done and I get a day long reprieve from work to keep such head exploding shenanigans at bay a little while longer.

Yes, you heard me. Apartment hunting is all but done. We applied for a place last night. A huge relief that was almost dashed by the fact that someone swiped up that apartment while our paperwork was processing. Luckily, there was another unit available in that same building, one that we had tried to get into with the broker the night before but couldn't. Two in fact were open but one was a 5th floor walk-up and was considerably smaller with a bit of an awkward layout. So Katrina went by today in her off time and checked it out for us, then relaying the information to me. Hopefully, this one will go over without any issues.


View Larger Map

The location is a bit farther south than I'd like but it's a step up from where I am now in terms of proximity to things (not necessarily work...I have to take three trains now instead of two, unless I want to take a local train the whole way...and no matter what, the commute is actually longer). It is, however, and most importantly, cheap enough that it is going to save me over $400 from what I'm paying in my current place. It's still settling in that I've paid my last rent check to my landlord here. What a relief.

Tomorrow is my day off and we should have about 10" of snow on the ground. I'll likely try and return some library books and get out and photograph some of the snow for you. Indulge in my hobbies so to speak and just relax for a day now that I can. In a few weeks though, we'll have to move of course, so that'll be interesting...the fate of my piano, notwithstanding. Still haven't fully decided if I'll keep it, donate it or try to somehow sell it. I'll probably keep it. I was saying to a friend the other day that the longer this thing stays with me the more attached to it I'll become and therefore the more obliged I'll feel to take it with me places.

Anyway, here are some pics as requested by some of you of the place. These are all taken by the agency and some are of similar units, not necessarily the one we're looking at.

First New Apartment pics

So, that's what's been going on. Apartment hunting which, if I chronicled it, I'd be here typing all night, working overnight shifts, visiting Raleigh, attending yoga, and anticipating snow. With any luck, I'll have time to shoot some snow pics tomorrow before it gets trampled and turns into icy gray muck. Good night for now.

New piece

Day after Christmas. Since I last blogged we did get our wallop of snow, right after I did the overnight shift Friday night. I woke up out of my 7 hour afternoon nap around 3:30 and looked out to see it had started. It didn't let up all day or night and it was quite a sight. By nighttime it had become a beautiful, fluffy and sparkly kind of snow that blew into artful looking snow drifts up and down the streets. I went to two separate parties, one in Astoria with friends of Karishma and then another back in the adjacent neighborhood of Park Slope with a friend from church. Trains were running slower and trudging was the watchword street level.

Both parties were great fun and I got to meet some new people at both. The second one entailed playing rock band with people I had just met...which is usually fun. That night was no exception.

The next morning, no one had mentioned to me that the choir would not be singing in church and would be using their rehearsal time to work on music for the Christmas Eve service, the service I could not sing in due to my inability to attend rehearsals. Maybe next year. Either way, I was really wishing I could have slept in after all of that gallivanting around Saturday night. But it happens and it was still a good service despite not singing with the choir. Four of us, in fact, sat together in the pews and sang in parts to the startlement of those around us who weren't expecting us to be wedged into the congregation as such.

I'm still poking at the piece of music that I'm composing for the ensemble. It's all for lack of inspiration at the moment. I decided to compose something like an Alleluia and I have an opening motive and some rhythmic motives and a basic structure in mind...but it's always the same. You hear it in your head when you're in one place, far away from instruments or paper and the only thing that remains of it when you finally do get paper or an instrument is the basic rhythmic idea. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you just have to accept that certain ideas never make it out of your head entirely before their corrupted or altered by time and the infinity of variation that abounds in the trials of writing but that corruption and alteration can often lead to something far more inspiring than what came before. This is all, of course, relative and opinionated. Like, how do I know it's more inspiring than my original idea? All I'm really trying to say is that your first idea, the purest idea that's in your head and the onset of musical inspiration, almost never comes out like you thought it would in that moment. I suppose it's more important that something does come out at all.

It's not as though I have complete and total writer's block though. I'm happy to report, in fact, that I spent the better part of the past few days diving back into a minimalist piece that I started months ago in Astoria. I set a teapot down on my cousin's stove top and the water splashing around inside made the most amazing rhythm...or at least the start of the most amazing rhythm and I finished out the rest of it in my head and while patting it out on my thighs and chest (this is something I do, probably to the complete vexation of those who spend a great deal of time around me). After letting some melodies and rhythmic ideas bounce around my head for a part of that afternoon, I did the most rudimentary of pre compositional planning and even composed some of it but left it sitting for the entire summer. Now I've extended it, come up with new ideas and even revamped my original idea for orchestration to include electric guitar and some electronics (samples and a drum track). This should be fun. I think I'm going to shoot for a healthy length and submit it to the Bang on a Can festival...the deadline is January 15th. That's close but hey, I'm pretty inspired now.

At any rate, the snow, which was actually mostly gray slush and desultory piles of crunch by mid week this week, is all melting now with the rain coming in now. I got loads of work next week at both jobs and I'm spending New Year's Eve working the overnight shift. Hopefully, I'll find some way to get it all of my work done on this piece.

With that, I'm going to go and probably do a little more work on it. Good night.

Blurb #16

Waiting for the sky to open up. It's supposed to snow a handful tonight and tomorrow, lucky us. This may not be that first "wallop" I predicted but it'll be substantial I think. At any rate, I work my first overnight tonight but not before I go into the city for dinner with a friend. Last night was a fun time. I was invited to the Technicolor Christmas party and brought a friend. There was free food and booze, gambling, Karaoke and a raffle...from which I won a nice portable DVD player. Good time was had by all. This is actually 2 out of 4 Christmas parties that I am planning on attending. Two in one night tomorrow night. Should be a blast. As always.

Just wanted to drop a blurb on you guys since I've only got a few minutes. Here's a pic that represents the extent of my getting into the Christmas spirit: