I get email. Too much email. So much, I don’t open most of it. But as part of my job, on the marketing side of things, I write and send emails pitching our product: events with networking and panel discussions. I need potential attendees to open and read those emails. How do I do that?

The crucial first step is to assign an email a subject that makes someone want to open it. As a brainstorming exercise, I collected emails to me that I opened. Then I ranked the subjects of the emails based on the likelihood I'd open them. (I excluded automated order/reservation/delivery confirmation emails.) By extension, I can imagine that other folks may open emails for similar reasons.

In the examples below, the name before the colon is the email’s From field; the text after the colon is the subject line. I’ve highlighted the key word(s) for me in the examples.

1. A personal email sent from a friend or coworker.
2. A non-personal email with a person's name I know in the subject. Most Facebook messages fall into this category; I like to see what people are writing about my status, photo, link, etc. Many LinkedIn messages fall into this category, too.
3. A non-personal email with the name of a brand, event or artist I know in the subject.
   Examples:
   • Gilt Group: Woolrich, PF Flyers, Allegri, Shipley + Halmos, Kid Robot and LNA and more Starts Today at Noon ET
   • Friends of Laphroaig: Laphroaig® Scotch at the New Jersey Whisky Classic
   • The Museum of Modern Art: February Membership Happenings
   • openhousenewyork: OHNY in 2010
   • New York Magazine: Renewal Alert!
   • David Byrne: HERE LIES LOVE: THINGS TO COME
   • The Main Squeeze Orchestra: 2009 Holiday Show, Sunday Dec 20th
4. A non-personal email with a general topic I know in the subject.
   Examples:
   • TastingTable NYC: Get cult pork before the chefs do
   • TastingTable NYC: Brooklyn-made bourbon, fresh off the still
   • New York Magazine: An App For Your Appetite
   • UrbanDaddy: This Scotch Has Your Name on It | Sponsored Love
   • Crate and Barrel: Making spirits (the drinking kind) brighter. Free Shipping details...

Conclusions:

I will, on occassion, open an email like this one. But not as many as I’d have guessed:

• Barnes & Noble: 25% Coupon, Plus 50% Off More than 50 Books

It’s too open-ended. Maybe I’ll at least click-through to see what those 50 books are. Maybe.

The obvious conclusion is that names are key. Topics may be important to me but I’m more likely to open an email with a name I know. I will open an email if I know the sender, I know a name in the subject line or I’m at least familiar with a name in the subject line. An ideal email promotion for my purpose might be a testimonial email that I assign a stalwart in the industry to send on my behalf (to his own contact list and/or my contact list). Or a subject line in my own email promotions could include the most-popular names of the speakers at the event being promoted.

This is one reason why people in my department are leery about taking vacation.

[Redacted]:

Hope you’re having a good vacation!

There’s a homeless guy named Curtis living in your cubicle now. He’s usually in the kitchenette pawing through the recycling bin or down in Battery Park drinking 40s with Gregg.

But when he’s here, he’s drying his socks on your monitor and napping under your desk. He’s so lazy. John assigned him the next two cover designs for Forum but all we’ve seen are some rough sketches he made on the bottom of an empty pizza box. Michael thinks he has promise and has taken to calling him “Curtains.”

We all miss you, except for Curtains, who hopes a terrible accident befalls you so he can clear off your desk and turn your cubicle into a fort.

Who knows where the time goes but my life sounds even more impressive¹ when weeks worth of greatest hits are edited and compressed into an entry. Have I learned my lesson? Will I resume updating daily? Let’s hope so. Hold on as I whisk you back to that magical month of November 2008.

On Halloween, I bade farewell to Inwood and moved into a new one-bedroom apartment in a mostly Caribbean neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’m on Eastern Parkway a few blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park and various peeps. I can see the Empire State Building from my bed and I’m still trying to get Raul the Lazy Super to fucking install my required apartment-to-front-door intercom/buzzer. Otherwise I’d invite you over in a heartbeat.

On Monday, November 3rd, I happened upon a great New York City stand-up storytelling competition staged by a nonprofit group I’d never heard of before, The Moth. Admission is only $6 and I’ll be attending more of these, for sure. A topic is agreed upon beforehand; at the show I attended, in the crowded basement of Union Hall, it was appropriately “sweat&rdquo). Participants independently develop a five-minute routine mentioning the topic or incorporating it as a subject. The night of the show 10 of them are picked at random from the audience to take the stage and perform; some stories are straight-up personal recollections and most are styled like comedy bits. Judges vote on each participant. Great fun.

The next day, some guy was elected President. I had pizza and beer.

On Thursday, November 6th I waited in an around-the-block line to catch a free Comedy Central “Comedy Hour” taping of a Jo Koy standup routine. His ethnic jokes bored me but I enjoyed immensely the pussy and dick jokes that dominated the second half of his set; they made me laugh those cathartic laughs that purge crankiness and worry from my system.

That weekend, I ate the best jelly donut ever, and you can only get one starting at 8:00 a.m. on weekends at the Trois Pommes patisserie on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, one of Ed Levine’s possibly top-three bakeries in New York City. They go quickly but while they’re available in a small basket on the counter, they’re still warm and filled with a homemade-tasting raspberry jam. They cost $3 each and they’re worth it. I bit into mine with vigor and blasted powdered sugar all over my hooded sweatshirt.

Later the same morning, Saturday, November 8th, I traveled to Edgewater, New Jersey for the annual bluefin tuna carving ceremony at Mitsuwa Marketplace. The crowd there pressed forward around a team of men armed with extremely sharp knives to buy the fattiest cuts of the 400-pound specimen as soon as they were cut. The fish’s head was planted in an ice-filled red plastic bucket to the side where people posed for photos with it. Later I learned that although bluefin is among the world’s finest and exclusive fish for sushi (I ate some at Mitsuwa from a bluefin carved earlier and it was amazing), it’s an imperiled species and that I shouldn’t have enjoyed myself as much as I did. I made amends on our drive back to New York by stopping at the amazing Philippine Bread House in Jersey City and eating an ensaymada, a traditional Filipino slow-death method via five ounces of donut-like pastry that’s fried, sugared and topped with cheese. So bad, yet so good!

On November 10th, I tracked down the small, great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant I knew was somewhere in my neighborhood, Chavella’s.

I now know this about Tony- and Academy Award-winning playwright/screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, who I heard November 11th in an interview onstage with New Yorker editor David Remnick: if I took a whiskey shot for every time Stoppard said “as it were,” I would be drunk. But: despite being wickedly smart and well-read, he’s funny and self-deprecating, uncomfortable talking about himself, a topic that arose often about his new translation of Chekov’s play, The Cherry Orchard. I plan to see it after it opens at the BAM Harvey Theater on January 2nd. Stoppard said he’s striving to make it conversational and incorporate contributions from the actors to improve its familiarity. But amid talk of great Russian authors and the challenges translating them, I was most excited by Stoppard’s lowbrow revelation that he not only contributed uncredited dialogue for Sean Connery’s and Harrison Ford’s characters in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but that the idea for the “leap of faith” invisible-bridge challenge was his.

On Monday, November 17th, my boss and eight other people in my office got laid off so the company could save money. But I don’t want to detail that here because you never know who reads what on the internet. Which reminds me: my company is swell and I certainly don’t plan on stealing a bunch of office supplies when we move down to 120 Broadway in mid-December.

That night, I saw Iron & Wine in a sold-out show at Terminal 5. I enjoyed Mr. Beam (and his sister, who sang harmony). He’s a funny guy who’s still in some awe that he can draw such a crowd. He playfully chided the crowd for bursting out into applause as soon as he hit a chord, pausing to say something like, “That’s just one chord! You guys don’t know what song it is!” I was happy he played two of my current favorites, “Resurrection Fern” and “Boy With a Coin,” and he encored on the acoustic with “Trapeze Singer.” I enjoyed his acoustic stuff more than I did the full-band jamboree. Also, I was curious to get to the bottom of the point in his web bio that “[i]n conversations with Sam while mixing The Shepherd’s Dog, he confessed to finding spiritual inspiration in Tom Waits’ pièce de résistance, Swordfishtrombones.” That’s one of my favorite Waits albums but I didn’t notice many connections other than the songs-as-stories and a pleasing amount of marimba.

I organized a Brooklyn bowling outing on Saturday, November 22nd at Melody Lanes in Sunset Park². I like this place and not just because the decor can be summed up by the digit 1989: the music is loud and mostly bad. And there was a young boy at the lane next to ours inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones. Also, I am happy to report that Al, New York City’s Angriest Bartender, remains just that. At least to me. Here’s what happened when I ordered a pitcher of Bud. Al poured it and set four plastic cups on the bar.

Jason

Thanks. But I’m with a group, so I’ll need eight cups.

Al

[testily] I can’t give you eight cups. You’ll have to order another pitcher and I can give you four more.

Jason

[pause] O.K., I’ll take two pitchers.

Al

Or I can give you these eight smaller cups instead of the four large ones.

Jason

O.K., let’s do that.

Al

So, two pitchers of Bud.

Jason

Well, if I get eight cups, I’ll just take the one pitcher for now.

Al

[exasperated] One pitcher, two pitchers! Make up your mind!

Everyone else in the group who made a drink run reported Al was nothing but pleasant. Short and squat, resplendent in his giant ’80s eyeglasses, red suspenders and slicked-back silver hair. But pleasant, so I guess being surly with me was enough. Later, when I returned to him for another flagon of Bud, he claimed he was out of pitchers and that I’d have to bring him back an empty one.

The next night, I caught the seldom-screened and exceptionally low-budget UK punk documentary from 1982, Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed, which I enjoyed, especially the concert-riot sequences, as well as all of the angst and acne in the talking-head segments featuring Q&A with and concert footage from groups including the U.K. Subs, the Cockney Rejects and the Stiff Little Fingers, and the likes of influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.

On Monday, November 24th, I bought decor and other apartment stuff at the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a pleasant pit stop at LeNell’s, the best liquor store in the city. LeNell Smothers is a charming Southern woman who poured me several wine samples while a Hank Williams song played. I purchased from her a bottle of Four Roses Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey for purposes of making my own bacon-infused bourbon, plus a pricey jar of genuine marasca cherries from Luxardo for assorted cocktail-development purposes.

I had a deliciously extensive Thanksgiving dinner at Jimi and Will’s newish apartment in Washington Heights. I learned I am not so great at playing Mario Kart Wii. I also made a cranberry relish recipe I clipped from the November 12th issue of The New York Times and it was delicious but next time: less onion.

And the next evening, Friday, November 28th, I finally made it into wunderkind chef David Chang’s reservations-difficult, 14-seat East Village restaurant, Momofuku Ko, thanks to the persistence of my dining companion, Sherry. Upon review, I see my notes on this disintegrate because I can’t read Sherry’s handwriting well, or mine, really; we each ordered the wine-pairing option, which amounted to often a full glass of expertly complemented wine, champagne or sake served with each course. All 13 of them.

And I don’t believe I understood a word the sommelier said. For example, describing a red amid a string of incomprehensible adjectives and Spanish and maybe Spanish adjectives, I picked up on the keyword Mendoza and said brightly to Sherry, “That’s in Spain, right?”³ when what I was actually wondering was “Wasn’t that the name of one of the bad guys in Dirty Harry?”⁴ Surely Sherry, the oenophile among us, did a lot of slow, incredulous head shaking.

Chang’s fixed-price menu, which isn’t printed publicly, changes often, so every day the courses are conceivably unique. We started with some sort of fancy pork rind; a neat cube of moist, peppered biscuit; and a non-jumbo shrimp with tomato chutney. I’m missing some matter in the descriptions there, and some ingredients, but let’s get to the big stuff. The pinnacle was the daikon soup with chunks of lamb belly, fried lily palm and fried purple mustard greens, paired with a Pinot Noir. Sherry said she wanted to lick her bowl after that transcendeliciousness but gave decorum the nod. The most beautiful dish, a smoked hen egg, its yolk broken and burst onto the plate, came garnished with a generous constellation of caviar, fingerling potato chips and sous vide onions and scallions.

Next: hand-torn pasta, cubes of snail sausage and pecorino cheese. Then: monkfish with uni and mitsuba. And: something with pine nuts and lychees topped with finely shaved foie gras which was of velvet-textured tastiness despite me not remembering what it even was.

With the plating of the most pedestrian course—roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts and mushrooms;—we were both very, very full (also: drunk; in retrospect, the stop at Decibel for sake and shochu beforehand was unnecessary). But we had one more entrée to go. It would have top-ranked had we not perceived our corpulence to be approaching that of Henry VIII’s: large shavings of beef cheeks that had been braised for 36 hours, mitake mushrooms and charred jalapeños.

Done? Not yet: two dessert courses arrived with glasses of Muscat champagne and sherry, respectively: mandarin orange sorbet with juniper and segments of bitter orange (mouth-wateringly sweet and sour) and pretzel ice cream (is that correct? or even possible?) with a yogurt-Granny Smith sauce and tiny spheres of deep-fried cheddar cheese. The pleasurable and unusual dining experience flew by and we were at Ko more than two hours; in fact, we literally closed the place.

A few days later I realized the Asian guy behind the counter the whole time whom I’d assumed was David Chang was, in fact, David Chang, which made me wonder whether I should have engaged him in conversation deeper than discussion of Mitchell, one of his chefs, and how he tried to break into the restroom while I was in there.

Update, 3:40 p.m. Hold up: Sherry reports that the guy I thought was David Chang may have been Peter Serpico, shown here. We may never know.

Also: David Chang likes Bob Dylan. The restaurant’s soundtrack is supplied by his personal iPod and I counted no fewer than five Dylan songs amid the shuffle of Joy Division, Public Enemy, Elton John, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young, Jurassic 5, Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive,” and a song named “We Here” from some group from Singapore that Sherry liked.

And that’s not even all I did on my Summer Vacation, I mean, November. But that’s all I’m writing about. Because I don’t tell all. Also, I’m tired. Could I have a more exciting month? Oh, probably. Bring it, December.

Trois Pommes

• 260 Fifth Ave. (near Garfield Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 230-3119
• Meal 45 of 52: a jelly donut ($3) and a coffee ($2).

Chavella’s

• 732 Classon Ave. (between Park Place and Prospect Place), Brooklyn
• (718) 622-3100
• Meal 46 of 52: quesadilla flor de calapaza (cactus flower) ($4.50), a giant bowl of rice pudding ($4.25) and two Pacificos ($4.00 each).

Momofuku Ko

• 163 First Ave. (between 10th and 11th Streets)
• (212) 500-0831
• Meal 47 of 52: a bunch of mind-blowing food and drink ($150)

¹ I know! I didn’t think it was possible, either! [back]
² I am not forgetting my Manhattan-based brethren and will plan an outing with y’all soon. My life is torn; a children’s book written about me would be a tender tale entitled Jason Has Two Boroughs. [back]
³ No. [back]
⁴ No. [back]

About half of today’s college students are willing to sacrifice career satisfaction for a bigger paycheck, according to a survey taken by Experience, Inc., a Boston-based career services company.

From an article in today’s Boston Globe, “Half of college students going for the paycheck, says study.”

I flew to Miami early this morning on business. Behind the hotel at which I’m staying downtown, two tugboats, one at each end of a giant barge, nudged the vessel into into place—they’re dredging the river to improve its use as a shipping channel. I thought this would involve a complex underwater procedure—robots, maybe. But no: there is an excavator sitting on the barge, its boom angling into the water to scoop up sediment. Not as exciting as I’d have thought.

On a nightstand in my room at the DoubleTree in Southern California is a plastic-sealed Sani-Cloth HB germicidal disposable wipe, next to which is a survey card, placed there “to understand the importance of providing a remote control disinfecting wipe to our guests.”

I am not picky with business-travel hotel rooms. I’ve stayed at places for less than $40 a night, places with carpet best described as “mangy” and furniture you couldn’t give away on craigslist. When I travel for business, I require a bed, a bathroom and quietude. That’s it. Germ content, much less that of my remote control, doesn’t enter my mind. I’d say I’ve given more thought to the following elements of hotel room cleanliness, although more as flights of fancy than concerns of an obsessive hand-washer.

• fecal matter content of comforter and chair cushions
• urine residue content of ice bucket and coffee carafe
• entertainingly contagious fungi thriving in tub
• mite population of pillows and mattress
• those three black hairs of indeterminate origin, clinging to the sides of the sink

A helpful tip: while charging a digital camera battery, leave the camera's battery hatch door open. This inspires one to remember to put the battery back into the camera. In theory.

I managed to toss my camera, battery hatch open and empty, into my suitcase during a preflight haze before dawn this morning. Now in Southern California, I realize my camera's battery is still merrily charging away back in New York City.

On the plus side, I had In-N-Out Burger for lunch. Just don't expect any photos like before.

When I.T. Guy switched out my eye-cancer-causing CRT at work with a brand new 19-inch Dell flat screen monitor, I was amused to note a new benefit: the extended area in which to clutter my desktop with stray files. In my photo, note the barren area on the right third of my desktop. Not for long will it stay that way!

I spend the majority of my waking life sitting in a cubicle. Also, I can’t think of anything more exciting to write about. So here is my cubicle credo.

• I believe cubicles are not meant for establishing one’s identity. Any figurines, dolls, stuffed animals and other toys perched on or in a cubicle should be stored at home in the cubicle dweller’s basement, near the remains of his unhappy, attention-starved childhood.
• I believe a spartan desktop indicates someone with too much time on his hands or a position in upper management.
• I believe in a pile system, one that extends from credenza to floor, draping every horizontal surface like luxuriant Spanish moss.
• I believe that if a tidy cubicle can serve its occupant as a metaphor for a well-prioritized and disciplined mind, I am allowed to claim that my pile system and strewn paperwork represent productive precipitation from my frequent “brainstorms.”
• I believe in displaying a cherished family photo in my cubicle. It suggests I’m affable and it’s a good conversation-starter when visitors or new employees stop by. It’s fun for me to talk about, too, because it doesn’t depict anyone from my family. It’s a wallet-sized studio portrait of grinning, Kindergarten-aged triplets that a coworker gave me a while back for no apparent reason. (They’re his sister’s kids and he talks about them constantly.) So I pinned the photo to my cubicle wall and when people ask about it, I make stuff up. “Jonathan, there in the middle? He died from the grippe soon after that photo was taken,” I’ll say. “But I hadn’t really bonded with him yet as an uncle, so it wasn’t a terrible loss. At least from my perspective.”
• I believe in displaying few other cubicle decorations. Mine include:
  • a Trogdor the Burninator sticker I found on a sidewalk in Cobble Hill.
  • a variety of those oval stickers from bananas, spanning Del Monte, Anita, Chiquita, Bonita and Turbana.
  • a printout of that “I Ain’t Your Friend, Palooka” graphic I commissioned last fall.
  • Rocket, a Beanie Baby blue jay that I stole from IT Guy. (Because I occasionally throw it at people, I consider Rocket a tool, not a toy.)
  • a J. deBeer & Son brand softball that I stole from the office softball team’s equipment bag. I like the box because it doesn’t appear to have been redesigned since the company was founded in 1889 (“It has the Pep and stands Punishment”).
• I believe I would like to take a nap in my cubicle but I haven’t yet figured out how to do so without getting bothered or fired.
• I believe in updating my blog from my cubicle, on the occasions that I subdivide my lunch hour into a dozen or more “mini-breaks.”

Today I threw a Frisbee around the grand ballroom of a hotel in Newark. There’s one more item off the Bucket List.

Today I spent some time in a large, empty warehouse in Jersey City. Which was not as interesting as I thought it might be.

Do you know how many dimples are on a Top Flite XL 3000 golf ball? 402.

A coworker of mine counted, dotting each one with a red Sharpie. He initially missed one partially obscured by the letter “O” in the word “Top” until I told him it was unlikely a golf ball would have an odd number of dimples. This is what happens when you work late.

I also convinced our associate art director to bring in a spare putter from her garage so we can property Putt-Putt around the office after hours with something other than the club we handmade from rolled-up scrap Tyvek, cardboard and packing tape.

I introduced the mayor of Philadelphia today at a real estate conference and all I could think to ask him before he took the stage, as he stood there surrounded by an entourage of his assistant, his scheduler, three burly men of his personal security detail and a uniformed officer of the Philadelphia Police Department, was “How’s it doin’?” That’s right: not even “How’s it goin’?” Geez.

I’m on business today at the Four Seasons in Dallas and in one of the fanciest yet most unnecessary perks of staying at an upper-crust hotel, I found housekeeping had snuck into my room while I was out to pick up all the clothes I’d dropped on the floor and draped over chairs, and actually folded them neatly in piles. Like, Gap-quality folding. Good stuff and a nice touch.

One of the guys in the production department, which is so pixelated with digital technology that I don't even think it has a fax machine anymore, was getting testy. A colleague was telling him that a client needed to fax something to our office. “Tell them if they need to fax it, they can just as easily email it as a PDF,” he said. And that was that, for he had decreed a no-fax zone.

Do people still use faxes? They pop up in publishing, the print-heavy industry in which I toil, or at least at our particular company, where insertion orders and registration forms still sometimes arrive over phone lines in bursts of screeches and static. Although more often, these orders and forms are signed, scanned on a newfangled copier and arrive to our inboxes as a tidy PDF, which most recipients then print anyway. So much for “saving a tree”; we’ve died of dysentery on the Paperless Trail.

I suspect also that large corporations and governments, both lovers of the bureaucratic paper trail and useless administrative positions to file said trail, are responsible in large part for keeping the fax from devolving to cassette tape or Polaroid camera status, hoarded and supported only by aficionados, hipsters and grandparents.

I recently spoke with a rep for the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, who’s a swell guy, and decided to welcome His Honor to keynote one of our real estate events. His scheduler insisted that we handle the invitation by fax. Requesting the mayor’s presence by speaking, as I’d just done, wouldn’t cut it. Nor would an email. I needed to wait for the scheduler to fax me a Request the Mayor’s Presence form, fill it out with a pen, then fax it back. Eventually and incongruously, a week later, someone emailed me to confirm that the mayor had agreed to speak at our event. What an archaic trail and trial.

My annoyances are petty and cliché and one of my current favorites is anonymous coworkers who siphon the office coffee so there’s a millimeter left, to avoid taking 30 seconds to brew a fresh pot. I emailed our IT Guy to check the feasibility of installing a webcam in a corner of the kitchenette to learn who was responsible for this shirking. He replied that “anything is possible with enough Ethernet cable” but admitted he’d have to check with the head boss as to my plan’s legality, so I quashed the idea.

Now I’m wondering how tough it’d be to install a circuit-contact between the bottom of the coffee pot and the coffeemaker’s burner, tied into a digital scale system on the burner, to measure the weight of the pot when it’s at rest and to blast an air horn every time it reaches a certain low weight. But then I imagine the coffee bandits would resort to topping off the pot of regular with decaf or pulling something similar to Indy’s sandbag-for-idol switch from Raiders.

This is all beside the fact that the coffee in my office tastes like burnt, wet sweatsocks. It’s the principle of the matter.

Having just avoided getting smooshed by the closing elevator doors, a flustered blonde woman who resembled a shorter Cybill Shepherd told me that she was “just having one of those days.” She had a plum role in a sitcom as Cybill Shepherd’s daughter—flew out to L.A. for the audition and everything—but when Merrill Lynch pulled out as an advertiser, the network cancelled the show. “Something else will come along,” she said, exiting on the 16th floor for the audition studio. “Good luck,” I said.

Do strangers start conversations with you in elevators? They seem to seek me out.

I ate rabbit nachos today for a lunch appetizer today at Rae, a restaurant attached by causeway to Philadelphia’s famous rail hub, 30th Street Station. As I told my luncheon companions, I don’t think I’ve ever used or heard the words “rabbit” and “nachos” in the same sentence. The nachos were O.K.; a bit smoky. Rae also serves $2 martinis for lunch, which must get more questions than any other menu item, rabbit nachos included. “What’s the deal?” we asked our server. “Are they served in a shot glass?” No, she told us, they’re regular, full-sized and -strength gin or vodka martinis. We ordered a round for our table. I would have had another but that would have been déclassé.

Today I was in the elevator of a major office tenant-rep firm in Philadelphia and three out of the four passengers were named Jason. (The fourth was my boss.) That’s weird.

Pax, the breakfast/lunch chain store off the lobby of my office building, is expensive and its morning lines long, but I’m lazy and want a muffin and a hazelnut coffee, so I frequent the place anyway. Usually it’s a busy but orderly scene. This morning, however, the woman at the front of the line was complaining about the price of her bagel with egg whites and tomato.

It was something insanely expensive, $8, I think, partly because it was an off-menu item and partly because this is one of the most costly cities in the country. She insisted on continuing her complaint (“It’s a bagel with egg whites and tomato. Eight dollars? That’s insane!”). I don’t know what she expected them to do—give her a discount because she deserved it?

No, instead, the manager strode over briskly, literally snatched the order away from her and said, “If you don’t want it, you can leave. You’re holding up the line.” She sputtered something about attitude and stormed out. The line shuffled forward as if nothing had happened. In the silence, I felt like chirping, “Ya know, in Latin, pax means...” but I didn’t want my muffin seized.

S.

Thanks for your recommendation of Laphroaig. For Christmas, I scored a bottle of 10-year for my brother and he was stoked. He also got a kick out of the fact that it was bottled when he was 12. That just made me feel old.

Jason

You’re only as old as you feel. Wait, no: you’re only as old as the number of wrinkles that appear on your forehead when you’re surprised, times eight.

S.

If I’m rocking the surprised face, I’m 24. If I’m just medium surprised, then I’m 16. (Not so sweet.) Mind you, I’m totally doing the surprised-look-on-my-face thing at my desk and feeling my forehead, as if reading Braille, for all to see. No one is paying attention anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

Jason

As I read those last two sentences, I laughed silently so hard that I cried a little. The devil is in the details.

S.

Submitted for your amusement.

The first rule of office holiday parties is you do not talk about work. The second rule of office holiday parties is you do not talk about work. Here is what you can and will talk about, while moving frequently to avoid the Office Bore:

Is it a coincidence that the big boss’ assistant is perceived as the hottest girl in the company? Conversely, does our company have a low hot-boy quotient when the hottest one at the party “looks kind of like Gary Sinise,” according to a coworker? (“Gary Sinise is kinda hot,” she added, not very convincingly.) Interestingly, the guy who kind of looked like Gary was hitting on the big boss’ assistant, which I guess is Natural Selection in action.

At the office holiday party, you may also discuss: Who will get hammered and make an ass of himself/herself? And: How late are you guys staying? (Yeah, we’re not staying very late, either.)

It wasn’t too bad, I guess. It was at a swanky, two-story suite on the 43rd floor of the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. The hors d’œuvres included soup dumplings, California rolls and miniature key-lime pies. The barmen had available Knob Creek bourbon and weren’t afraid to knock it into my glass. There was a billiard table, on the rails of which we were not allowed to rest said glasses. Afterwards we had dinner at John’s Pizzeria, which uses too much garlic in its pastas and appears to be located in a deconsecrated church.

What’s really gross is when someone at the office gives you a Christmas card and it’s clear they just sealed it because when you open the envelope, the flap is still wet with spit. I always give my cards a full day to cure, just in case.

Atop the garbage can in the office kitchen lay an empty gold-papered Godiva Chocolates box. I retrieved it and refilled the chocolate-shaped divots in the plastic liner with single-serve containers of Land O’Lakes Mini Moo’s Half & Half creamers. I closed the lid and put the box on the counter, the classic free-food location.

One minute later, from my cubicle, I heard M. in the kitchen shriek, “That’s cruel!”

Our office held its annual health fair today in the conference room. It’s an excuse for physicians and other shysters in our health plan to drum up more business, like the chiropractor who insisted I needed an appointment so he could address my possibly poor posture. I found out later that coworkers who agreed to an appointment received a free shoulder massage; I received only a photocopied diagram of the spine entitled “Your Nervous System Controls Everything.” Another practitioner was offering complementary, full back/shoulder/neck massages, although the therapist kneading my muscles and inadvertently tickling me noted the presence of “serious knots” in the region of my trapezius muscles. I also got my blood pressure taken (110/70) and my body fat measured (11.1%, but only if I really do weigh 150 pounds, as I guessed).

We were strongly encouraged, via a series of increasingly aggravated emails from HR, to attend our company holiday party, so that we might mingle with our coworkers and exhibit appropriate amounts of corporate-approved cheer. It was at a too-small Upper East Side nightclub, The Grand. The drink pours were very generous, the food was lousy and the DJ was familiar only with booty-shaking hits from the early ’90s, which was a mixed blessing.

The grumpy editorial assistant I work with attends renaissance fairs, or “ren fairs,” as she calls them. After I’d asked whether she costumes herself as a wench at such events, she told me no, but added there’s a practice there called wenching for which a gaggle of ladies costumed in the hottest Middle Ages couture circle some dude and kiss him until he blushes, like a G-rated gang-bang. And I had wondered why nerds were such big fans of renaissance fairs. I’d look up “wenching” via Google in order to supply you with linkage, but there are some things I just don’t want to know more about, and wenching is one of those things.

Not only couldn’t I sleep on the three-hour-plus flight late Tuesday night from Miami to Chicago, the temperature disparity wasn’t fun, either, with Miami at 70 degrees versus a brittle 35 in the Windy City. It was past midnight, the ride downtown from O’Hare was hectic, I was tired from work and a rotten cold, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

Most of the hotels downtown here filled months ago for Greenbuild, the 20,000-attendee green buildings conference I’m attending at McCormick Place, so the colleague who booked our group’s rooms got stuck with the James, a boutique hotel with rooms designed like Spartan-modernist time-capsules from the 1970’s, lounge music piped in everywhere and a lobby crawling with a clientèle resembling skinny, black-clad models from Eastern Europe. I would not be joining this fun however, for there was no room at the inn. The James had overbooked but swiftly put things right: I was given a voucher to stay at the Allerton Hotel. The Allerton upgraded my room to a suite, comped my first night and offered my stay today for the same cost as my room at the James. The James paid my cab fare, too; the hotels are only a few blocks apart, but it was a nice touch. When I returned from the conference last night, there was an apologetic voicemail from a manager at the James and an envelope had been slid under my door. It contained a gift certificate from the James good for a one-night stay in a “loft suite” there.

My second brush with commendable customer service arrived at dinner last night. Hoping to knock-out my cold with a one-two punch of tequila and spice, I tried Su Casa, operated by the same company that runs Pizzeria Uno (now known as Uno Chicago Grill) and Pizzeria Due, the latter of which is right next door to Su Casa. The salsa was spicy and my enchiladas cheesy, but right after my entrée had been served, I was asked to move from my wobbly table for two to a booth across the room to accommodate a party of nine rowdy ladies with stereotypical Southern accents. I didn’t mind doing this but they made a big deal about my “inconvenience” and the manager stepped over to let me know my meal was on the house. I only had to pay for my several margaritas, which helped inspire a full and restful night’s sleep at the Allerton.

Turns out it was probably best I didn’t stay at the James after all. The Chicago location has only been open less than a year and they’re still working out some kinks of room design. A colleague of mine who’s staying there reports that she accidentally yanked a towel rack off her sliding shower door, thinking it was a handle; then, for good measure, a 100-pound panel of the door jumped its track and almost crushed her, which would have been a terrible way to go: naked and flattened dead in a hotel-room tub, eulogized by soothing lounge music in the background.

Bill Clinton delivered the keynote address at Greenbuild, a conference I’m attending today and tomorrow at McCormick Place in Chicago, but I heard only faint bits of that famous voice from a floor away because I was on my phone the whole time with I.T. Guy, who tried but failed to diagnose why my work laptop wouldn’t connect wirelessly to the internet.

During this difficult time of the screenwriters’ strike, I’d like to offer my services as a writer, much like the “scab” players who offered their services during those uncertain weeks of the 1987 NFL season. Let me “tackle” your writing project with gusto. I will score you many “touchdowns,” “win the game” and earn your praises, your “cooler of Gatorade dumped over my head when I least expect it,” if you will.

Jason

Supposedly the attachment to this email is a photo file. I think the extension is just wrong. Any way to open it? Winner receives a copy of the Madonna CD, Ray of Light, plus a hearty handshake.

O.

I won’t try to open it based entirely on the prize offered.

Jason

Consolation prize is the Madonna CD, chucked at your head.

O.

There’s no data in the document. Tell them to send the correct fucking format.

Jason

Really all I wanted to do was throw a Madonna CD at you.

O.

That’ll cost extra.

Jason

[throws Madonna CD at O.]

An upper-level guy at work sent a group email today that concluded with this sentence:

Thank you for being a part of the team and most of all for being my friend.

Which immediately made me think of a certain phrase and image from Pulp Fiction superimposed with lolcat-style typography. I commissioned my peep in the production department to create it and she fulfilled my request in five minutes for free because she thought it was funny, too. Uncertain whether my upper-level coworker would feel the same way, I decided not to forward my lolvincent to him.

In addition to not telling a girl, “I didn’t realize you were that old” upon learning her age, or commenting “I like your new haircut” when you’re uncertain whether it’s merely windblown or a month old, I have learned it is also unwise to ask, “You’re not really going to eat all that cheesecake, are you?” Although it did net me a mangled half-slice of raspberry swirl Junior’s from my disgruntled coworker.

Angelo Mozilo, the short, silver-haired CEO of Countrywide Financial, keynoted our apartments conference in Los Angeles today, which was bold and nice of him to not bail on the engagement considering federal regulators are being urged to investigate his stock trading. It’s one of those situation where he took steps to unload hundreds of thousands of his shares before the company took a plunge. Just in case, he assigned a security detail of four burly gentlemen to follow him around and we had to print dainty attendee badges for them so they wouldn’t appear too suspicious and burly.

I’m working out of our L.A. office today and find it nice to retreat from a week on the road to familiar settings that feature high-speed internet access, land lines and a friendly assistant who orders everyone lunch from the local sandwich shop. The L.A. office houses only six employees and doesn’t have much extra room, so my coworker and I shared a wobbly round meeting table in the largest office. We faced off at our respective computers as if engaged in a fierce round of Battleship and I learned that, apparently, when I type, it is especially obvious on a wobbly table that I strike the keys with undue noise and drama.

I managed to get this far at my job without a Portable Integrated Communications Solution until I.T. Guy admitted it was a mistake I hadn’t received one sooner—why hadn’t I said anything?

So I have a Motorola Q. It was burbling with digital noises while still in the box, so I opened the box, turned it off and closed the box again. It has Verizon cellphone service, can be used to read and compose email (with full QWERTY keypad), and arrives preinstalled with Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0. I think I would maybe like to use it as an eBook reader. I’m certainly not using it as a cell phone as I already have one. And although it will come in handy checking emails when I’m on the road for business and away from a computer, I don’t plan to carry it with me always as I’m already weighted down by an iPod, cellphone and digital camera, and already working enough when I should be enjoying myself with fun social activities to write about in this space.

I don’t know the correlation between strange doodles and real estate conferences, but like at least twice before, I happened upon another odd scribbling at a real estate conference today in Orlando. It resembles a demented Homer Simpson.

Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been trying for nearly a decade to determine how Manhattan would have looked to its first European explorers, circa 1609, in an effort he’s named the Mannahatta Project¹. When it’s completed, it will include, as a recent New Yorker profile on Sanderson noted, “a virtual re-creation—a three-dimensional computer map—in which you will be able to fly, as it were, above the island, land wherever you want, and have a look around. In place of your local cell-phone shop or O.T.B. parlor, you may see a trout stream, or a black bear browsing amid blueberry patches.”

I’d read this article on my flight to Orlando this morning and was thinking about it after arriving at the hotel here that I’m staying in tonight, the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.

As its centerpiece, the hotel boasts a 4.5-acre, perhaps dozen-story-tall glass-enclosed atrium that includes “a variety of themed environments”: there are streams and ponds and actual alligators and giant lizards in the Everglades section, there’s a giant yacht floating in Key West on which businesspeople can throw parties, and throughout there are towering palm trees, flowers and other plants, pools of koi, waterfalls and rocky outcroppings.

All of it is lit by the sun through the atrium dome, like a biosphere, although the glass is thick enough and angled as such that I couldn’t even hear when it was raining, to the degree that I was startled when I walked outside to find it storming. Indeed, the atrium trumps the outdoors and its swaths of scrub grass run through by highways, new subdivisions and strip malls.

Earlier, I was checking out one of the ballrooms for a meeting my company’s staging here tomorrow and while a hotel staff member was pointing out the grand balcony accessible through a set of double doors, she noticed a ubiquitous-in-Florida small lizard skittering around at the base of the door. She cracked the door, patiently shooed out the lizard and apologized. Gotta keep the environment at a controlled level of reality.

¹ I find it interesting that Inwood, my neighborhood and Sanderson’s favorite part of Manhattan because of its largely unchanged topography and forestry, is one of the few parts of the city where one “can get around successfully with a 1782 map.” [back]

And they keep affixing Post-it notes to the cases.

This first one is a loaner from an editor, John, who volunteered a few choice selections from his jazz collection after I asked if he could help build a soundtrack for an afterparty at an upcoming real estate conference my company is producing. Let the record show that John is irritated by “Un Poco Loco,” a 1951 track with Bud Powell on piano, Curly Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums.

This one is from the requisite cool guy in the production department, who’s a native New Yorker and lives in a loft in Brooklyn in which he built a small recording studio. He’s been trying to bring me up to speed on the popular pop the young hip white kids are listening to these days, in this case Bring It Back by Mates of State, which is too hypercheerful and brassy for my tastes. I didn’t ask him for a loaner but I think he may have thought I was lavishing too much praise on the Kinks album I recently loaned him and figured my appreciation of American rock stopped at 1970.

Bonus mp3: “Bouncing with Bud” (1949) by Bud Powell (piano), Fats Navarro (trumpet), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Tommy Porter (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums).
Bonus mp3: “For the Actor” (2005) by Mates of State.

This Post-it wasn’t stuck to my monitor at work, but to one of the monitors in the production department. I’m fairly certain this guy’s Mac remains tamper-free but you can never tell with those production imps; I overheard chatter about the classic fill-the-credenza-with-Ping-Pong-balls prank.

A little sarcastic back-and-forth at work about attending an upcoming “green” real estate development event.

C.

I plan on attending wearing a business suit constructed entirely of styrofoam, plastic bags and Pampers. I will be arriving via a gas-guzzling 1965 Cadillac and carrying several cans of Aqua Net hairspray.

Jason

I will descend to the stage from the rafters on a smoking jetpack fueled by the blood of cute, endangered animals and chilled by Arctic glacier melt. Then I will personally kick Leonardo DiCaprio’s ass for being such a smug jerk about his Prius.

The real estate development and investment firm that owns the New York Mets occasionally invites employees at my work out to ballgame functions and tonight we had reign of a private loge, the Diamond View Suite, from which we could watch the Pittsburgh Pirates get crushed, 6 to 3. It was my first time to Shea Stadium, and it is worn and dumpy, or as we say in real estate parlance, particularly when the owner of the asset is standing right there, “tired.” Not to worry: Citi Field, the new stadium, is under construction next door, and when complete, old Shea will revert to a parking lot.

We had a fine first baseline vantage point and all the hot dogs and Cracker Jack we could handle, though it took me a while to get over the distraction of airplanes continually taking off from LaGuardia. Also I was dismayed to learn that the Cracker Jack people apparently no longer include toy prizes inside their snack but instead small paperboard cards featuring riddles and triva with rub-to-reveal answers. Lame.

Waiting afterwards for my Long Island Railroad train to arrive, I immersed myself in the drunken and ecstatic throng of fans on the platform. A particularly loud group of guys had obviously had a lot to drink, judging by the several of them who stepped down off the end of the platform to urinate near the tracks, all the while shouting, “Let’s — go — Mets!”

Guys

Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Mets!

Speaker

Westbound train arriving on track number 1.

Guys

Westbound train! Westbound train! Westbound train!

As the train pulled into the station, they moved down the platform to the last car, where a woman in a business suit was waiting to board.

“I am not getting on the same car as you guys,” she said to them, holding up her hands as if to banish them. She walked to a different car but the leader of the drunk guys shouted, “Follow her!” and they stumbled off in pursuit. On board, I could hear them shouting “Let’s go Mets!” from a car away until either they debarked in Queens or the businesswoman subdued them with her briefcase.

Shea Stadium

• 123-01 Roosevelt Ave., Flushing
• (718) 507-8499
• Meal 29 of 52: a hot dog with mustard and onions (free).

A business colleague I’m going on meetings with this week in Florida has lived here since she was two years old and like a lot of people in Tampa seems to know exactly when it’s going to storm. It storms a lot here in the summer, nearly daily, I’m told. Tampa’s like the thunder capital of the world (or is it lightning?). This morning, my colleague predicted, under bright sunny skies with giant puffy white clouds, that a storm would break around 4 p.m. It sure didn’t look like it to me, but as foretold, round about 4:15 p.m. there arrived magnificent lightning, spiking the sky with light, then a downpour that knocked bark and fronds off the palm trees, which bent back and forth in the high wind. About an hour later, it stopped, the sun re-emerged and evaporated most of the puddles.

I’m in Tampa on business, pretty early on a Sunday because I like flying JetBlue and the only flight they had that wasn’t a total ripoff got me in around 2 p.m. I’ve done my work. Now I’m sitting around watching bad television because there’s nothing remotely interesting to see or do within a two-mile radius, it’s like 95 degrees outside and I don’t have a car. I watched Happy Gilmore and am a little ashamed to admit that although I find Adam Sandler’s movies stupid, he makes me laugh at times, especially when his characters get angry, whether at a golf ball or Bob Barker. I’ve already paced around my hotel room and a brisk circuit of the hotel lobby revealed that the only event being held here tonight is “Mrs. Rosa Quijano”s 95th Birthday Dinner Buffet,” from 3 to 5:00 p.m. at the St. James Restaurant. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, I’ve noticed the catering sales manager at the hotel has the same last name. They’re a rowdy bunch but not so rowdy they’d notice the bored looking guy partaking of their liquor.

The sun doesn’t so much rise in Southern California as it does simmer through the smog.

This was in the tape deck of my business colleague’s Jeep throughout our multiday trip of meetings in the Inland Empire, but instead we listened to Jack FM and, with the sunroof open as we hurtled down the expressway, we sang along to a Jet CD, poorly but passionately.

Kind of like the bridge of a low-rent Star Trek knockoff.

A young rep who’s striving to get my boss to sign a multi-ad deal on her firm’s real estate website took him and I to dinner tonight in Atlanta at a tapas restaurant. During the course of the conversation, which became progressively addled by drink, she off-handedly mentioned Spanx. My boss and I admitted we didn’t know what that was, and she described them as “sausage casing for women,” adding “I’m wearing some now!” Which was a bit too much information.

Window washing? That’s ballsy. Nothing but rickety scaffolding and mere ounces of ballistic nylon straps between you and a plummet to death.

Two window-washers showed up tonight to clean the filthy windows in our office. They brought a harness but left it on the floor just outside my cubicle, where it stayed the entire time they stepped out onto the foot-wide window ledges of the seventeenth floor to swipe at the grime with a squeegee and soapy water while holding onto the sash with their free hand.

This window faces south; the skyscraper looming in the washed-out background, One Penn Plaza, ranks among the city’s top-20 tallest. Standing on our window ledges is not for the vertiginous.

It was windy out today and very sunny and it may have been hard to concentrate with some jackass inside taking pictures of them, but nothing fazed the window-washers. Probably if one fell, the other would be obligated to throw the harness out the window after him for insurance purposes.

“Where you guys from?” asked our not-especially politically correct office manager, after she casually mentioned that a man who lived in her apartment building hailed from Ghana. “Africa,” they said simultaneously and mischievously in accents I couldn’t place. The guy in the yellow shirt thought it was funny I was taking photos and even funnier when I offered to email them to him.

I must move beyond mere ballsiness in reference to these particular window washers and award them the Gold-Plated Brass Balls Award, with clusters and bonus testicle.

Work lately has been busy and stressful. It’s like ... a carnival game. Maybe whack-a-mole. Or the dunk tank, with a lot of the balls thrown directly at my head. Maybe it’s like whack-a-mole dunk tank, oversized mallets and wooden balls flying all over the place and then when the target’s hit, I’m dumped into the water tank and get electrocuted, because you really shouldn’t submerge a whack-a-mole cabinet.

I received an email from the jokers in the production department this afternoon: “Congratulations on making the cover this month.” Attached was a PDF image of the cover for one of our regional real estate magazines.

Seems this one fellow, a random real estate executive, resembles me.

Maybe. I think he’s more my evil twin. I fancy my ears are more handsome.

A coworker of mine is one of those sporty and energetic young go-getters, so she went for a jog on a winding path near the base of Camelback Mountain last night. She promptly tripped and fell on a cactus. There weren’t any injuries other than to her pride, and as for removing the needles, the hotel keeps a large bottle of classic white Elmer’s Glue at the security station for just that purpose. You squeeze it over the affected area, let it dry, then peel it off, just like you did when you were in grade school and pretended like it was fake skin that you were ripping from your zombie hand. Which you can still do, only in this case it also pulls out the cactus needles.

I had finished ironing my dress shirt, all proud of myself that it was still wrinkled, but less wrinkled than when I pulled it from my bag. I pushed the cord-retract button on the iron and as it whipped back, the plug clocked me. I now have a prong-shaped welt pockmarking my noggin. What fun.

I would be remiss if I did not mention I am in Phoenix today, cactus country. It’s like 82 degrees here, breezy. There’s a man bringing a Patron Silver-and-Grand Marnier margarita to my door, along with some chicken tacos, the handmade tortillas bundled in foil. Everyone gets his or her own hacienda here. I feel like any moment I will gain two roommates and a reality TV show crew.

My dinner will be a relaxing reprieve to a busy day that included a man on my flight who kept leaning onto my armrest and mashing the channel-changer buttons for my personal mini television which I otherwise kept rooted on VH1 Classic. Lots of great videos I’d never seen before and This is Spinal Tap in its entirety. What a bargain.

A short Hispanic man with a mustache just knocked on my door and asked if my room needed refreshing. It did not, I told him. ‘Would you like some chocolates” he asked in a thick Spanish accent, while thrusting at me a clear plastic bag sagging with candy. I found this funny and called my coworker for her to keep an eye out for the door-to-door chocolate man and his reverse trick-or-treat schemes.

I ate my chocolate squares sitting out on my personal patio. It’s eerily quiet here except for the wind in the trees and the occasional air conditioning unit kicking in a few roofs over. Strange coral-like trees sway in the breeze and the branches of a tall red-flowered bush scratch against the roof of the metal patio umbrella over my head. I completed this balmy romance of the desert by walking full force into my closed screen door. O tequila.

They actually have a subway system here! I don’t think I knew that. But it’s one of those that doesn’t run between midnight and 5 a.m. Philly’s starting to get some press that it’s a true 24/7 city, but that’s either the real estate people’s PR people talking, or I’m in the wrong part of Center City, or both. There’s no one out at night but bums and ne’er-do-wells.

Took the train to Philadelphia today. Near Trenton, the water had completely flooded the tracks and the train slowed to a crawl. It was as if we were on a monorail in some sort of low-tech urban floor adventure. “And if you look to your left, you’ll see a mobile home with water up to its windows.”

Rain, rain, rain. Went into work again today. My jeans got totally soaked.That’s no fun.

Next to my cubicle at work is an empty cubicle. Rather, it used to be empty. Soon after the girl who worked there quit, more than a year ago, the cubicle progressed through the stages of white-collar clear-cutting. First, someone purloined the stapler, maybe because it was slightly fancier than their own or maybe they just wanted a backup. Then the electric pencil sharpener disappeared, because, hey, electric pencil sharpeners are nice, and no one was using this one, sitting there in an empty cubicle. The power strip was next to go, followed by various pens and pushpins and trays. At last, someone wheeled away the chair, replacing it with their own brokedown model. Picked clean of accouterments, the empty cubicle now was the loneliest cubicle. If there happened to be wind on the 17th floor, it would have whistled through this cubicle with melancholy as a tumbleweed trundled by.

Then, as in New York at large and in particular at a media company focused on commercial real estate, people recognized space was at a premium. So they started dumping their junk in the empty cubicle. Half a dozen busted chairs collected in there and now spill out of the entrance. Next arrived a sprawl of old newspapers, empty three-ring binders, Bankers Boxes of anonymous paperwork from the late ’90s, outdated desk calendars and other random crap. I’ve taken to calling it New Fresh Kills and I’m pretty sure I saw a homeless guy sleeping in there the other day.

The company at which I work is just large enough that there was a chance no one would have noticed this pileup and it would have continued attracting trash until it began emitting methane. But it’s located directly across from the glass-doored conference room, so most everyone sees it on a regular basis, including, much to the consternation of the higher-ups, besuited out-of-office visitors to the conference room. I’ve heard that the big boss will be sending out a Clean Office Initiative memo very soon, written in that corporate style of “we all need to keep a clean work area” and “thank you in advance for your participation,” because as much as he wants to, he can’t just blurt out “somebody fucking clean the garbage cubicle.” But seeing as how its donors have been largely anonymous, I wonder who will be responsible for this task?

Despite what Missing Persons once claimed, people do walk in L.A., they just prefer driving. Or need to. That place sprawls.

Our event was all day at the humongous L.A. Convention Center, located right next door to the Staples Center, home of the Lakers. For a moment, I worked with a temp named Stephanie at our accreditation table which is where I learned that I’ve never met anyone who talked as fast as she did, and that she’s an actor who played one of those perky gameshow contestants in a recent Orbitz commercial.

Midway through, there was a monsoon-like storm featuring winds that bent the palm trees and rain that lashed the glass-paned atrium of the center. Twenty minutes later, it stopped. The sun and giant fairytale clouds returned and after another hour, the pavement was as dry as Clint Eastwood’s face. It was as if nothing had happened.

To knock back after an excruciating day, our staff got ripped at the post-event cocktail party then met at a steakhouse for staggeringly large slabs of grilled cow and more drinks. Then, in the coup de grace of any stereotypical business trip, we descended on the hotel bar for yet more drinks. Lots of letting down of guards, general sailor talk and brutal slagging and gossip regarding various people conveniently not present to defend themselves or file suit.

Hello again from Los Angeles. It's unseasonably overcast and "cold" here, which means about 60 degrees. Many of the women I pass on the sidewalk this morning are clutching themselves like Poor Little Match Girls.

I had been told that our Los Angeles office is in the "bad" part of town but that must have a different meaning than in New York. The streets and sidewalks are wide, clean and well lit and handsomely landscaped. (I like the trees here; not just the palms, but a hardy variety I don't know the name of that lines the streets and resembles much larger, fuller versions of Bonsai trees). The buildings are mostly fancy new skyscrapers but the classics are well-preserved; the one containing our local office dates from 1927. Beautiful ornamental scrollwork arcs over the entrance, like that of a gothic church. Even the homeless people here radiate glamor and charm, like they're actors playing homeless people, which I suppose they may just be.

My body's all jangly from the time difference, plus the fact that I forced myself to get up at fucking 6 a.m. local time so I could maximize my East Coast phone-work. Working remotely sucks. I can't access my Excel documents on the home server. My grandma moves faster than this elderly ThinkPad. And I refuse to give out my cell number to casual business acquaintances which means I call my voicemail in New York every half-hour for updates.

Hello from Los Angeles. Nothing much to report. My flight from JFK to LAX was delayed an hour and a half because of mechanical problems on a flight earlier this morning—the domino effect.

A kid with a 15-inch PowerBook in the window seat next to me spent the flight watching Underworld and episodes of South Park, interspersed with feverish song-composition in GarageBand. He had on headphones and bobbed his head a lot. I was hoping to spot some stereotypical L.A. types on the flight but there weren't many, other then the guy in front of me in his stringy hair and holey jean jacket who surely would win the competition for his loving rendition of Eddie Vedder circa 1993.

My cab driver from the airport recommended I catch a late dinner at the 24-hour diner a block from my hotel downtown because it was founded and continues to be run by ex-convicts. Also the food is good. But I was too tired for that and retired to bed after pondering why my hotel room has two full yet separate bathrooms and a creepy-spartan old-world design scheme that suggests John Turturro's room in Barton Fink.

Bruce Wasserstein’s private equity and investment firm is exploring a sale of the company I work for. Announcing and explaining this, we received a letter today via email from our CEO and attended a hastily assembled staff meeting, the contents of which can be summarized thusly:

1. We love you. Also, our investors.
2. Don’t panic.
3. Stay the course.
4. We upper-management types won’t share much more information with you about this possible sale but we’re blindly confident any potential new owners will value each and every one of your pretty little heads as much as we do.
5. Get back to work.

Also today, I bought new dress shoes from a “fine menswear” store on Madison Avenue using the gift certificate my boss gave me for Christmas. The salesman, wearing a partially unbuttoned dress shirt revealing a gold necklace and a thatch of chest hair, attempted to upsell me into purchasing a second pair for half-price but I’m not budgeted for two pairs of shoes this month and was really only interested in exhausting the gift certificate before I forgot about it.

I was in the elevator this morning, going back down to the sandwich shop off the lobby to fetch a carrot-raisin muffin because the line was too long earlier, and this girl who got on at 16 started talking to me. She made full-on, somewhat startling eye contact and at first I thought she thought I was someone else. Then she said, “How are you doing?” I said fine and asked if she’d just come from an audition, because 16 is where the audition studio is. She said her audition was in an hour and I’m unsure why I didn’t ask what it was for.

I imagined for some reason that she played a musical instrument, possibly because she didn’t have on enough makeup to be auditioning for a show. You recognize those girls in the elevator right away. You also recognize those girls from a block away because their facepaint has been applied to be visible from a mezzanine. Instead this girl was cute in an unobvious way, resembling Chloë Sevigny in Boys Don’t Cry, with a fairy-dusting of acne.

She asked if I was there for an audition myself (which was strange because I didn’t get on at the 16th floor) and I told her, no, but that I work on the 17th floor and could usually hear piano playing, loud acting and singing rising from below.

“That must be annoying,” she said wryly.

“Sometimes. But sometimes, at the end of a long day, it can be soothing,” I said, which was a lie but necessitated by my lack of anything more clever to say on short notice.

By then we’d reached the lobby and she said awkwardly, “Well, have a nice day,” and we parted, never to see one another again.

Now, if this had been a romantic comedy, at the point when she asked whether I was there for an audition, I would have started singing Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life” charmingly badly and she would have laughed and then we’d have gone out for coffee at The City Bakery and I’d start hanging out at her place, writing lyrics for the songs she’d compose on her viola. There’d be at least one scene in Central Park in autumn of us walking and talking. There’d be some misunderstandings but we’d work them out thanks in part to the advice of my wizened-sarcastic coworker-friend from Brooklyn played by Paul Giamatti.

Or maybe I’m digressing like this because I saw Music and Lyrics tonight, which sort of follows the formula of the above paragraph. He, a washed-up pop singer from the ’80s. She, hired to take care of his plants. Ah, but she’s a closet writer. They burn the midnight oil crafting the perfect song together, on a commission from some sort of Christina Aguilera popstar knockoff. They learn about themselves, they learn to love, they learn to rhyme again. Argh. I did enjoy watching them brainstorming for a day straight over the minutiae of perfect words and chords, which reminded me of that clichéd truth of Twain’s that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is ... the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

Drew Barrymore left me wondering: Can she turn that lisp of hers on and off like some actors can with an accent? Because she sounded more lispy than usual here. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s charming but obviously I have issues. Hugh Grant plays his patented randy/foppish quippy-Brit character albeit with more pelvic gyrations and an appropriately age-beaten face that no doubt still gets some sort of sandalwood scrub applied daily to its T-zone.

Technical issues: wince-worthy lip-synching by Hugh and Drew to their voice doubles when their characters are required to sing, which is often. Most unforgivable is opening the film by depicting the hit music video Hugh’s character made in the ’80s but not treating the picture to make it actually look like it was filmed in the ’80s (i.e. the music videos from different eras shown in This Is Spinal Tap).

I grew up in the suburbs of Middle America surrounded by mutant meal items made with convenience foods, entrées like hotdish and fruit-cocktailed Jell-O salads that I forget are chiefly a Midwestern Thing now that I no longer live there. For our office department’s St. Patrick’s Day party tomorrow, I wanted to bake something tonight different than the soda bread I made last year so Google found me a recipe for grasshopper bars on the Betty Crocker website.

“Grasshopper bars? What are those?” was the response from people around the office, their minds filling with a plague of chirping, leaping insects.

“You know, like grasshopper pie but in bar form,” I explained.

“Grasshopper pie?!”

“Crushed Oreo crust, Cool Whip or marshmallow cream filling with crème de menthe . . . ?”

Nothing but stares. I’d Suburbanized myself again. But I was determined to make the recipe anyway. It looked easy, tasty and had that requisite holiday color.

As I prepared the simple brownie base, I wondered why anyone would ever bother using a prepackaged mix when it probably takes only an additional minute to measure out the flour, cocoa, sugar, vanilla, baking powder and salt to blend with the eggs and oil/butter. Scratch tastes better, is “all natural” and most cooks will have the majority of those ingredients hanging around their cupboards anyway.

The bars end up very similar to petits fours with that sugar-butter frosting. But baby, they got real ugly once I cut them into squares. The thin chocolate coating chipped and splintered, giving the tops wear patterns of polished nails after three weeks.

Friday, March 16th Update: My coworkers said they liked the bars as they scarfed down the entire pan faster than the soda bread someone else supplied this year. But I don’t think I’ll make them again. In addition to the chocolate-chipping issue, the frosting was too thick and powdered-sugary plus not as minty as I’d have liked. Perhaps my dusty, forlorn bottle of crème de menthe, the lowliest of the liqueurs, had lost its efficacy. I also learned not to use a metal knife to cut thick bars made in a new Calphalon pan, which now appears to have been mauled by Wolverine.

I drove by this sign in Atlanta this afternoon, amused by the cocktail-napkin-quality cartoon of the half human/half burrito “fast taco.”

Sweating with fear or exertion, he’s wrenched his head around to steal a bug-eyed glance back. His sombrero just popped off but there’s no way he’s stopping to retrieve it. He will move as fast as his little green cowboy boots will carry him.

What are you so afraid of, burrito man? Who or what are you running from? An anthropomorphic hot dog? Your bratty enchilada children? Wolves? A drunken fraternity? A menial life in Mexico? The INS? Or are you merely making "a run for the border" in a lunch patron’s gastrointestinal tract?

The mind boggles.

At the mere suggestion of sleet early this morning, which at least one local newscaster took the time to define as “freezing rain” in case his viewers were unfamiliar with the curious meteorological phenomenon, Atlanta whipped itself into a lather and cancelled a bunch of schools. It was for nothing because the temperature didn’t drop to freezing, so the city was instead treated to a bitterly cold incessant rain. I’ll bet the classroom-free schoolkids today will still be talking about this day well into their 80s, the Great Freezing Rain Fiasco of aught-seven. I didn’t know Atlanta ever even got this cold, but it does, a few weeks a year. And I had been hoping for a reprieve from the New York chill.

That didn’t matter much because I spent most of my time indoors at meetings, typically every hour on the hour, except when my boss and I were late, which was always, a combination of the meetings running long and excessive travel time. The meeting overtime was because most all of the folks we met with, discussing an event we’re planning in the city later this year, were more cordial and helpful than we thought they would have been. My boss and I initially found it odd that most of the executives we spoke with managed to explain whether or not they were a native of the city (and if not, how long they’d lived there and from whence they came) very soon into the conversation, but it seems Atlanta’s a lot like New York in that most of the people there aren’t from there originally but love it anyway. One transplant from Chicago certainly didn’t miss that city’s winters and he noted frankly that race relations in Atlanta are ages ahead of those in the windy city.

The native Atlantaeers were stereotypically warm and charming, with accents like butter on warm flapjacks and fun names, too. We’re having breakfast tomorrow with a gentleman named Bubba, for instance, and I tried but failed to get a meeting with a fellow named Paisley.

The travel time challenge was exacerbated because my boss is as deft with directions as I am, a chilling fact. This despite our GPS, the exact model I had in Miami, and just as good at leading our spunky red Ford Escape on wild goose chases, including the one where it deposited us across the street from where we were supposed to be, which took us seven minutes of wandering around the sidewalk to realize. Also, Atlanta has more than 40 streets named Peachtree, none of which feature peach trees and several of which confusingly turn into each other. It’s a world of difference if you’re on Peachtree Street Northeast or West Peachtree Street or Peachtree Road and so on.

Because of our hectic schedule, we didn’t get to sample any fine local cuisine, dining tonight at the local branch of the Palm Restaurant steakhouse chain. For dessert, I amused and saddened myself by ordering a thick wedge of S&S cheesecake which, like me, had been flown in from New York City about a day earlier.

My boss and I flew into Atlanta tonight on business. It’s my first time in the city other than its hectic airport and I am told the nickname “Hotlanta” is no longer in vogue; one properly refers to the city as “the ATL.” Please make a note of it.

The boss of my boss, the capo di tutti capi, must be celebrating his birthday soon, because the obligatory card made the office rounds today in an unmarked manilla file folder for all employees to inscribe. I couldn’t think of anything creative to add to the platitudes already on the card, so I wrote good riddance, signed my name and passed it on. Brevity counts.

We had our office holiday party tonight at The Supper Club. It was the first public whole-company gathering since our merger and it was surprising to see how many people are now officially my coworkers even though I still have no idea who 98% of them are.

D.J.: playing music too loudly and too out of date. Food: looked good but I didn’t eat any of it, as I had gorged on Chex Mix and free Jet Blue garbage-food on the plane back from Florida. Alcohol: good and plenty.

Sadly, to my knowledge, no one made an ass of him/herself this year.

I flew in tonight to the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport for our South Florida real estate conference here tomorrow. The venue is the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida, a smoky slice of Vegas in an otherwise boring part of the Sunshine State. You can see the hotel rise a half-mile out on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, sprawling tall and spotlit gleaming white. Three toothless turrets jut up from the structure, lending a palatial air. Out back in a thicket of palm trees is a massive pool that I saw not a single person use. An island plunked in the middle is accessible by footbridge and features waterfalls, waterslides and the sorts of thatched-roof bars that serve drinks festooned with skewered fruit and tropical flowers.

I had been joking that I wanted to get my photo taken with Meat Loaf’s jacket, but inside, the hotel has seemingly every outerwear garment but the Loaf’s, displayed on headless mannequin torsos behind glass. I saw concert-costume jackets belonging to Prince, Aerosmith, Cher, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, the Yardbirds and James Taylor. John Lennon was represented by a pair of boots from the early years of the Beatles. Strangely, no jacket of Elvis’ was in the house, only a pair of ripped corduroy pants, for which I had no time to read the explanatory placard. I assume they were from one of his movies or perhaps the end of his life when he let himself go, gorging on fried food and amphetamines.

The rooms of the hotel are decked out in a lot of sexy halogen lamps and the clothes hangers and room service menu are upholstered in faux leopard fur. Snippets of song lyrics are printed on various items. My extra roll of toilet paper, for instance, was wrapped with a paper band printed with Steve Winwood’s “roll with it, baby.” My room didn’t contain any rock-star memorabilia but my TV was flanked by a framed black-and-white photo of Bruce Springsteen rocking the mike with Lil’ Steven and one of that guy from Cheap Trick with the five-necked guitar.

December 7, 2006 Update: Per an MSN Money article this morning, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which operates the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, is paying $965 million to buy the entire Hard Rock business (except the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino), which includes a chain of 124 Hard Rock Cafes, four Hard Rock Hotels, a pair of Hard Rock Casino Hotels and one of the largest collections of rock memorabilia.

While Christmas shopping today in Chelsea, I saw this graffiti commentary scrawled on the signage for a condo building under construction at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 18th Street. As a real estate professional, I can confirm that the “easy formula” sums up the city’s situation well.

I sat next to a minor celebrity on my flight out to Long Beach, California this afternoon. He was a 50s-ish fellow with a moustache who looked like what a younger brother of Robert DeNiro would look like, only skinnier and taller.

He started with the usual seatmate small talk, the Q&A that can worry me when I wonder whether it will carry on throughout the flight. Yes, I live in New York. Yes, I’m going to Long Beach on business. My business? Real estate.

I learned he’s a lawyer and splits his time between homes in Los Angeles and Cranford, New Jersey, which he described as being famous for the fact that the Ashton Kutcher/Bernie Mac movie Guess Who was filmed there. I found out that he too has a Sony Ericsson T610 and that he too thinks the reception is appalling (inability to get signals inside buildings, etc.) and that he too wonders why he hasn’t yet bought a new phone.

But his minor claim to fame was, as he confided to me, that he’s the guy with the ad on the back cover of the Long Beach yellow pages.

So the first thing I did after arriving at my hotel was to slide open the nightstand drawer and flip over the phone book. Sure enough, there was Mr. Moustache in the requisite Lawyer Standing In Front Of A Wall Of Important-Looking Books photo. Judging by the tie width, shininess and design, and a lack of gray in the hair and moustache, I estimated it was taken in the mid ’80s. But I definitely still recognized him there, cellphone troubles years away, under the headline PROVEN RESULTS!, with notes that he has 32 years trial experience and accepts major credit cards.

I left work an hour early today to catch my flight out of La Guardia back home to Cleveland for Thanksgiving vacation. Why is it all hell breaks loose at work the day I try to leave on vacation? It was in preparation for the last four real estate networking events my division is planning, which someone scheduled in four corners of the U.S. within a nine-day period following Thanksgiving. I imagine you’ll be reading about those.

The flight, meanwhile, was non-eventful for a La Guardia flight, which is to say 15 minutes late boarding, an hour late taking off and crowded. For dinner, my Mom, Dad and sister got some pizza, other finger food and wine at a place in downtown Akron. It’s always good to see the family, especially with my sister Dana done with her multiyear stay in Ireland and temporarily living with my folks.

I travel for work a lot and today I needed to book a flight for three consecutive days in early December when I’ll fly from New York to Washington, D.C. to Fort Lauderdale and back to New York.

I began with my darling JetBlue and immediately hit a snag with their Multi-City booking option, shown in this squashed screencap.

Was I missing something? How was I supposed to add the third and final leg of my trip with this interface? I called JetBlue, begrudgingly because I get double frequent-flyer miles when I book online. An agent named Barry booked my flights and at the end of the call, I asked him to reveal the secret of using the Multi-City option on JetBlue.com.

After checking with a supervisor, he told me what I needed to have done was book the first two legs of my trip using the Multi-City option, then separately book the final leg. He admitted this wasn’t intuitive, didn’t make sense to him and could have been improved. Words of wisdom from Barry, who ended up awarding me double-points even though I’d made the reservations with him.

As the web-wonks at JetBlue must know, improving this interface is doable. Travelocity, which I use sometimes, has a very intuitive Multi-Destination feature, at least for trips of four legs or fewer, shown here in a screencap. After you enter all of your legs, it even totals the cost of each possible full itinerary, which is one of the main reasons for even using a feature like this.

C’mon, JetBlue. I like everything else about you, particularly your personal televisions and potato chips; get cracking on your website. I guarantee other weary travelers have scratched their heads over this Multi-City confusion.

Well, now, nothing like this ever happened before at one of our real estate conferences. There's a union group of janitors on strike in Houston who feel they're not getting enough money and benefits. They noticed we had senior-level representatives from some of the city’s largest property owners, including Hines, one of the largest property management firms in the world. So a wily plainclothes group of protestors representing the janitors infiltrated our event.

They just walked in and took random name badges from our registration table. (Typically we just spread out the badges in alphabetical order for the taking and never check ID.) Then they blended themselves into the 300-strong audience of real estate executives seated in the ballroom of the hotel where we held our big opening sessions.

Every 10 minutes, one of them would stand up and start ranting loudly about inequity and health care. At first, we thought it was a joke or someone planted by one of our more mischievous speakers onstage. But when it happened about four more times, every ten minutes, it became clear we were dealing with some good old fashioned protest shenanigans, just like those students who seize the stage from political candidates or college presidents.

Hotel security was eventually called in, but short of checking every ID in the room, we were hard pressed to identify further hecklers, seeing as most of them were dressed in suits or sports jackets. Each time one of them rose, the more burly and surly of our staff rushed over to escort them from the room. This wasn’t too tough because one of our guys from the Los Angeles office resembles Sterling Hayden in appearance, frame and temperament.

We buttressed our entrance with a security checkpoint and fended off further intrusions, although when we left for the airport after the event, we got stuck in a snarl of traffic. Having been ejected from the hotel, the protestors decided to handcuff themselves to garbage cans and lay down in a circle in the middle of one of uptown Houston’s busiest intersections. They were eventually arrested.

I flew to Houston this afternoon for a real estate conference my company’s producing. I’d wondered why my flight out of JFK on Continental was so cheap and I think it’s because the airline just started there or something because its check-in area is literally the size and solidity of Lucy’s psychiatric help booth. It’s just sitting there at the far end of terminal 4, which houses most of the scrappier international airlines, like Aer Lingus, so I really thought I was in the wrong place up until the point I was issued a boarding pass.

I wish I could tell you that the stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas, but the city lights get in the way and this is only a sad airport-hotel-airport trip. I was also disappointed as the cab sped by two ’50s-style A-frame Whataburger restaurants I know I won’t have time to eat at.

Reminiscent of another strange sketch I found earlier this year is this “snappy” doodle I found on a table after a real estate conference here in New York today.

My company conducts a semi-monthly raffle for which an employee can receive two tickets to a Broadway show or dinner for two at a fancy restaurant, tax and tip not included. Odds have it that the winner will be among the 300-some lawyers and lawyers’ minions who toil in our flagship Park Avenue office, not one of the 35 folks here on Eighth Avenue. But today I was selected for the dinner-for-two and the amount of praise and congratulations I received from my coworkers for doing nothing was on the par of winning a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Nobody here likes lawyers, much less lawyers’ minions.

Immediately, too, I was besieged with offers from lady coworkers to step in as my dinner companion. I am not a shallow man but I don’t want to dine with someone I work with; I get enough of them here at work. Plus, I guess I am a shallow man because several suitors would appear to rank eating within their top-three hobbies.

So I turn to you, my beautiful readers and allied tradespeople, with an offer to dine with me. Explain why you think you should be the one to join me at March or San Domenico. Reviewing your entries, I will ignore the fawning, select whomever I want and alienate most everyone. It’s all in good fun!

But first, a little about me. What should you expect from Jason as your dinner companion? All of this writing about meals here and you still may not have a clear picture as to whether I’m an Andre or a Wally when the dinner bell rings. Here are the facts:

• Don’t be concerned if I eat little. I don’t exercise so I don’t eat much, a health philosophy practiced by four other people in America.
• I have no idea how to select a wine, which will be fun because the price-per-bottle limit of my dinner-passes is $100.
• I will drape my napkin upon my lap prior to dining but during the meal you will catch one or more of my elbows resting on the table edge.
• I usually chew with my mouth closed and I don’t gesture with my utensils when making a point.
• Why, yes, I will try some of your entrée.
• Yes, it is delicious.
• Favored topics of conversation include current events, Manhattan news, celebrity sightings, movies, books, poetry, photography, art, music, computers and Cascading Style Sheets.
• If you’re going to discuss who got voted off the island or America’s top model or whatever it is TV fans are always going on about, I will feign interest but actually I will be gauging the symmetry of your eyebrows. Alternately, imagining you naked.
• I enjoy vicious racial humor, but only in the company of the race that’s being mocked, only after at least a two-week familiarity with that person and only if it’s reciprocated with a good cracker joke.
• When conversation lulls, I will ask my dinner companion to select and rank the most attractive people in the restaurant.
• I carry exact change and my Visa card has a reasonable credit limit so you should not be alarmed that it is illustrated with a photo of Lake Erie.
• For digestif purposes, I’m a Scotch man. Cognac is for rappers and pussies.
• As I’m leaving the restaurant, I’ll load-up on the free stuff at the register—mints, matchbooks, business cards, unguarded menus, little boxes of crayons—but I’ll try not to make a big deal about it.
• I may insert a toothpick into my mouth, but only after I have exited the restaurant and only because I think it makes me look tough.
• If pressed to complete the phrase “dinner and ------,” my first five free-associations would be “a movie,” “conversation,” “dessert,” “dancing” and “casual sex.”
• I like long walks on the beach. I usually take these alone at Coney Island, barefoot and head down like the “Jason is Sad” montage of my biopic, but really I’m just scanning the sand for broken glass and stingray barbs.

So what do you think? Who’s hungry?

Making the links on the Internet this week has been David Roth’s article in Slate about his job as a baseball-card writer for Topps, which also makes Ring Pops and Bazooka bubble gum. His recollections took me back to my years as a staff writer for a pair of national trade magazines for the candy industry, a job I had when I lived in Cleveland, right up until the point I moved here to New York¹.

Writing about candy wasn’t much more romantic than trade-press writing for other big industries. I dealt with the usual deadline pressures, fended off persistent PR flaks and interviewed executives from private companies who were loath to divulge anything more than press-release tidbits.

The travel perks were expansive and mind-altering. In Chicago, I watched Jelly Belly manufacture its signature jelly beans and conversed with the company’s founders at length about conjuring flavors from scratch. I saw gumdrops, chocolates and kids’ candy parade down conveyor belts in Brazil and Mexico. Every year in Cologne, Germany, I walked miles among hundreds of booths at the world’s largest candy trade show. In a hotel ballroom in Canada, I witnessed grizzled candy executives tear up over receiving lifetime achievement awards. I’ve been to Hershey, a magical place in Pennsylvania smelling of chocolate and cow shit, and stayed at the Hershey Lodge, the large and luxurious halls of which resemble those of the hotel in The Shining.

And I ate a lot of candy. I didn’t gain much weight but by way of cavity-shadowed X-rays and rounds of drilling, I helped my dentist fund his costly hobby custom-building offroad sport vehicles.

¹ Coincidentally, right after I moved here I had an informational interview with a rep from Topps, which is headquartered just off Madison Square Park. But nothing came of it because the company farms out its PR through an external agency and wasn’t looking to hire any in-house writers. [back]

Greetings from Miami, Home of the Humidity. I got up at 2 a.m. today to catch a 3 a.m. car for my 6 a.m. flight out of La Guardia, because the TSA monkeys are still suggesting we arrive early to cover for their gross inefficiency over the liquid terror scare. The problem is, everyone arrived early. There were already a full 60 people in line when I arrived at 3:30 a.m. And not for screening: for checking in. Because American couldn’t be bothered to open any earlier than normal. Plus, it was annoying, because as a flight to Miami it was chock full of Summer Breaking youngsters, many of whom it seemed had never been in an airport before. Also, there was an entire teenaged baseball team checking in at once, complete with coaches and long duffel bags stuffed with bats. By the time I got through the lines and waiting, it was 30 minutes until my flight. Once aboard, the requisite shrieking baby across the aisle challenged my sleep, but I nodded off twice and the flight passed quickly.

I rented a Taurus at the airport, because I’m meeting with a bunch of bigwig real estate executives this week. Unlike D.C., Philly or San Francisco, where I made similar trips in the last 18 months, everything considered the Miami Metropolitain Area is spread out across three counties, connected by perpetually jammed routes like I-95 and no reliable public transportation.

Because I’m so bad at following directions, I opted for a car with one of those GPS systems that digitally maps the vehicle’s location and announces where to go. I spent the first 15 minutes shouting at it. First, it didn’t even tell me where to go from the car pickup garage. Then—and I swear it did this even after I entered my correct downtown Miami destination—it gave me directions back to the drop-off area at the Miami Airport, which I stupidly followed until I realized too late that it was trying to ditch me. As the day wore on, I got the hang of it. My favorite feature is that I can drive in a random direction, which is how I usually start map-plotted trips, and the GPS will immediately chart a correct alternate route based on my waywardness. The interface is clumsy, as any data-entry device without a keyboard will be, and it takes me a good five minutes to enter my coordinates. But better that than than trying to unfurl a map of Southern Florida as I hurtle down I-95.

My hotel, a franchised Days Inn, is really, really cheap. There’s a dead cockroach on its back in the closet, which bothers me considerably less than finding a live one. In fact, I’m going to leave the carcass there as a warning to any living insects, like a head on a pike.

The blue collar neighborhood behind the hotel is comprised of low bungalows with rippled terra-cotta roofs and stunted palm trees poking from stiff-grassed lawns. Walking around back there late this afternoon, I noticed lizards the size of tiepins skittering up tree trunks and across the sidewalks. They’re probably considered vermin, but they’re cute, with their tongues darting out and their spindly legs.

Good for you that the hotel has free wireless internet access, that I might bring you this thrilling entry. Wireless internet is quite plainly the most expensive and recent capital improvement that’s been made to the place. I believe the furnishings, duvet and curtains can be carbon-dated to the Carter administration. As long as my room stays quiet, air-conditioned and alive bug-free, what more could I want?

We held a real estate conference this morning in White Plains for the Westchester, New York market for which I moderated a panel discussion on Yonkers. The panelists and I had a conference call last week to talk about what we were going to talk about. Among the panel’s politicians and economic development officials, there was much hand wringing over the phrase “affordable housing.” Suggestions of “workforce” or “obtainable” were named instead, words that have specific meanings but in this case were being used as euphamisms or Newspeak like “downsizing.” These phrases were debated for a full five minutes of the call. And there was a strict warning not to mention a shame of Yonkers from the past that’s still having repercussions on the city’s success today: desegregation. Conspicuously absent from the conference call was the panel’s star, Yonkers mayor Philip Amicone, who dispatched a minion to the teleconference in his place. Later I realized this may have been a maneuver by him to speak his mind on the panel without bowing to suggestion.

During the panel, he flat out talked about not only affordable housing (that’s right: housing for poor people), but desegregation and he used the phrase white flight, which caused several panel members to look down at their water glasses with a grimace, though they seemed resigned to the fact that he was the mayor and he’d do whatever he wanted. Yet he seems far from a dictator. After the panel I thanked him for his candor, and he said he picked up his low-bullshit way of talking practically and getting things done from his previous civilian job as a civil engineer. “And if I don’t get re-elected, I’ll go right back to doing that,” he told me, as if he’d rather be designing a particularly majestic suspension bridge.

If you store a mysteriously chunky, semiliquid foodstuff in a Mason jar wrapped in a torn plastic grocery bag, then place it in the common fridge at work, right in the middle of the top shelf, you’ve opened the floor for commentary.

My boss is having me moderate one of the panel discussions at an upcoming real estate conference of ours which necessitated a photo of me for the program. One of the production ladies took it in our office with her digital camera, but she kept getting glare off my glasses. If it wasn’t one lens, it was the other, or both, no matter which way my head was turned or tilted and no matter where the light source. She ended up photographing me without my glasses, removed one of my eyes digitally and Photoshopped it over one of the glaring glasses frames in another photo. There’s still some glare, but it’s clearer that I have two eyes. After too much of me staring over her shoulder at this fascinating surgery, watching my digital eye flit around her screen on the tip of her cursor, she threatened to place it in the center of my forehead,

Looking over these photos, I realize that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen myself without glasses. Sure, I can look in a mirror, but my eyesight is so poor that my face must be about an inch from the glass, or else I’m a pale blur. So I know what three-inch-square segments of my face look like without glasses, but not my whole head, until I saw the photo. Eh. I look like one of the “before” photos in one of those magazine pictorials that strive to convince ladies to wear the newest seasonal makeup combination, lest their face look as if it’s sculpted from wax.

The production lady was also able to erase the background elements of the photo so it appears as if I was photographed on a gray studio backdrop. This is always slightly harder than it would seem, to avoid looking as if the foreground element has been cut out with safety scissors and gluesticked to a new background. Also, my tie that day was crumpled, having been wadded in my backpack, and production lady was all set to “iron” it in Photoshop, but she didn’t need to because of the angle at which it appears in the final photo.

Really all this work was overkill, seeing as the headshots in our event programs are the size of postage stamps. But it was an intriguing process. O, Photoshop; you save us from reality.

I took a train up to Greenwich, Connecticut today. The ride took 50 minutes, not including the time it took to get over to Grand Central from my office building. Then I attended a meeting that lasted maybe 25 minutes. And then I took a 50-minute train ride back into the city. What a time waster. On the positive side, I find train rides relaxing; is it because the constant gentle rocking of the traincars in motion lulls one into a rock-a-bye-baby state of drowsiness? I think so.

I’d been told to keep an eye peeled for pickpockets, gypsies and gypsy pickpockets while I’m vacationing in Rome this August, and I thought, how bad can it be? I’ll just ensure my wallet is in my front pocket.

Today, though, a friendly New York-born-and-bred coworker cautioned me as well. She’s been to Rome twice and said a fannypack or money belt was absolutely necessary for securing one’s money and other portable valuables. Yikes! Now that a lifetime New Yorker has emphasized the magical disappearing quality of tourist money in Rome, I’m inclined to believe it’s a serious situation and will buy that money belt. Although this doesn’t mean I still can’t execute the idea I had to keep an empty decoy wallet prominently stuck in my back pocket just to see how quickly and quietly it could be filched.

I’d been without a proper cap since I lost my favorite in Ireland last summer, so before my San Francisco trip, I returned to Morris Bros., the Upper West Side purveyor of baggy T-shirts and school uniforms, where I bought my previous hat. I liked that ex-hat because it was one of those elastic band varieties that best fits my chubby head. The closest they had this time was “The Perfect Fit” Yankees cap in “Fitted Garment Wash,” which makes it look as if it’d been left on a hot car dashboard an entire summer, then driven over a few times for good measure. I wasn’t crazy about the logo, but it fit and protecting my balding head from the sun and the cold was of paramount importance.

On two separate occasions here in San Francisco, people in the hotel elevator used it as a conversation starter. “Oh, you from New York?” they’d ask, and we’d enact a rushed conversation abruptly ended by the elevator doors opening. It was tough to tell if this was genuine congeniality or the talk of a salesperson, who frequent hotels for meetings and conventions. Waiting for the restroom on my plane back to New York, another person struck up a conversation; by then I’d downgraded my “Are you from New York?” response to “Not originally.” This girl said she’d lived in many places ’round the world and decided that two years is the minimum amount of time that can pass before one can consider oneself a true resident of a city. Sounds about right. I guess I have to wear my hat during travel more often and strangers will talk to me.

I had to cross the bay this afternoon for a meeting in Oakland, California, and I was all set to tackle the BART card-vending machines with renewed vigor. In San Francisco, like in D.C. (but unlike flat-fee New York), you pay for your subway ride based on its length. This requires you to put a little thought into how much money you should put on your card because the machines only return a low amount of maximum change.

When I entered the Montgomery Street BART/MUNI station, all of the farecard slots were taped over with blue stickers and the electronic turnstiles were open. Signs announced a “Spare the Air Day,” which I later learned was heat-induced—apparently, 84 degrees is really hot for the city.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article, the free rides were to lure commuters away from their cars onto public transportation to avoid exceeding state and federal smog standards. Although transit officials said the campaign drew “significant numbers of new passengers to some systems,” it didn’t sway enough to avoid tipping the smog scale, likely to 90ppb (parts per billion) of emissions for today; the federal ozone standard maxes-out at 80ppb. Hey, at least they’re tryin’.

I did some stereotypical San Francisco sightseeing today. I hiked up Telegraph Hill to see Coit Tower and a prime view of Alcatraz Island. I browsed the stacks at City Lights, co-founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore and publisher to the beat poets. Fisherman’s Wharf, which I also stopped by, is the Times Square of San Francisco: chain restaurants, dreary hotels, questionable entertainments, beggars, tacky T-shirts and trinkets for sale, and fat people clearly not from the city waddling about. This photo of a seagull in a shitstained landscape, eating what appears to be a bun, just about sums it up for me.

I salvaged my wharfwalk somewhat with a planned visit to the Musée Mécanique, a collection of antique mechanized penny and nickel amusements, including viewboxes for 3D photos (“See what the belly dancer does on her day off!”), player pianos and orchestrions, photobooths, fortune-tellers and palm-readers, love-testers, mutoscopes and slot machines.

It’s too bad it’s not a true museum but a bunch of stuff some daft old bastard collected and threw into a warehouse on Pier 45. There are very few placards describing who made these Wunderkammern and why, how popular they were, or how they work. Or course, there’s also no admission fee to the Musée, so I can’t complain too much.

One of the two most popular attractions was Knock Out Fighters, a primitive precursor to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. They’re these articulated, marionette-like boxer figurines, made in 1928 by a St. Paul-based scale manufacturer, that are completely mechanical and use no electricity. The arms of each player’s boxer are moved independently by two triggers on the gun handle-style “joystick.” A direct punch to the chin of an opposing boxer pushes in a pin that causes the figure to collapse in defeat. The other crowd-favored game was this mechanical test-your-strength arm-wrestler in a luchador mask, favored by gentlemen wishing to impress their ladies.

I also enjoyed this amusement park model fashioned mostly from toothpicks.

Nearby was an intriguing text-and-photo-based history of the roller coaster and the magic year of 1884, when LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a crafty inventor from Ohio, installed the first, the 600-foot Switchback Railway at Coney Island. It topped out at six miles-per-hour and required passengers to exit their car at the halfway point to switch to another track. But even that couldn’t hinder thrill-seekers who waited up to three hours in line to pay their nickel and take the wild ride. That same year at Coney Island, San Franciscan Philip Hinckle installed the first power-chain operated lift-hill coaster, while in San Francisco, two “continuous oval-track gravity coasters” opened, one at Ocean Beach and another at Mission and Eighth. Here’s the text of an ad from that year promoting the latter coaster:

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
A Sled-Ride Down Hill Without Snow!
GREAT SPORT!
PHYSICIANS RECOMMEND IT. * OPEN DAY AND NIGHT.
The CALIFORNIA GRAVITY RAILROAD CO.
Cor. Eighth and Mission Sts.
ADMISSION FREE. * FIVE CENTS A RIDE.
Bring your family and enjoy yourselves.
Polite Attendants. Electric Lights.

There are newer exhibits in the Musée as well: about a dozen old video games plunked way in the back. I was disappointed that the only inoperable machine was one of my all-time favorites, Tempest (1980), and to read the instructions revived fond memories. This game was easier than Old Maid:

TO PLAY:
Shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges. Player loses a life when:
* caught by an enemy
* hit by a charge
* skewered by a spike

Wrapping up a fine afternoon on my long walk back to the hotel, I was able to score some Mexican Coke. No, not the Lindsay Lohan kind. Check it out, baby: hecho en Mexico.

If you wonder what my fuss is about, you are no soda connoisseur. Here’s part of an Associated Press article from 2004:

[D]iscriminating shoppers [...] say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

I’ve since read not all Coke in Mexico is made with sugar, but I trust that mine is because there’s an official label stuck to the oldschool green-tinted glass bottle by the importer with sugar listed as the second ingredient after carbonated water.

If you believe a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which doesn’t offer any hard data to back up its claim, you can find Mexican Coke “just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States.” But most of the officially sanctioned product here is found in Texas and Southern California, two of the largest Mexican markets in the country. The rest of the country’s Mexican Coke may be “grey market” stock brought over the border by third-party distributors or retailers. See, the Coca-Cola Co. limits official imports of the stuff because U.S. bottlers don’t get any money from Mexican Coke and that makes the U.S. bottlers sad.

One reason U.S. Coke isn’t made with sugar is that domestic sugar prices are artificially inflated to several times of those anywhere else in the world in order to help poor Florida sugarbeet farmers buy another Olympic-sized swimming pool for their second house.

So drink Mexican Coke and not only is it tastier than “the real thing,” you’re screwing over sugar farmers, the Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers. Amazing how quickly an American icon can turn renegade. I’m going to lug my bottle back to New York and store it in a cool, dark place. As is done with Dom Perignon, I will save it to drink with a special someone for a special occasion.

Greetings from San Francisco! I’m here all this week for work and I must ask you: Is there any song more annoying to have stuck in your head here than “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” by Scott McKenzie?

Up on the 20th floor of the Argent Hotel, as I utilize my $14.95 per night DSL connection, I can hear streetcars trundle by on the street below. Probably the most interesting structure visible from my window is the Hobart Building, although within walking distance are the Transamerica Pyramid and other architectural marvels.

Right now, I’m trying to adjust to the time difference, a chore aggravated by my busy work day today, as well as going to bed very late last night and rising at 4:00 this morning to catch my 7:00 a.m. flight from JFK to Oakland. I’m to that point where when I turn my head, my vision lags 50 frames behind my motion, slowly dragging objects and people into focus. It’s like being drunk, only not as fun.

I flew to Boston this afternoon for a conference tomorrow and on my flight out of LaGuardia, the pilot’s name was Spud. And the flight attendant’s name was Odessa. But the funniest part of this was that the co-pilot’s name was Dennis.

About a year ago at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, some wonks presented a paper that concluded coworkers who share their music via iTunes form opinions about each other based upon the musical selections.

For those unfamiliar with the inner-workings of iTunes, there’s a feature that lets you listen to (but not download) music on other people’s computers within a Local Area Network (i.e. pretty much within any office) via a Shared Music tab.

Most importantly, the study found that employees used their shared music libraries to consciously portray an self-image, adding songs they thought would make them seem more cool or removing embarrassing ones. I admit that I did the latter at one point to shield others and myself from the potential uncoolness associated with my mighty collection of ’80s pop. But sometimes, one finds oneself thirsting for the synthesized drama of Cutting Crew, Bananarama or Glenn Frey.

Also, as you might expect, the study discovered that many people think their musical preferences are unique when in fact they’re not. As I like to put it, if your musical preferences are centered around CDs you bought online or in a store, then your preferences are unlikely unique. The only way your preferences are remotely unique is if your chief outlet for purchased music is wax cylinders proffered by some drunk with a hurdy gurdy on a street corner in Selma, Alabama.

Finally, the study says it drives people nuts when music is shared anonymously; people want to associate musical preferences with a face, presumably so they can mock it. The two people sharing music in my office today weren’t anonymous, but if they were or you didn’t know them, you probably still wouldn’t get a very clear picture of their personality judging them by the bulk of their musical selections.

My previous boss shares her music, and here are her top-five most-represented artists, with the number of songs in her library by each:

• 77 Steely Dan
• 42 Elvis Costello
• 28 Michael McDonald
• 25 John Fogerty
• 23 Paul Simon

O.K., so you know how old she is. (Answer: roughly as old as your Mom.) But Elvis lurking there like that is a sort of strange inclusion.

The only other music-sharer today was a girl probably in her late-20s that works on the magazines:

• 25 Billy Joel
• 25 Radiohead
• 21 John Coltrane
• 20 The Who
• 14 Bob Dylan

Again, all big names, but an intriguing mix.

If I shared my music, which I don’t, my top-five list would be:

• 46 PJ Harvey
• 33 The Rolling Stones
• 32 Sonic Youth
• 28 Madonna
• 26 David Bowie

Again with the big names, and expected from a guy with black plastic frame glasses, even if the bulk of my collection is comprised of one or two tracks by assorted and sometimes more-obscure artists.

So it doesn’t seem in the case of the two ladies in my office that they’re attempting to cultivate any cool via their shared playlists. I certainly don’t begrudge them for their Michael McDonald or Billy Joel, as I trust they would not begrudge my Madonna.

Self-professed “rogue economist” Steven Levitt coauthored a book last year, Freakononics, that’s become quite popular (although at least one wiseguy disagrees with some of its key conclusions).

Levitt still teaches at the University of Chicago, so I thought I’d check what his speaking fee might be for our event in that city this summer. It’s $50,000, and that doesn’t include expenses. I had no idea sub A-listers charged this much. I mean, we’re a decently monied company and all, but that’s a wee out of our budget; we typically only grant small honorariums and cover travel and lodging expenses for any big-name headlining speakers we may procure.

The kindly woman at Levitt’s agency told me that instead, perhaps I would consider Levitt’s Freakonomics coauthor (and apparently the guy who actually wrote the book), Stephen Dubner. His fee? A modest $25,000.

My boss and I discussed our options and decided that we could instead just hire someone cheap with a dramatic voice to read passages from Freakonomics. Or we could take the Avenue Q route, get some stringy puppets and have a bawdy economic outlook onstage.

This guy is speaking at a real estate conference in Phoenix that my company is producing next month.

That site is more of a historical appreciation of Mr. Pollack, but he’s currently active in Arizona real estate. Oh, and is a drummer in a band (while still wearing his suit) and owns his own three-dimensional advertising museum. Writers such as myself are always mildly disappointed to discover that characters like this actually exist because it takes all the fun out of making them up.

He reminds one coworker of a cast member from Survivor, Johnny Fairplay. To me, he is Arizona’s version of the Donald and resembles a dragonslayer. A dragonslayer from the early ’80s.

I am supremely disappointed I will not be attending this particular event of ours to hear this gentleman speak or at least get a closer look at that hair and bask in its life spirit.

Here’s a doodle I found at a real estate conference in Philadelphia today.

The soda bread I made last night for our perpetual Patty’s Day party at work today was a hit. The photo above depicts what remained of the spread at 12:45 p.m., after the locusts had descended. What’s left of my soda bread is sitting on the tinfoil in the foreground. Many people said they liked it, but I think that was because this mouthy girl I work with kept telling people it was I who had baked it, after listing all the ladies who had made stuff, as if it was by some miracle that a guy could cook. Also, I don’t take praise well.

So thanks to Dana for the recipe, and happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. Drink a Guinness for me.

This girl in my department is getting married early this fall and started dieting in January. She’s always on top of her work so it’s not surprising she’s on top of this and not merely waiting until two months before the Big Day to start.

She’s also a driven, competitive individual, which helps. When she began the diet, she goaded me to reveal much I weighed. “I bet you weigh less than I do,” she would say, poking at me. But I sidestepped her question because I really don’t know how much I weigh, and even if I did I wouldn’t tell her because I don’t think the weight of a nearly six-foot-tall guy has any bearing on the weight of a woman of average height.

So she’s looked elsewhere for encouragement, banding with other dieters in the office to talk about whatever it is dieters talk about: maybe brag how little they ate for lunch or how they would garrote their own mother for half a Snickers bar.

My problem with all of this is she’s losing weight and looks great, but I’m not sure how to tell her this or even if I should. In this self-absorbed and litigious age, I rarely complement a coworker on his or her appearance, because even if I try the old “Oh, did you get a haircut?” I’m hit with a retort like “I just didn’t have time to blow dry it this morning.” And it’s not so much feelings of impropriety as it is my general avoidance of sweet nothings like “Good morning” and “How are you?” In summary, for me to say something like “You’re looking good” could imply:

1. She didn’t look good before.
2. I have an ulterior motive because I haven’t addressed her personally before.
3. I am a pervert and party to harassment.

Although I’m sure heath benefits are a component to why people diet, it’s really about looking better, isn’t it, particularly with swimsuit season fast approaching? So why shouldn’t I be able to complement her on her appearance? And would “You’re looking good” even be the right way to put it? It’s vague, although “Hey, you’ve lost weight!” doesn’t work, either.

I flew to Miami today on business and it’s only the second time I’ve even been to Florida. I see why people would want to come here for the sole purposes of drinking/fucking or waiting out death. It’s really quite pleasant. Warmth, huge puffy white clouds, palm trees, ocean breeze, spunky music. It’s enough to make you go all soft and pleasant. I’m down here for a two-day conference event produced by a big brokerage with lots of money and it’s being held at the same resort where Tiger Woods played and won during the Ford Championship on March 5.

Like most other white-collar businesses, my work is populated by middle-aged white men who get really excited about golf, and this is a golf haven. I hate golf because I am not good at it, nor do I have any desire to improve my standing. As my Dad would tell you, the first and only time I played a game of golf other than Putt-Putt, I hit more balls onto I-75 than any flat green surface.

These guys, who were mostly brokers, like sports in general. The keynote speaker was Don Shula and I watched the crowd literally lean forward in its seats to hear Coach, as they called him later during the Q&A session, talk about himself and pitch sports-success-as-business-success similes. He’s a dynamic speaker and his well-crafted jokes referencing events during his tenure coaching the Dolphins were funny, but I was left with the impression that he pulls the same speech from his pocket at all the corporate events he’s paid to speak at, complete with the insert company name here spot to personalize the thing, like the band that shouts out, “Hello, Cleveland!”

I received a nice, chastising email from our head IT guy, copied to about a dozen other offenders as well as some key upper executives. The subject line of this scarlet letter was “Your mailbox is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over the size limit” and I was proud that I was ranked with the fourth largest mailbox size in the company: 1.5 GB.

I’ve been in an argument with our IT guy since I first exceeded my mailbox limit, sometime back in 2004, because of the way he has my account set up. As you might suspect, the mailbox size is due to an accumulation of attachments: high-res images, Word and Excel documents, and the like. Many times, I’ve saved all attachments to my hard drive, then removed the attachments from the emails. Alas, my email is mirrored on a server somewhere and whenever I relaunch my email program Entourage, it dutifully synchs the mailbox on my computer with the mailbox on the remote server, which never, ever gets the message that I’ve deleted any attachments. So I watch in horror as the attachments magically reattach themselves and my mailbox size reinflates; these are zombie attachments and I cannot kill them.

The chastising IT email didn’t give any archival suggestions, only vaguely stating that we should aim for a much smaller mailbox size. As examples of this fitness, I was amused to note he included the line, “To place things in perspective, Bill        and Eric          have mailbox sizes under 349 MB.” Those two guys are, coincidentally, the CEO and CFO of our company, respectively. I hate to be the first to tell you this, IT guy, but there’s a reason these guys’ mailboxes are so small: 1.) they don’t actually do any work, in the strictest sense of the word; 2.) they have people to manage their email for them.

After talking to the IT guy, what it turns out I needed to do was delete the entire email, including the attachment, from my computer. It’s like those Roundup commercials that point out how you need to kill the root of the weed, not just its flowery top, to totally eradicate the little fuckers. I was vaguely aware of this option but didn’t want to take it, as I like to keep old emails around for purposes of memory and blackmail. My eventual solution was to copy all of my sent items and pre-2005 received items, sans attachments, to local folders on my hard drive, then delete the messages wholesale from Entourage.

Now my total mailbox size is only about 128 MB. Everybody wins!

I like celebrating the birthdays of coworkers. Not the obligatory herd into the conference room for grocery-store cake and wordlessness, but the signing of the card. I put thought and personalization into my messages. The one I just wrote, for a girl in the production department that I’m buddies with, read:

You are the patron saint of the company. But one of those pagan-style saints. You know, the fun kind. Happy feastday,
Jason

My rules are that the messages must be concise and not what everyone writes in interoffice birthday cards, which is “Happy birthday!”, “Have a great day!” or both. For people over 30, they will additionally allow, “You don’t look a day over 25!” For people under 30, it’s “Don’t drink too much tonight!” (Or maybe that’s just me.) Sometimes I challenge myself by fabricating rules, such as that I’m not allowed to use the word “birthday” or “happy.”

Here are two other recent birthday tidings I remember writing. This one was for the grumpy editorial assistant; I like goading her into greater grumpiness, although I admit it’s not much of a challenge.

You are the sunshine of my life. I don’t like the sun very much. Enjoy your special day anyway,
Jason

And for my previous boss, the one with olfactory hallucinations:

Do you smell something burning? That’s all the candles on your cake.
Jason

I never get feedback on my messages. Maybe people don’t read all those tiny, hastily scrawled congratulations. Maybe, like Dave Coulier, I’m not as funny as I think I am. I’ll keep writing them, though. It gives me something to consider at work other than real estate.

More business meetings all day today in Philadelphia with my boss, eight in a row. That’s tiring. But we’re getting plenty of great speaker ideas and potential topics to cover at our Philadelphia real estate conference this Spring.

Like you care, but the hottest topics in Philadelphia real estate are:

1. Condo Conversions. The city’s becoming more 24/7 (as New York is) as older office space downtown is converted to condos that cater in price to young professionals or even baby boomers that are moving into the city from a house in the suburbs. (Suburban sprawl in Metro Philly has reached the point where the highway infrastructure is no longer sufficient and there are traffic jams of nightmarish proportions.) Developers are so ape over conversions, they’re converting factory space, warehouse space, apartment space and in one case, an entire parking garage. But how many condos are too many condos, and is there a lack of affordable space?
2. Gambling. Donald Trump has his busy hands in a project to bring a few slot-machine casinos to the Downtown area. On one hand, who wants that influx of shitmongers that is attracted to gambling? On the other, the city could use the taxes generated by such ventures, particularly since it’s still in the python-like grip of an inexplicably anti-business stance, tax and incentive-wise. This in part has resulted in:
3. Office Vacancies. There are more of ’em downtown than some Philly real estate execs are comfortable with, and although job growth is positive there, it’s nothing to write home about. How can the city attract business to locate or relocate in Philly? Will developer Brandywine build a second Cira Centre skyscraper, as has been rumored, and what effect will that have on an already generously available inventory of space? And what effect will there be from the Comcast Center tower, slated to open next year?

On the train back, I got to listen to my boss have a cellphone conversation with his young son about how he (the son) had been throwing up for most of the day. We sat in the dining car, recapping the day and our notes, while eating bad nachos and drinking canned Budweiser. They gotta start including perks like this on the subway.

I got smacked by the battery of business meetings in Philadelphia today with my boss, seven of them in a row, pretty much every hour, on the hour. Fortunately, all of the meetings today and the ones tomorrow are in Center City, a fancy term for “Downtown Philadelphia” and the weather is unseasonably nice, so the transport is not hectic at all. We walked to most of the appointments and took a cab to a few. We’re meeting with locally based commercial real estate executives—a mix of brokers, developers, owners and bankers—to get ideas for topics and speakers for our Philadelphia real estate conference this year.

At my boss’ insistence, we had dinner at one of his favorite Philly spots, The Continental [Warning: link leads to obnoxious Flash site], a kitschy-hip Martini bar serving tapas-style food and 80’s pop hits over the sound system on three floors. The concierge at the hotel said the place didn’t take reservations, but we’d have no trouble getting a table at 7:30. We ended up waiting at the bar for 45 minutes, but the location was comfortably convenient and we drank plenty. The crowd was a strange mix of young families and 20-something hipsters. We tried five different dishes: steak, spinach ravioli, samosas, fried calamari (served in a newspaper cone, like they used to serve fish and chips in Britain), and my favorite contribution, lobster macaroni and cheese, which was a valiant attempt, but needed more lobster and less orzo, which substituted for the macaroni.

Philadelphia is strange. It’s like a weird cross between the urban Midwestern-ness and architecture of Chicago and the density and culture of New York City, but with quietude and no good public transportation. It was so eerie, it took me a day to realize how quiet it was on the streets, even during rush hour, because almost no one honks their horn here, whereas in New York, most people start honking as soon as they leave their parking space, just in case, and, well, you know, everyone else is doing it.

After work, I took the train to Philadelphia to meet up with my boss (who had been in Washington, D.C. for meetings) for two solid days of business appointments tomorrow and Friday.

We’re staying at the Radisson Warwick, built in the late 1920s in the English Renaissance style and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. My boss had left me a cellphone message to meet him at the fancier of the hotel’s two restaurants, the Prime Rib, a Zagat-recommended steakhouse that was fancier than I thought it would be. My first clue was when I was required to check my coat, informed I needed a jacket, and realized I had already had my bag containing my suit sent up to my room. The Brooks Brothers loaner I ended up with was a good three inches too short in the sleeves, but the restaurant was tastefully dark so I don’t think anyone noticed, much less cared.

This is a detail of a can of cut-rate Lucky SuperSoft brand air freshener that’s in one of the restrooms at work. Because of the palm tree photo illustration, I know what they mean by “Marine,” but the first thing I thought was that, even when they’re fresh, marines probably smell mainly like sweat, particularly when they’re “in the shit.”

Remember that near life-size color printout of our publisher that made its way into a company restroom this summer? The imps in the production department were just getting warmed up. They got their hands on the snapshots from our company holiday party and when I returned to the office this morning from our Northern Virginia event, I was greeted with an 8.5-by-11-inch printout of this photo taped to my computer’s screen. Marvel at the requisite Guinness in hand, and my grotesquely slack, pasty face.

Not bad work, especially considering I wasn’t wearing a Santa cap. The wonders of Photoshop!

I got off easy. Two other photos were expertly transfered onto full-size magazine covers and cleverly interspersed with actual real estate publication covers that are framed behind glass and hanging on a display wall near our office lobby for all to see. One particularly saucy photo, depicting two of our salespeople dirty dancing in a pose reminiscent of a certain sex act illegal in some states, magically appeared on the cover of our flagship print publication, complete with custom cover lines (“Sales Keep Getting Stronger, Page 44”).

Another salesguy, snapped with beer in hand and shimmying to his own flabby white-guy dance, appeared on a cover of Men’s Health magazine with cover lines about how to “Muscle Up in 3 Weeks!”, “Never Miss Another Workout” and similar blurbs regarding abs. Both covers resemble professional versions of those “Time Magazine Person of the Year” novelty covers you can get at amusement parks. Holiday hilarity!

Our Northern Virginia real estate event was from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m. today at the Ritz-Carlton at Tysons Corner, Virginia. A fine venue with a crackling fireplace, stockings hung from the chimney with care, and a giant gingerbread merry-go-round. And that’s just the lobby!

Actually, beyond the decor, and the fact that you have to take two separate elevators to get to your room (now that’s classy!), it wasn’t that special. There was no coffeemaker in my room, probably because that’s considered ghetto by Chairman Ritz-Carlton, but the bed was large and mighty comfy. I would be lying to you if I told you I most certainly did not jump several times directly from the luxuriously upholstered ottoman directly onto the bed, where I eventually ended up staying to watch four reruns of Friends in a row while I ate a scrumptious room service strip steak that I will be getting reimbursed for.

Up at 4:00 a.m. to catch my flight from Newark to Washington National Airport. I spent the day roaming the streets of our nation’s capital, meeting with real estate executives to discuss the agenda and speaker lineup for our Washington, D.C. real estate conference, which will be held next year in late February or early March.

I also marveled at how clean Washington is compared to New York, and how wide and accommodating its sidewalks are. Also: much better subway system. Of course in a public transport smackdown, D.C. has the unfair advantage of a system that was built more or less all at once (and not in horribly merged chunks, like in New York). It’s also nowhere near as old as New York’s system. But anyway, here are some pros:

• The best: LED boards telling you which side of the track your train will arrive on and in how many minutes.
• The conductors tell you which side of the train the doors will open on.
• Padded leather-ish seats. (If you installed these in New York, they would be ripped off and/or defaced in approximately 20 minutes.)
• Carpeted floors. These, too, would be ripped up in New York, or soaked in one or more bodily fluids.
• Quietude; not all that scraping and banshee shrieking of New York’s trains.
• People somewhat more polite getting on and off the train. D.C. reminds me of Chicago in that respect; a clean, large actual American city that seems to be populated by people with Midwestern attitudes.
• Creepy-cool stations. It took me a second to realize why, but it’s that the artificial light sources come from the ground up, so everything is bottom-lit, like when you were a kid and told ghost stories while holding a flashlight under your chin. This is more theatrical and flattering then harsh overhead florescent lighting. The large arched concrete stations have recessed panels and strange lighting, too.

One con is that you often must swipe your card not only upon entering the system, but also when exiting, apparently because you pay for the length of your commute during rush hour instead of a flat fee, or something like that. It’s kinda annoying, but not that bad to put up with.

Between my meetings, I had some spare time which I spent photographing the Washington Monument and the White House.

Viewing the exhibits at the National Museum of American History (isn’t that name redundant?), I saw one of Mr. Roger’s orange knit zip-up sweaters and Bill Clinton’s saxophone. I walked briskly through an exhibit called, “Whatever Happened to Polio?” It’s a rather hopeful title, as if the Smithsonian thought people would say, “My god, what did happen to it? Better find out by entering this informative looking exhibit!” But it’s not always easy to get people interested in essentially eradicated viral diseases any more than it is to get the average American interested in American History prior to 1983.

I also viewed the star-spangled banner, of Star-Spangled Banner fame, which has been stretched flat in a massive, spotless workroom behind Plexiglas while it’s being repaired and restored. I was chagrined to learn that before the Smithsonian got its hands on it in 1907, the flag’s cretin owners snipped small and not-so-small bits off to save as patriotic mementos-one of the flag’s 15 white cotton stars, for instance, has been snipped clean away, and other chunks of the red-white-and-blue striped bunting are missing.

My company’s holiday party this afternoon, like last year’s, was held at the Met Lounge, the upstairs area of Tonic, a bar/restaurant/club near Times Square. The company rented the top floor and lounge area for good eats, two open bars, music and mingling.

Continuing the Office Space theme to my gift-exchange purchases, I got my secret-Santa the film on DVD. She seemed to appreciate it; I thought she might, seeing as the movie’s tagline is “Work Sucks” and she’s easily the crankiest person at work and has been with the company 16 years-she’s an editorial assistant, and I used to work with her when I was editing the real estate magazine, having her send faxes, transcribe interviews from audiotape and other drudgery.

A few hours after the holiday party, I headed back out for Katie’s birthday celebration at Tom & Jerry’s, a cozy bar on Elizabeth Street just off Houston. The name isn’t a reference to the cartoon, but more likely to the liquor-spiked hot eggnog beverage of the same name; lining shelves behind the bar are vintage punchbowl sets, many printed with the phrase “Tom & Jerry.”

Any bar without the obnoxious pretenses of the average SoHo establishment, teamed with Guinness on tap and Laphroaig on the shelf, is O.K. by me. Also great was that on a large movie screen at the end of the bar they played a cycle of classic black-and-white films from a range of eras: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Buster Keaton’s The General and Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law.

In what’s become a stupid in-joke (is there any other kind?), whenever this one coworker and I are talking about exacting imaginary revenge on someone particularly despised, we say that he or she needs to be “punched in the neck” or put through “a good neck-punching.”

It’s a phrase I purloined from this guy I used to work with, R.J., who had a lot of bottled up anger and creative turns of phrase. I don’t know why the idea of punching someone in the neck is so amusing to me. It’s not at all that I literally want to punch someone in the neck or otherwise hurt them; I think it’s the specificity of the word “neck.” It’s a funny sounding word, too, and who in their right mind expects to be hit there?

This thought inspired some screen-captures and Photoshop hackwork tonight for a filmstrip-sequence image I’ll be emailing to my neck punch-obsessed coworker tomorrow. (Click image for a larger version in a pop-up window.)

It helps a bit if you’ve seen the movie.

Do you recall that industrial real estate conference I went to about a month ago in Long Beach, California? I was reminded when the digital contact sheets from our event photographer arrived today. That’s right: Look who got snapped making a speaker introduction. You know, I thought I remember a paparazzo flash interrupting my concentration.

Adjust that mike and stand up straighter, son! At least I’m attempting to make eye contact with the audience, although it appears to be of the Medusa sort.

Another insanely busy real estate conference day, this one for the New Jersey market. The car service driver picked me up from the apartment at 5 a.m., and it was good he did because he got lost on his way to Teaneck. He seemed to expect that I should know how to get there, even though I explicitly provided the dispatcher with the hotel’s address. The high point of the day was either the roast beef sandwich I had for lunch or the beautiful view of the city from the George Washington Bridge.

A Reuters story posted on September 19^th that I came across today serves nicely as a nexus of my job (real estate), my apartment search (little space; lots of money) and Dublin, where my sister lives.

10-foot-wide shed sells for $269,100 in Dublin

Startling price for tiny structure highlights Ireland’s real estate boom

DUBLIN, Ireland—A former tool shed built to fill a gap in the middle of a row of Victorian houses in what was once Dublin’s poorest district has found a buyer at a startling price of $269,100 (220,000 euros).

At 10 feet wide and with a floor space of 280 square feet the building was last sold for 500 Irish pounds ($777) in the 1970s.

The red-brick house has no garden and no ground floor windows.

The realtor selling the property said on Monday a sale had been agreed but declined to comment further.

The price tag raised eyebrows even in Ireland where the cost of homes has tripled between 1997 and 2004.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Dublin may not leap to the average person’s mind when he’s thinking of the world’s costliest rental rates, but it ranks highly. Another exmple: According to a study issued last October by international brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield, real estate on Grafton Street in Dublin is the world’s fifth most expensive, after London’s Oxford Street, Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, the Champs Elysés in Paris and, of course, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Since my company was acquired by a law journal publisher last year, it has become much more of a “corporate” entity, because the acquiring firm is much larger than ours and because it’s bristling with lawyers. We now receive all sorts of directives from upon high, including the need for all employees to take a sexual harassment training course.

These courses have come a long way since I was last subjected to an awkwardly produced VHS video on the determents of ass grabbing in the workplace. The one I took was available online via any web browser and there was a quiz at the end to ensure I learned my lesson.

The presentation kicks off with an embedded Flash video that tells the tale of Mav, Beth and Katie. “Things are about to get a little uncomfortable,” the voiceover solemnly intones over a jaunty synth-sax riff, but I wasn’t about to get my hopes up. The plot, such as it is, involves Mav, who previously dated Katie, feeling uncomfortable because of her sexual innuendos regarding the nature and precise location of Mav’s tattoo. Beth plays both the conflicted coworker and token non-white person.

Afterwards, I blew through the “what is sexual harassment” overview, which includes a brief summary on what it is, how to report it, and many grammatical errors, such as, “E-mail create’s a permanent record” and “I’m a cat lover and my co-workers constantly bug me with ‘uses for dead cats’ jokes, is this harassment?” (In case you’re wondering, a.) the grammatical error is a run-on sentence; and b.) it’s not unlawful sexual harassment, although the program demands, “Keep all harassment in check—report the behavior to HR or your supervisor.”)

To finish, the program presented me with a 15-question true-or-false quiz, on which I had to score 80% or better. It’s a good thing I passed, or else they would have moved my cubicle next to the cat lady.

The two questions I got wrong were:

Everyone working in the editorial department of one of our publications is often involved in verbal joking behavior with sexual overtones. The new reporter objects and asks for a transfer. Is it true that he is being sexually harassed?

I thought “not necessarily,” and clicked false. Damn.

The other was:

It is sexual harassment if one of our advertisers makes off-color remarks on the telephone to one of our employees.

That, too, I thought was a “not necessarily” false, particularly as the sentence didn’t state whether the magazine employee was also making off-color remarks (and he probably was, if you know anything about ad reps).

Although I passed the test, I don’t know if I learned much other than it’s against the law and/or company policy to harass someone because of his race, national origin, ethnicity, religion, age, disability or cat-love preference, but it’s only illegal “in much of the country” to discriminate because of sexual orientation. So if you’re insecure in your own sexuality, consult your in-house HR representative before making any fag jokes at work.

My company had its New York real estate conference today at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. I’d read that Marriott is sinking more than $5 billion over the next five years to revamp all of its hotels and rooms to “the New Look and Feel of Marriott,” which includes crisp, white beds, because one was sitting right there on the Times Square sidewalk outside the Marquis this morning. It was one of the more incongruous things I’ve seen on Times Square and I was disappointed to see that no one, not even the Naked Cowboy, was curled up on it and taking a nap, as you’d expect on the streets of this city.

The bed was part of a PR stunt and demonstration on the new Marriott room design, but other than it, the details are hazy. According to a press release, the new look of the guest rooms will be “clean and crisp, with simple forms, straight lines and uncluttered surfaces,” which describes an iPod as usefully as it does a hotel room. Having traveled much recently for both fun and profit, I can say that all I want from my hotel room is a place to sleep and use the restroom. If I must discuss “features” of my hotel room, here would be my wish/complaint list, for Marriott or any other chain:

• Can you please, please let me open the windows? What, you think I’ll jump? I know you have air conditioning, but either it’s cold enough to keep Ted Williams’ head fresh or it’s dry and warm and smells like one’s armpit at that critical point when the deodorant has just started to break down.
• Can you also stop dicking me over on business center charges? Recent examples (both at Marriott chains) include computer usage for 69 cents a minute and printing of a single-page document for eight dollars. I get reimbursed by my company for this stuff, but cut it out.
• I don’t need eight pillows on my bed. One is fine.
• Marriott is bragging about the “plug and play” capabilities it will feature its new room design. Via an “exclusive high-tech device,” you’ll be able to plug your laptop, videogame system or mp3 player into the in-room television. Wow, just like I did with my Commodore 128 in 1986. How’s about something useful, like wireless internet access in all the rooms, idiots?
• I’m undecided if hotel beds are too firm. I tend to think so, but that’s better than having them slightly lumpy, which more people are going to complain about. But, man, some of these beds, they’re so hard you can play bocce on them. Then again, usually I’m so tuckered out and sleep arrives so easily, I don’t notice.

My flight arrived in New York at 5:30 a.m. local time and I now understand why people aren’t so keen on taking redeyes. It was packed but quiet, mostly younger people. I slept fitfully and drowsily watched ’80s videos on VH1. I recall Tom Petty’s “Running Down the Dream,” Kraftwerk’s “The Telephone Call” and an endless stream of men with teased hair and frosted lipstick, exemplified by videos including Europe’s “The Final Countdown” and Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” Our efficient car service ensured a Lincon was ready and waiting for me at JFK and I lept in like I was Rod Stewart or someone. It was dark and rainy on the ride back. When I arrived home, I slept a few hours, then went into work around noon, which was rather pointless.

Another early morning for the second, full day of our industrial real estate conference.

Many of the panel sessions touched on how the huge ramp-up in foreign trade has made industrial real estate-related work a booming trade on the coast. What industry is California’s biggest employer? You may guess entertainment, but for the first year, the business of importing and directing goods (logistics) has surpassed entertainment as tops. “That’s more of our heartbeat than Hollywood,” as one speaker put it. (In terms of exports, California’s most popular by far is garbage. It’s mostly wastepaper, although scrap metal is also in the top five.)

There was much talk of Asian trade. I knew most of Wal-Mart’s merchandise was from China, but I just hadn’t appreciated exactly how much: $18 billion worth last year, or 70% of its merchandise. Wal-Mart likes to point out that the majority of its suppliers are American, which is true, but they supply only a fraction of Wal-Mart’s total stock.

The retail giant is also not so keen on publicizing the fact that Chinese factory workers are paid the equivalent of 56 cents to 67 cents an hour. An article in today’s USA Today reported Wal-Mart got slapped with another class-action lawsuit yesterday, filed by advocates for workers in six countries (including China) who charge the retailer overlooks labor abuse at factories run by its suppliers. The lawsuit could cover a class of anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 workers, according to an attorney at the firm representing the plaintiffs.

But thanks to this reliance on Chinese merchandise, the U.S. trade deficit doubled between 2001 and 2004 to $264 billion. Yet we keep at it, importing $20 billion worth of goods from the country in 1999, a figure that has skyrocketed now to $50 billion. We are China’s bitch, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Making these figures concrete, the day was topped with a boat tour of the Los Cerritos Channel, an artery connecting the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which are North America’s largest, accounting for 43% of all U.S. containerized imports. Containers are colorful steel cargo boxes, 20- or 40-feet-long and about eight feet tall and wide, and the only thing more impressive than the ubiquitous stacks of them on the docks and atop sprawling freight ships are the skyscraper-tall stacking cranes that swiftly clamp and lift the boxes with ease, rearranging them in the world’s biggest, most boring game of Tetris.

We tooled around some more, seeing the only lighthouse in the U.S. with a green light that blinks every 17 seconds, and the spot at a coast guard camp where the breakfast-with-Col. Jessep scene was filmed in A Few Good Men.

The boat arrived back at the dock later then expected, so I skipped out on our chartered bus and sped back to the hotel in a taxi to pick up my bags and head out to the airport where I had a redeye back to New York.

I rose before dawn to catch my car to JFK for my 8:30 a.m. flight to Long Beach, California for the industrial real estate conference my company is producing. I took Jet Blue, which I’d never done before, appreciating the personal TV built into every seatback and the continual proffering of brand-name snacks and beverages (Terra Blues potato chips, Planters smoked almonds, Arizona iced tea) to mask the fact that we weren’t getting any lunch. There were only 30-some people on the flight and each got his or her own three-seat row to spread out and relax, or sleep, as I chose to do for a few fitful hours.

I’d never been to California before today and although it was my own fault for not flying in a day early or staying a day later to see the sights, I made the most of my airplane-hotel-airplane trip. It was sunny but unseasonably cool in Long Beach, the airport for which has some of its luggage carousels located outside. I walked around the area of the Marriott and it was a typical business park area with soulless office buildings. I marveled at the tall, skinny palm trees sprouting everywhere and looking perfectly ridiculous, the ostriches of the plant world.

At the corner of Clark and Spring, a small strip mall that I would have normally passed by without notice caught my attention because it was called Time Square and the typography on its signage seemed to have been frozen, like Walt Disney, in 1966.

I stopped at Pop’s, a local greasy spoon specializing in the unlikely combination of hamburgers and teriyaki, the menu split 50/50. I got a hamburger and fries for an unbeatable $4.60—the burger was big and bursting with pickles, fresh-cut purple onion slices, lettuce and tomato and not-so-secret thousand-island sauce. The heap of fries were thick cut, crisp and piping hot, fresh from the fryer. I ate at a fire engine-red fiberglass table and listened to classic tunes from the ’60s, like “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James & the Shondells and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.”

The conference began at 4 p.m. with roundtables for the few dozen people that showed up in the hotel’s ballroom, after which we retreated to the pool for beer, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. I chatted with a cute L.A. girl who was from an architectural firm and resembled Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, only with not-as-big hair.

My boss told me I needed to write an introduction for one of the event speakers he was introducing at the conference tomorrow, so I went back to my room and composed it—longhand. Note to self: Bring laptop to future conference events. I was in bed by 8 p.m., the whoosh of airplanes landing a few hundred yards away from my hotel room window lulling me to sleep.

Another exhausting day on West Coast time, staying late at work to prepare for and wrap up stuff for the industrial real estate conference my department at work is producing, and which I’m attending tomorrow and Wednesday. For dinner, I met up at Saigon Grill with Andie and Eric. I got some California and salmon-and-avocado rolls, Andie got a stir fry and Eric ordered the pork chops. Tasty!

We had our company picnic today in Central Park at the Pinetum, just like last year. And just like last year, it was as exciting as a sack of cornmeal. I have to see these people all day, every day; what a treat to see them outdoors, dressed in shorts and eating pasta salad. I stopped by around noon, ate a bunch of the free food, and left after an hour. My boss was out of town today, so I didn’t have any reason to stick around.

I had 92 emails in my work inbox this morning, which I know isn’t as many as you had when you were on vacation, but it’s a lot for me. I only had two voicemails: one, my dentist’s office telling me I had an appointment at 9 a.m. today (which I didn’t; clerical error) and the other a hangup. Not bad, considering. I had troubles shaking the zombie feeling of the five-hour time difference, which I was just getting used to as I left Ireland yesterday.

I had many pints of Newcastle with the coworkers tonight at Local West, the company’s bar of choice for employee send-offs. Not one but two ladies, neither of whom I worked with directly, are leaving the real estate racket for other jobs. It was a big turnout and we overtook half of the bar’s back patio, which affords nice views of the 57-story One Penn Plaza and the Delta Airlines mural at the corner of W. 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, which is sort of a C-list tourist attraction.

The best part of the evening was when I was in the restroom and some dude at the crowded wall o’ urinals was simultaneously peeing and talking loudly to no one in particular.

“Man, I just got back from Panama!” he declared while unzipping. After peeing a bit, he shrieked “Oh, it burns!”, peed some more, then bellowed, “I’m telling you, it’s like St. Elmo’s Fire!” After a pause, he quietly added, “She said she was a virgin.” I’m certain he was some drunkard having a little fun but still, I couldn’t stop laughing. Meanwhile, everyone else was hurriedly exiting the restroom or averting their eyes like they’d do when confronted by some scabby beggar on the subway.

What is it about art/production departments? Not that I’ve known that many of them, but all the ones I have known have been merry pranksters, the lot of them. (I’ve also noticed they’re the hardest partiers and the heaviest drinkers, but that’s another entry.)

Some key members of the production department at my job were directed by our company’s publisher to take a near-lifesize photo of him and generate a poster-quality color printout for use in some sort of promotion. Keep in mind that although this is a younger guy, he’s the top dog, with his name and rank in 8.5-point type on our masthead—everyone else gets 1.5 fewer points.

Also keep in mind that letting a nearly lifesized photo of anyone fall into the hands of wily production people is asking for trouble.

Some time between 5 p.m. yesterday and this morning, an “extra” printout magically materialized on the inside of the door to one of our three restrooms. Much as with images of Christ appearing on yams in Ecuador, this vision of our leader generated excitement amongst the populace, inspiring it to cluster around the figure in awe.

I crammed into the restroom with several coworkers this morning to view it in stunned silence. His arms are outstretched in a gracious gesture, as if to say, “Welcome! Welcome to our restroom, handicapped accessible and therefore the roomiest and finest in the company. Please do not place paper towels in the toilet. Enjoy your stay, and come again!” The look on his face, which I've cropped out for legal reasons, adds to the effect, the relaxed grin and boyish twinkle in his eyes likely making it difficult for people to poop in a relaxed fashion. As my coworkers and I stood there, we admired the care with which the printout had been secured to the door with sturdy, clear packing tape, and that his hands, each of which overlapped the space between the door and the frame, had been meticulously cut and lined up.

Everyone thought for sure that such a display would be quickly removed or that there’d be a nasty retort from upon high, but so far, all quiet. I’m sure the eventual payback will be hell, but I’m also certain the production department is used to retaliation by now.

July 21, 2005 Update: Someone finally tore down the cutout and threw it out. It lasted way longer than I expected.

Just before quittin’ time at work today, my boss sidled up to me. Although he didn’t say I had to come in on Saturday or anything, he gave me an assignment to finish at home over the weekend and have ready for Monday morning. The whole thing reminded me a bit of something.

Normally, I wouldn’t know or care much about the decisions of Supreme Court cases, but since Kelo v. City of New London has much to do with real estate, I’ve had an interest in it and have been following its progress. The decision was handed down today by the justices, in favor of the city. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve watched a few episodes of both Matlock and the version of Perry Mason in which Raymond Burr was grossly obese, so bear with me.

You can download a 58-page PDF document of the court’s opinion, but here’s the case in a nutshell. A redevelopment corporation sponsored by New London received approval to acquire private property in the area in order to raze it, then build a hotel, office space and other real estate designed to revitalize the area. Some homeowners refused to be bought out and challenged the condemnation of their houses.

All morning, the AP was running headlines for its Kelo coverage that read “Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes.” That certainly gets people’s attention and inspires some of them to load their shotguns to keep the guv’ment off their property. But it’s not the story and not even the juiciest part of the ruling. Newsflash: The Fifth Amendment already allows local governments to take private property—the house or apartment you may be sitting in right now—through eminent domain if they deem the land for “public use.”

What Kelo really means is that localities have even broader latitude for the reasons they give for taking private property. New London residents wanted a narrow definition of what constitutes “public use.” Bulldozing homes to build a new highway in order to reduce congestion, for instance, or to spruce up a ghetto, would be “public” enough and O.K. in their book.

But the city wanted, and received with the Kelo ruling, a broader definition of what constitutes a public benefit for a community—bulldozing homes to build a Wal-Mart, for example. That’s clearly not a public project, but the public benefit of such economic development would come in the form of more jobs and tax revenues. Now that’s the crazy part of Kelo if you’re not a fan of big business and generally ugly architecture. It’s what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor picked up on in her dissent, when she wrote that the decision means, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party.” But Justice John Paul Stevens noted that states will be within their rights to pass additional laws restricting condemnations if residents are “overly burdened.”

Today was the real estate conference in Chicago that my company was hosting. Waking at 6 a.m. and stumbling around my hotel room bathroom to take my shower, I realized the complimentary shampoo I had planned on being there wasn’t, and the front desk assured me they didn’t have any either, so I trudged groggily to a Walgreens and bought some. Back in my room, I put on some coffee to brew before I hopped in the shower to discover afterwards that it had percolated everywhere but into the carafe.

The conference began around 7:30 a.m. at the Renaissance Hotel. About 400 real estate execs were in attendance, most from the local area, and I sat in on the sessions dealing with industrial real estate and the debt/equity markets. After lunch, the remainder of the day was dedicated to sessions on tenant-in-common deal structures, which made me drowsy.

Around 5:00 p.m., I had a beer at the conference’s cocktail reception and took a cab back to O’Hare with some other people I work with. The cabbie helpfully dropped us off at the wrong terminal, even after we told him twice which airline we were flying and he repeated it, but a short tram ride later and we were checking in with American.

My flight back was uneventful: quiet and on-time. My seatmate was a very large young woman in camouflage pants, who stealthily overflowed some of her bulk over the armrest and into my seat area. I had to curl my right arm in a rickety fashion to avoid constantly brushing her firelog-sized forearm. She listened sporadically to her iPod and half-heartedly attempted to start a conversation with me halfway through the flight.

She: Are you from Chicago?
Me: No, I’m from New York. I was in Chicago on business. [pause] Are you from Chicago?
She: No, I’m from New York.

During our approach to LaGuardia, the pilot announced we’d be swinging around Manhattan and that there’d be some marvelous views of the Statue of Liberty and Randall’s Island, but only for those passengers sitting on the right-hand side of the plane, which I wasn’t.

I got a cab soon after landing and my cabbie immediately started talking at me about the weather, then clammed up until we hit the Upper West Side, whereupon he suddenly restarted with a tirade on the city’s high rents. As he pulled up to my building, I had to squint at the bills in my wallet as the cabbie explained that a vital fuse had expired, rending dark his dome light and most of his dashboard. Another cab speeding down the street behind us honked angrily at having to slow down to pass, and some words were exchanged between the two cabbies, culminating in my cabbie shouting “Fuck you!” as the other cab sped around us. “It’s great to be back,” I said, and I meant it.

My flight into Chicago for my company’s real estate conference landed around 7:00 p.m. and after arriving at my hotel, a small Sheraton downtown that opened June 1 and still smelled vaguely of wood and paint, I decided to walk over and get some dinner at the nearby Gino’s East. A block away from my hotel, I was amused to see the Cass Hotel, where I stayed during my first solo trip to Chicago, sometime in the mid-’90s. Peering inside as I passed by, I saw they had added an adjoining restaurant/bar and that the front desk was open and inviting and no longer shielded by bullet-resistant glass.

In fact, it seemed the whole neighborhood was shaping up to be even more touristy. I walked by the hideous new Rock ‘n Roll McDonald’s, which opened in April across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe. With a huge parking lot and drive thru, the multi-story structure takes up a full city block and boasts 60-foot-high golden arches. Previously located on the site was a McDonald’s that was reportedly the third busiest in the U.S. and one can only assume the current incarnation will keep that ranking.

Gino’s was O.K. but touristy. Their gimmick is that you can write on the walls, doors and rafters, which are plastered solid with graffiti, giving the place the dark air of a grubby college bar. (There’s a hopeful sign behind the front reservation desk, listing the things you can’t, or more promisingly, shouldn’t, write on, including the plates and the servers.) I sat at a single-person’s table near the bar and the front door where I watched a succession of cabs drop off excited families. I ordered a coke and small deep-dish pepperoni pizza and passed the 45-minute wait by reading Bill Bryson’s Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, an excellent and very funny book. The pizza was rich and tasty and, as I suspected, I was only able to eat about half of it before I felt the dough rising in my stomach.

It was getting late so I took a stroll down Michigan Avenue, marveling at how Chicago is, in general, more clean, polite and pedestrian-friendly than New York, with wider streets and sidewalks and more greenery. In other words, it’s a true Midwestern city and it’s always made me feel at home.

I crossed the river and reflected on the intersection of candy and real estate as I looked up at the Wrigley Building, its white terra cotta facade supernaturally floodlit at night. The Chicago Tribune printed a dishy item yesterday about Wrigley “studying its long-term real estate needs,” which includes a remote possibility of vacating its namesake building, after which a “likely scenario” would be the conversion of the office building into luxury condos, a common practice these days in the downtowns of large U.S. cities. Although I would rue the unfathomably rich fuckers who could afford to live in such an astounding location, I suppose I wouldn’t have a problem with a conversion as long as it didn’t alter the classic architecture of the building.

I found out yesterday that the girl I’m working with who’s also from Ohio is moving on to a new job in San Francisco, leaving me the only admitted Ohio native at my company. I’ll make do, somehow. She points out that although she’ll be distancing herself from the terror-rich environment of NYC, she’ll be introducing herself to the seismic activity-rich environment of California.

A year ago today, I began my job as a real estate writer. What have I learned? What haven’t I? Let’s bust out a list and review.

• The new position seems to be working out well. It’s faster paced than the previous one and involves more writing and travel, which I enjoy.
• I’ve survived, by my estimate, over 200 fire drills.
• I eventually learned most everyone’s name, except for the names of the dense layer of executive assistants our company specializes in. With the chief editor’s assistant quitting approximately every month, only to be replaced by another pretty new face that has no idea what she’s getting into, I don’t expect to anytime soon.
• Conversely, I have yet to determine whether I’ve carved a recognizable niche for myself in the minds of people outside my immediate department. To them, I’m probably known as that weird guy or the shoddily attired fellow.
• My computer, which I’ve had all this time, hasn’t yet crashed or lost any important data.
• I have yet to figure out our cryptic phone system, however. I don’t know how to “conference someone in” or change my outgoing message, and it is with trepidation that I attempt to transfer someone.
• I haven’t started using idiot business-world words and phrases like “primary action list,” “think outside the box,” “proactive” or made-up words formed by warping a noun with ize (“verbalize”).
• Since my cubicle was relocated, I no longer have my spectacular window view. Instead, I have a view of the top of the guy’s head in the cubicle on the other side of mine, as well as his extensive collection of Homies that he has carefully arranged atop his partition wall.
• I don’t think the job has altered my exterior appearance much. I’m still that ruffian depicted on my photo ID, albeit slightly more haggard and a touch more fleshy.
• They still haven’t fixed the damn air conditioning. Instead, we have these industrial fans placed strategically around the office to blow the loose papers off everyone’s desks with maximum efficiency.

All said, not a bad year in the work-world.

Today was the main day of our industrial real estate conference in Jersey. It went swell. My favorite part of the day was getting a ride back to the city.

My boss had mentioned it wouldn’t be a problem at all for me to get back to Manhattan at the end of the day, but what I think he meant to say was that it wasn’t his problem how I got back to Manhattan. He drove me into Secaucus but I think he was cranky with me over my poor skills navigating him to the hotel and causing him to violently swerve his Taurus into exit and merge lanes at the last second. I wasn’t offered a return ride.

But three of the salesguys were going back into the city for a softball game, and they invited me to tag along. The head salesguy, G., is hilarious. He must be in his mid-30s, not too much older than me. But he sometimes acts like he’s still 15 or something. He had had several drinks after the reception and the driver kept telling him to hurry up or they’d miss the game. He ended up taking his last drink, in one of the hotel’s nice cocktail glasses, along with him, like he was Dudley Moore or something.

We all crammed into a VW Bug and with our collaborative navigation effort, soon came upon the Jets Stadium, indicating that we were headed in completely the opposite direction as we should have. With the driver protesting that the car was running on gas fumes and G., drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, drawling in his best Spicoli voice that everything was cool, we managed to get turned around and pointed in the correct direction.

When we stopped at Sunoco for gas, G. hopped out, deposited his empty glass in the garbage, then bought and quickly ate a Butterfinger and a Hostess apple pie. After we got back on the road, he realized he had to pee badly and as we got held up in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, he was literally ready to hop out and go right there on the side of the road. One of the salesguys kept G.’s mind off things by regaling us with some crazy stories, including how his mother is friends with Tina Louise, the actress who played Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. (“Is she still really hot?” “Well, she looks good for a 71-year-old.”)

While we were still in traffic, G. called his wife to make up some excuse explaining where he was, since he was supposed to be attending his son’s own softball game. He ended up saying he had been “recruited by some guys in the office” all of a sudden to play softball (after telling us to stop laughing so it sounded like he could conceivably be calling from the office).

After we finally got back into Manhattan, G. couldn’t wait to pee any longer and burst out of the Bug at a red light on Amsterdam to run inside a Burger King. They eventually dropped me off on West 86th Street, then sped off to Central Park for their game, arriving halfway through the third inning. According to the official post-game report, G. provided “heartfelt cheerleading.” Our team lost anyway but everyone had fun.

Our industrial real estate conference kicked off tonight with dinner and an open-bar cocktail reception in a private loge at the Meadowlands Racetrack in Jersey, adjacent to Giants Stadium. The loge was nice, but beyond that, the place is seedy. Most of the indoors area has all the warmth and charm of an airport.

And the people. The older guys are grey and stooped, with slicked back hair and those retiree-issue light-weather jackets. The younger guys, I would guess they were in “construction” or “the mafia.” The women are the sort of people that hang out with the sort of guys like this. Simply put, if you emptied a Greyhound bus and gave them all cheap cigars, you’d have the clientele at the Meadowlands. These guys are serious about gambling. They clutch their newsprint racing guides and shout passionately at their horse.

“You horse can’t hear you from way up here, in the cheap seats behind the plexiglas windows,” I felt like explaining to these gentlemen. “And even if your horse could hear you, do you think it’d listen or even understand what you’re saying?” But these guys are serious about racing.

I placed some bets; I’m an idiot. A guy in the sales department where I work placed most of them for me. He’s big on math and odds and had scribbled cryptic little notes all over printouts of the horses’ stats that he printed off the internet. In my first horse bet ever, I put down $10 for a horse named Motivational to place in the third race. It did and I won $1. Unwisely, I left my winnings as well as my original bet in the salesguy’s hands for the later races. I took the shuttle bus back to the hotel around 10:30 because I had to get up at 6:00 a.m. for the conference. The salesguy explained that morning over breakfast that he was ahead for a time, but ended up getting wiped out in the last two races. I owed him $3.

As a writer for my company’s conference division, I don’t have all that much to do at the actual conferences, other than sit-in on the sessions to learn the players in the real estate industry and increase my knowledge. Today I spent most of the morning directing arriving attendees down the proper escalator since neither us nor the hotel (“We thought you were going to do it!”) had prepared enough directional signage. The interior of a hotel and various conference rooms: it served as my trip to Boston, although I could have been anywhere.

I flew out to Boston this afternoon for a conference that my company is producing on the local commercial real estate market. We’re staying at the Seaport Hotel, with the conference itself being held tomorrow in the adjoining and unfortunately named World Trade Center Boston, which is essentially a long conference/trade show center extended on a pier, much like Navy Pier in Chicago, but without a Ferris wheel.

The hotel is nice and all. It’s one of those all-tips-inclusive places, which helps eliminate those awkward pauses after some guy has delivered your room service or hailed your cab. The hotel’s located in what seems to be a still-under-development business park section of Boston, which means it’s not all that close to the much more exciting downtown area. I walked downtown to check it out, passing the site of the Boston Tea Party along the way, but was disappointed that I had ended up in the business section of the city, reminiscent of Wall Street after 5:30 p.m., streets winding twistily through creepy urban canyons of steel and stone.

This afternoon at work, we had our first “this is not a drill” fire drill. It took a solid five minutes of alarms and strobes for people to actually leave, and if it had really been a five-alarm catastrophe, we all would have died.

The problem is, they test the alarms, like, once a week. The sirens are those swoop-upward “bwoooooooop!”-sounding ones that, when you first hear them, make you start and get that metallic fear-taste in your mouth. This is followed by about 10 more bwoops before some meathead with a thick New Yak accent crackles over the PA system to inform everyone that it’s just a drill and to ignore all sirens and signals while they keep on bwoopin’ for the next few minutes. The frequency of these false alarms has led us to believe that they’re likely a “justify your existence” act on the part of the building’s staff.

But we should have known what to do in the event of an emergency. A few months back, the FDNY sent a grim, balding man in a herringbone sportscoat to herd us into the hallway and patiently explain where the stairwells were. He stressed that we remember two things in the event of a blaze: 1.) calm speediness will save our lives, and 2.) the elevators will become human Easy-Bake ovens.

So naturally, the first thing we did upon hearing that actual smoke had been sighted and smelled in the building was to pile into the elevators. You’d think a lot of my coworkers would be smarter than that, with 9/11 and the Blackout of ’03 forever stamped on their DNA. But New Yorkers are also an impatient bunch, which clearly trumps common sense.

You’d think that I’d be smarter than that. But not having lived in New York all that long, I took my chances with the elevator. Ours being a prewar building deep within the Garment District, I've always imagined it was previously a shirtwaist sweatshop and therefore as impervious to flame as a kerosene drenched piñata stuffed with children’s pajamas. So the name of the game was to exit quickly and not shuffle down 17 flights of stairs.

Upon arriving in the lobby, we were confronted by one of the building’s doormen who angrily informed us that some jackass had been smoking in a stairwell, flicked the smoldering butt down an airshaft and lit a newspaper on fire. Perhaps one of us had perpetrated this event, he seemed to be suggesting, not very subtly. He added, however, that the flames were swiftly extinguished and that there was nothing to worry about.

This being 4:30 on a Friday, most people grabbed the opportunity to simply leave. The rest of us trudged back to the elevators, taking them back up to work, where we briefly pondered our mortality and finished sending some emails. Moments later, the people who took the stairs down arrived in the lobby.

Big news on the Jason job front: a few weeks ago I was offered a “lateral move” at the company to a new position, one with the same pay but in a different department, and I accepted.

So today was my first day working for our conference division, which only lately has become a big deal within the company. A year ago, we held only a handful of state-of-the-industry type conferences. That number only recently boomed into 20, typically multi-day conferences held all across the country in major markets (New York, California, DC, Florida and others) on a full slate of topics: sales, purchases, leasing, financing and development.

My title, which was carefully co-chosen by my new boss and I to have all the right media buzzwords and alliteration, is Content and Communications Coordinator. Chiefly, I’ll be writing copy for emails, brochures, programs and ads for each of the conferences. I’ll also be researching the markets in which the conferences are to be held, in order to secure new speakers, panelists and keynote addressers, and develop relevant and timely topics that the conferences will cover. It’s similar to the side of my previous job I liked the most: information gathering (i.e. talking to people on the phone) and writing.

A perk of the new position, which happened to be one of the top perks at my job with the candy magazines and one I missed the most, is travel. I’ve already booked my flight for our conference in Boston in mid-May, with more trips sure to follow.

This cartoon by The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has been floating around the office for the past few weeks and printouts have ended up on a bulletin board or two. Although the cartoon is now more than 20 years old, I think the sentiment behind it is more or less timeless.

More work today on the script. In the evening, Andie, Eric and I watched one of the basketball tournament games and had some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—Everything But The... for Eric and Andie, and Cherry Garcia for me.

For a freelance project, I’ve been writing a script for an industry event wherein executives are inducted into a hall of fame. In front of their family, friends and coworkers, they’re honored with a This Is Your Life-style presentation: a slideshow of photos from throughout their life projected onto large screens, with accompanying biographical narration, which is what I’m writing. Specifically, I’m pairing the photos with bits of biography and work history contributed by each inductee, as well as incorporating details from testimonials provided by people who know the inductee.

The problem is, when you really get down to it, most people’s lives aren’t all that compelling. People are born, go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, go on vacation, play golf, get inducted into a hall of fame (optional), and die.

I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s massive A Short History of Nearly Everything in small chunks for the past few months, and I’ve been appreciating the way he will define an obscure scientist in a deft sentence or two of memorable, often humorous detail, or freshen the image of a historical figure you thought you knew:

Newtown was a decidedly odd figure—brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin—a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather—into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could,’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing—at least nothing lasting.

Bryson meets the challenge of writing about real people: making the ordinary relevant and interesting.

As if by magic, I got off work at normal time today. My boss ordered everyone to clear out, as we’ve all been working late this week getting out the upcoming issue of the magazine. As she said, we should be able to get a lot done tomorrow; although our heathen company isn’t allowing us to take off any B-list holidays, such as Good Friday, about half of the office is taking a personal day anyway.

So by leaving at 5 p.m. today, I wasn’t able to witness the cleaning crew empty my rubbish bin as I have the rest of this week, but I assume it will happen anyway, like the tree falling in the forest, or something.

Andie called and invited me to see Melinda and Melinda, the newest film by Woody Allen, which all New York liberals since 1972 have been required by law to see. I declined her offer on account of my tiredness, but I do eventually want to see it. My mind still cuddles Woody’s version of New York, which, as I once suspected and now know to be true, isn’t New York at all. No, New York has grit, inescapable noise and advertising, plenty of people who aren’t at all disarmingly charming, and a distinct lack of a soft, warm glow in Central Park in the autumn, unless you’ve been drinking.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re great people, but it’d be nice to work one day this week and not be present for the ceremonial emptying of my cubicle’s garbage can by the office cleaning crew.

Regarding those two real estate development sources that I pitted against each other in order to get one of them to call me back for an interview: the woman from Forest City called this afternoon and I had a fine talk with her.

She was the one that I thought was avoiding me via a suspicious case of laryngitis. But in speaking with her, I really think laryngitis may have been the case. She started most sentences with “so” and ran with it from there, swooping and meandering, dropping in “and” after “and.” At some point, I’d have thought they would have ceased to be grammatically correct, but mostly, they were. This isn’t a quote I’ll end up using, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.

So increasingly, they’re turning to the private sector to companies like Forest City, that have the national presence, the credit-worthiness, the interest and the experience and capability to partner with these institutions and own facilities and do a number of individual financial structures to help them get these facilities up and running as quickly as possible, on a lease basis or an ownership basis.

I can’t rightly poke fun at her (and indeed I’m not), because few of us speak like we write, but things get really shaky with stunners like this one.

So we would expect in the first building, which is about a 150,000 square feet state-of-the-art research facility and about 250,000 square feet of office space, and then from that specialized support facility, we are expecting to tear down some of the more specialized facilities that we don’t think have general purpose, and so our first thing will be to recreate the campus and we’ll have 700,000 square feet and we expect actually to occupy significant portions of that by the end of next year and with the first tenants potentially being in by the end of this year.

My transcription of the interview ended up being about as long (3,500 words) as my completed article is supposed to be. But she had many revealing and helpful points to make, and was more candid than I assumed a high-level executive of a $7 billion real estate juggernaut would be. After I’ve added some periods, commas and semicolons, I think I’ll be able to extract some readable bits of wisdom.

I spent most of the day scrambling to finish the feature I’m writing on biotech and life-science real estate development and I’m having a devil of a time getting one of my key sources, Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, to commit to an interview. I had something set up with them, then the source developed a mysteriously convenient case of laryngitis, according to the corporate communications guy I’m dealing with there.

I decided I needed to get another source lined-up in case I couldn’t eventually get through to Forest City, so it was a happy coincidence when another corporate communications person called me today to pitch CB Richard Ellis, one of the country’s largest real estate brokers. They’re working on some of the biggest biotech developments in California with Slough Estates USA, the top such developer in the state. I told the woman I already had a broker as a source and needed a developer, so she said she’d see what she could do about getting someone from Slough to call me. She didn’t sound so enthused, however, because she only directly represented CBRE and wanted to get her bonus points for shoehorning them into my article.

It was then that I hatched a plan: I told her that it’d be a shame not to have Slough get involved in the article because one of that company’s big competitors, Forest City, was very interested in participating, and I could have only one developer source in my story. She immediately sounded more interested and said she’d call me back first thing Monday. Now I will call Forest City to tell them it’d be a shame not to have them involved in the article because one of their big competitors, Slough, is very interested in participating.

I hope my Machiavellian craftiness doesn’t backfire. I only need one of these yahoo companies to call me back with an interviewee, and quickly, so I can finish my damn article, which is due next Thursday. We’ll see what transpires.

I attended New York University’s 10th Annual REIT Symposium today at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. My boss had me go to learn more about REITs (real estate investment trusts) and because she assigned me a feature on that topic for the upcoming issue of the magazine. It was a daylong event, and on my way there, crossing Fifth Avenue around 7:30 in the morning, I was amused to see some hardcore Irish fans dressed in green and already lining up for the city’s infamous St. Patrick’s Day parade, which didn’t even start until 11:00 a.m.

The symposium was a series of expert panels that answered questions from a moderator, then a few from the audience of about 250 people. There was a lot of overlap in the topics discussed, but I learned a lot about the globalization of REITs and who most of the major players are, and even hit a few folks up for interviews.

The session that generated the most laughter, yet was the most surreal, was the one right after lunch that featured three old-timers known by everyone in New York real estate: Bill Mack, Steve Roth and Sam Zell. These are genial, seemingly easygoing guys, grandfathers who opened the session with some off-the-cuff cracks about their age and their grandchildren. But the similarities between them and your average grandfathers ended there. Your average assembly of three grandfathers, for example, is unlikely to be referred to as “a troika,” as these guys were by a subsequent panelist. Their sage remarks on real estate were liberally quoted by other subsequent panelists, like they were the golden words of Warren Buffet or something. And although your average grandfather may on occasion purchase you a generous gift, that purchase is unlikely to be on the magnitude of, say, the $6.6 billion Roth paid yesterday for the entire Toys “R” Us corporation in order to get his hands on the chain’s valuable real estate. So I found it wild that these guys were as flippant and lighthearted as they seemed during their discussion of the real estate market, peppered with meandering old-guy anecdotes about what it was like in the ‘60s.

After that session, which ran over its allotted time as the guys kept chatting, about half of the audience left, which took a lot of the wind out of the last two sessions. They seemed to drag and which were likely scheduled last in the program for a reason.

I was happy to blow out of there at 5 p.m., noting the area near Fifth Avenue was still swarming with partygoers in their greenery and various degrees of drunken stupor, despite the fact the St. Patrick’s Day parade ended around 3 p.m.

I had a meeting at Ernst & Young’s U.S. headquarters this afternoon, which is in a 40-story skyscraper at 5 Times Square. They do a lot more than corporate auditing, financing and taxes. Their Real Estate Advisory Services group covers areas like hospitality (hotels and other such lodging), construction, investment funds, REITs (real estate investment trusts) and more. They do simple things like issue reports on the state of the hotel market recovery and, more actively, quietly conduct big real-estate related jobs, like structuring the financial models for the Port Authority in its rebuilding of the public transportation infrastructure in the former World Trade Center area.

The meeting itself was your typical meeting, something about synergy. The cool part was the building itself. Probably because of its location, there’s a giant (maybe 20-story) narrow vertical sign mounted to the building’s facade that spells out “Ernst & Young” in blatant red neon. At night, you can see it from dozens of block away down Seventh Avenue, and it’s actually helped orient me on more than one occasion.

Our meeting was in a conference room on the 23rd floor, which afforded a spectacular 180 degree panoramic view of the city's west and south sides, including a bird’s eye view of the active construction for the New York Times’ new headquarters, which will effectively block a lot of E&Y’s view of the West Side and Jersey beyond.

Also, the building’s security, at least on the surface, seems really tight, compared with, say, our building. In a logbook, you sign-in your name, date and time, and who you’re seeing. Then they take a digital photo of you that’s presumably logged somewhere. It’s also printed unflatteringly on a temporary ID badge, which also lists your name, where you’re from, the date, how long you’re authorized to be in the building, who you’re meeting with and what floor they’re on. Of course, as one of the E&Y guys sarcastically pointed out, once you’re done with these theatrics and get past the lobby, you can wander around pretty much anywhere in the building, your ID badge unchecked by anyone. Ah, semblance of security; post-9/11 Manhattan knows you all too well.

On Monday, the company finally replaced the woman from my department who quit in mid-January, and as the blue bubblegum cigars say, it’s a boy, so I’m no longer the sole male in my department. The position he’s filling is really more for our New Jersey publication than the one I write for, but there will likely be some overlap with editing and proofing.

I immediately noticed he’s much more cordial than I am. Plus, handsome. He speaks in an audible, pleasantly modulated voice. Also, when he’s sitting at his computer, he has an alert, erect posture; I tend to slump like a scurvy ridden pirate.

He also falls easily into casual officeplace conversation, which has never been a strong suit of mine. This morning, for instance, he was engaged in a lively debate with the ladies about the merits of various Girl Scout cookies and Hunter S. Thompson. He followed up on this with the identification of two prominent actors who have played Thompson in movies: Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam. (Man, that sounds like something I would mention!) Then, without consulting the internet, he asked if anyone knew the only film that Depp and Murray have appeared in together. None of the ladies did, so he rakishly revealed the answer.

I didn’t know the answer to that either, despite the fact that, as Scott can attest, we had a 12-foot-long vinyl promotional banner for that movie hanging up in the living room of our college apartment for the better part of a year. No, the only crazy-connection trivia bit I could have trumped that with would have been that the last article Hunter wrote before he killed himself included an interview with Bill Murray about an intriguing new sports concept mixing golf with firearms. But I kept that to myself.

Looks like my cock-of-the-walk status is waning.

I think the cipro is making me a little edgy^*. I seem to be unusually sensitive to coworkers tromping by my cubicle, gawking out my segment of window, and remarking on the fact that it’s snowing. Yes, yes it is. It’s been snowing, heavily, since lunchtime, so people have been remarking on this since lunchtime. Really observant stuff, too, like “Wow, it’s really coming down!” and the witty “Maybe we’ll get to go home early!” This wouldn’t be so bad if about 15 separate people hadn’t done it, saying more or less the same thing, with the grace and intelligence of a succession of circus clowns tumbling from a tiny car.

I guess I should take heart that I actually have a window in my cubicle. Only about 10 non-corner office-types here do. The avenue isn’t so wide that I can’t catch some Rear Window-like glimpses of people in the office buildings across the street, working, or perhaps writing blog entries.

^* Edginess doesn’t seem to be one of the official side effects or warnings associated with cirpo, at least according to the alarmist Patient Information brochure Duane Reade provided when it filled my prescription. But here are some of the genuine warnings: don’t take multivitamins within several hours of taking cipro; avoid excessive sunlight and tanning booths; and don’t eat any dairy products along with cipro. In other words, do not taunt cipro.

This afternoon, I interviewed the chairman and co-CEO of a real estate investment trust that just bought a $1.51 billion portfolio of top-shelf office buildings located primarily in the booming California market. It was huge news, netting a story in The Wall Street Journal, among other major publications, and it was a nice coup for us to score an interview. I think it went well and that my questions were concise and well-informed, but the whole time, all I kept thinking was that I really just wanted to blurt out, “Dude, $1.51 billion is a lot of money.”

And what have I been working on all week at work? Well, lots of stuff, but since you asked, I’ve been working on something that’s simultaneously a pain in the ass and something I enjoy: editing.

In mid-December, I attended a symposium on pension funds, where a roundtable of seven experts discussed property fundamentals, cap rates, investing and other such topics. As my magazine does at all events like this, we had some guys there who recorded all that was said and later transcribed it verbatim to a Word document.

An 18,500 word Word document.

And guess whose job it is to boil that down to three to four pages for the magazine? You guessed it. (Me.) “Three to four pages,” you say. “That sounds like a lot of text.” Well, with the headline, deck, photos, captions and other graphical elements that will be added to distract people from the dry subject matter, it works out to only about 3,500 words.

Hiya! My editing skills are unstoppable! I grabbed my red pen (and yellow highlighter after it started getting nasty) and took it to that fatty text. It was easy going at first, summarizing the moderators’ often-rambling questions and taking out the unnecessary words and phrases we use when speaking (“well,” “I think,” “I mean,” “really,” “actually” and many more). Then there was removing repetition. Next came the heavy-duty condensing, which got to be a challenge because of my relative unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I felt mighty after I got it down to 10,000 words. Sweating bullets, I smushed it down to 5,000 or so, and then it got really tough. In fact, I ended up pawning off the cursedly wordy thing to a coworker today to knock it down further—I’d read and re-read it so many times that I had memorized large chunks and none of it was sounding any more cuttable. But be cut it must. It’s a labor of love.

Nothing makes the editorial department feel so smug as when we spot errors in the writing of coworkers, particularly if it’s unintentionally funny. (We editors also find alliteration funny on occasion. We don’t get out much.) This afternoon, our office manager sent out an email to all staff, advising us that the Pitney Bowes mail metering machine was inoperable and that no mail would be sent out tonight. In closing, she wrote:

I am sorry for the incontinence.

Ha ha! We gave her a standing ovation and recommendations for absorbent undergarments.

There was a fiery red sunset hovering ominously over Jersey today. It even had the salespeople, who don’t have windows on their side of the office, wandering over to our side to marvel at it. This photo, taken through the window in my cubicle, doesn’t do the color justice, but I like the reflection of the office fluorescents superimposed on the cityscape.

That sunset signaled, literally and metaphorically, the departure of my editorial department coworker, Julie, who is hightailing it back to California for a better-paying job (she’ll even have a staff!) and proximity to her family. To see her off, at 5:30 p.m. sharp, all the youngsters in the company walked over to the newly opened Local West, a bar on W. 33rd St. at Eighth Ave. That’s right by Penn Station, so it attracts a lot of the after-work crowd for whom it’s convenient to roll down the stairs directly outside to the 1/9, 2/3 or ACE trains after a night of heavy drinking.

The appeal there, at least for me, were the ghetto-fabulous 25.4-ounce cans of Foster’s for $3 until 7:30 p.m. Julie brought along her going-away present from the editorial department: a small fire extinguisher upon which we had Sharpied messages of good fortune. (It was a cheeky allusion to the office Christmas party last year where Julie’s hair accidentally caught on fire.) We drank way too much, got some nachos and gossiped about our coworkers. Good times.

The building I work at on Eighth Avenue has 25 stories, but you can always tell which people in the lobby or the elevator are going to the 16th floor. That’s where Ripley-Grier Studios is located, and the people going there are actors, dancers or musicians scheduled to audition for anything from an off-broadway show to a dancing position at Tokyo Disneyland. Arriving with their agents/Moms are the child actors, which are instantly hateable with their screechily insistent and smug voices. You pass the time in the elevator entertaining yourself with thoughts of them ending up drug-addled and/or bloated like Dana Plato. The men are slim and well-groomed, with carefully tousled hair, smart, well-tailored clothes and black leather jackets; perhaps I am merely jealous but I often must restrain the urge to punch these men in the neck. The women are dressed with flair, shunning the New York professional’s grim uniform of grays and blacks for the spastic kinds of colors and patterns that got them the part of Sandy in Grease when they were in high school Drama Club. They’re also heavily made up and try to use their cell phones in the elevator, which you can’t do. Occasionally, they’ll also try to get off on the wrong floor and someone else in the elevator will helpfully point out, “I think you want 16.” In the end, though, they all get the last laugh. Because our offices are on the 17th floor, we can hear the singers below practicing scales, often loudly. If we’re lucky, they’re auditioning drummers.

One of my coworkers, Julie, is quitting at the end of the week to move back to her beloved homestate of California for a better job and to be closer to her old friends and family. So I not only feel O.K. with revealing her name, but this somewhat amusing email exchange we had after I burned her some music from my iTunes library. For the record, I should point out that I don’t sing show tunes in the shower (much), and despite her Republicanism, Julie actually is cooler than I am, which you probably already guessed.

I promise to burn your cds this week so you can have your backup back by Monday =) Thanks again! (though Corso loves your music so she might want to borrow...)

No sweat; they're all yours. Feel free to keep them, trash them, give them away, make them into handsome cocktail coasters, use them as evidence when turning me in to the RIAA, etc.

So when do we get a sampling of the elusive Julie's musical tastes? You are conspicuously absent from the iTunes shared playlists. As long as it's not all showtunes or Norwegian death metal.

I haven't been home to even load my ipod yet! but I do own a frightening amount of show tunes (theater background), so Norwegian death metal might have to be my next purchase =)

Soon I promise and then we can make fun of me for more than being a republican.

I meant no disparagement to show tunes. I've been known to burst into rousing bits of "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" or "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General," typically in the shower, because of the superior acoustics. I don't think you'd be made fun of for your music, at least not by me. My playlist may be hip enough for Corso-endorsement, but when you get down to it, what I *really* like listening to are cheesy Phil Collins power ballads, plus pop-R&B songs and hair metal from the late '80s/early '90s. My secret shame.

Well hair bands from the 80s are my personal weakness, so you just became that much cooler in my book =) I mean who doesn't love Bon Jovi? Or at least want his highlights?

And you absolutely should laugh at my music choices, I do on a daily basis! So no disparagement taken. Though even I might have something to say about "I am the very model..."

"Slippery When Wet" = awesomest Bon Jovi album. I only ever wanted Mr. Jovi's acid-washed jean jacket and his way with the ladies. I think I still do.

On a somewhat related note, I just bought "Appetite For Destruction" on CD yesterday at Academy Records and not only was it still factory-sealed, it had a faded sticker on it that said something like "Featuring 'Welcome To The Jungle,' As Heard In The Movie 'The Dead Pool'" (which came out in '88).

There was a split second wherein I considered selling this original, valuable relic on eBay, but you know, when you really want to hear "Sweet Child O' Mine," you really gotta play it right away, and loudly. And sing along.

That made me laugh out loud! Though I don't know if I could resist Sweet Child of Mine for the promise of Ebay riches. That is a true moral dilemma. And Slippery When Wet is my favorite album too. It will be on the ipod in short order (if my cd isn't too scratched to read. Man I love that thing.)

I never owned "Slippery," but I remember jammin' along to "Livin' On a Prayer" on the radio of my Panasonic boombox.

I first started buying music in junior-high and the first tape I bought, an all-time favorite, was "Hysteria" by Def Leppard. I still recall all of the songs (or at least the choruses) on that one.

The second- and third-ever cassettes I bought were "Invisible Touch" by Genesis and "King of Rock" by Run-D.M.C. Those are pretty sweet in their own right.

You just dated yourself! But to keep embarrassing facts even. My first cassettes were NKOTB and I believe Michael Bolton (after Wee Sing and Big Bird of course). I think you were cooler than I...

It was a much better day today for my boss.

Although now she has a tremendous cold and spent most of the day popping Halls and looking flush.

It really wasn’t my boss’ day today.

As she dozed off to sleep last night, it struck her as unusual that she didn’t hear the trains on the Long Island Railroad, which she takes to work and which pass right by her apartment near the East Rockaway station. But as she discovered in the wee hours of this morning, a water main nearby had burst with such force that it partially collapsed the platform at the station and derailed service.

She would have taken her car to work instead, but it was filled with four inches of water from the flooding caused by the burst main. A reporter with camera in tow asked if he could film her bailing water out of her car with a pail, but she gently told him to fuck off.

When she got in to work, late, after someone drove her in, she was notified that one of the editors in her department (one of the “editorial ladies” I’m always referring to) had just put in her two-week notice for resigning, a move that will further cripple a department that’s already been a person short for several months now.

Then someone pointed out to her that she had somehow torn a hole in her shirt, possibly because of her muscles bulging in a Hulk-like fashion from her simmering rage.

The day passed with her on the phone, alternating between her insurance company and the water company, trying to figure out who was going to pony up the dough for the $400 worth of water damage to her car’s interior.

Before leaving, she discovered she had misplaced her Smithsonian magazine and would not be able to complete the engrossing article on the Aztecs that she had started reading yesterday. It probably would have been a good thing to read while waiting for that Long Island Railroad train; WCBS-TV noted at 5:15 p.m. that “Thousands of commuters were disrupted all day on Tuesday with both eastbound and westbound trains alternating on the same tracks. Buses and taxis are standing by if needed. ...the train schedule for the Wednesday morning commute is uncertain.”

Oh, it is no fun at all to return to work after having been gone for what seems like a month. And then the cold, cold rain. And the $25 our greedy landlord just charged us for the radon detectors he was required by New York law to install. The rest of 2005 better be better than today or I’m firing up the Delorean to the tune of 1.21 gigawatts.

In the flipside of the hotel I was at yesterday (the Waldorf, in case you weren’t paying attention), this afternoon I went to a press luncheon at the W New York hotel over on Lexington and E. 49th Street. There are only 20 W hotels in the world right now and the one on Lexington was the first. Apparently, they’re performing quite well. They cater to young, hip types who can appreciate lobbies that resemble a ‘60s bachelor pad, or at least sit in them smugly, pretending to read The Guardian or maybe Gravity’s Rainbow. But the chain is owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which also owns Sheraton and Westin, among other name brands, so they’re not so arty that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Anyway, I was there to learn about REITs, which are real estate investment trusts, which went pretty well. Don’t despair; I’ll spare you the boring details. I think the high point was when the representative from Reuters started choking on her gourmet bottled water—the kind in sealed glass cylinders that they sneak onto your table in fancy restaurants—and had to leave the room so as not to disturb the presentation with her sporadic hacking.

Also I got a free lunch out of it. I had the chicken. It was OK. And I got a free pen, which I sarcastically presented to my department’s administrative assistant when I got back to the office. She’s been demanding free crap from me ever since she found out about those Zagat guides.

Went over to the Waldorf-Astoria at 4 p.m. today for a symposium on pension funds that my magazine co-sponsored. It was pretty good, I suppose, in that I don’t know a lot about investing or cap rates or any of that stuff, which is a large part of real estate, so I got to learn a thing or two. We had some top-shelf participants on the panel, including guys from Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, TIAA-CREF and ING Clarion. The meeting was held in a grand old conference room on the fourth floor that had antique mirrored doors, a fireplace, gilded molding and chandeliers dripping from the ceiling. It was supernaturally chilly in there, which I attributed to the ghost of Dorothy Parker.

Walking over there was a chore. That part of the East Side is not the place to go this time of year if you’re not a fan of crowds of fat, white tourists, bumbling around in their brightly colored parkas, waddling slowly and aimlessly, taking photos of random objects, and causing no cheer other than amongst the pickpockets, who have been patiently waiting all year for this opportunity. That region of the East Side features a lot of tourist magnets: St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center with the skating rink, Lord & Taylor (where I unfortunately had to go earlier this afternoon for Christmas shopping) and Saks Fifth Avenue, which, as near as I can determine, is Lord & Taylor, just with different bags. There are also a bunch of overpriced restaurants in the area, including the one at which we held the post-symposium reception.

Let’s just say that any place that charges $13 for a 1.5-finger pour of Glenlivet is not likely a place I have arrived at of my own volition. I didn’t stay for the dinner, although I was curious about it, because at the time, I wasn’t sure what the restaurant’s name (Acqua Pazza) indicated other than “horrible misspelling.” Apparently it’s Italian, because the web site includes this gem of a sentence: “Perusing the menu is reminiscent of exploring the Italian coastline.”

Also, I rather shrewdly decided that while attending receptions after work are one thing, attending dinners is quite another. Dinner, you’re expected to sit down, be civil and “make conversation,” not wobble around a darkened room, addled by gins and tonic. I decided it’s not in my economic interest to get in the habit of working free overtime for my company in this fashion. So I left after drinking my liquid gold and chatting briefly with my boss’ boss, who is always as cranky as I sometimes am, and who took no issue with my departure. Anyway, work dinners can’t be enjoyed the way I enjoy my dinners at home, which often involve Sonic Youth, tacos and pants removal.

One of the more frustrating aspects of my job is that the corporate hierarchy can be a burden at times. My boss wrote the cover story for our upcoming issue, a profile on the incoming CEO of one of the country’s largest commercial real estate firms. The firm happens to be based in Manhattan, so my department’s head boss wanted a cover photo that was grand and New Yorky. It was decided that the USS Intrepid would be an appropriate backdrop, so the CEO and a bunch of his underlings were gathered to pose on the deck and we got a lot of cool photos. The cover and feature were laid out this week, but the head boss came by my desk today (I think because no one higher-up was around to vent to) and slapped the feature layout on my desk and shouted that it was just “lazy” that we had used a similar photo for the cover as we had for the feature, and demanded a fix.

Of course, I had no real part in the photos or the layout; I had only heard second-hand what the cover photo would look like and I knew what the feature would be about, but the layouts themselves are the domain of the production department. So I checked with them for alternate shots and they showed me three full proof sheets of nothing but great photos of the CEO and employees aboard the Intrepid. It seems everyone was so keen on meeting our head guy’s demands for the Intrepid, no one thought it necessary to take any shots in alternate locales. So the production department brainstormed and they’re likely going to produce a Photoshop-heavy feature layout with the CEO cut-out of one of the Intrepid photos and pasted magically onto a new background. I have great faith in our production guys, but it’s still going to be a cut-and-paste job. I don’t think they were so happy about the whole situation either.

It’s a drag that we have a photo budget that’s generous enough for us to take group shots of dozens and dozens of people aboard a freakin’ decommissioned aircraft carrier, but that our head guy apparently never made it clear he wanted more than that. And the icing on the cake is that, looking back at past cover stories in our magazine, we use similar photos for the cover as we do for the corresponding feature all the time. Argh. I think everyone had a stressful day.

From noon to 4 p.m. today, we had our company holiday party at the Met Lounge, located at the Tonic Bar off Times Square. The company rented the lounge out for that time, so we had it to ourselves; they even let us bring and play our own music, which was broadcast over the entire bar’s sound system.

I’m not a big fan of forced corporate cheer, but I must admit it was nice to speak with folks from other departments (circulation, art and sales) that I normally don’t get a chance to talk to at length, if at all, during the work day. Our company’s head honchos handed out American Express Gift Cheques to everyone for gifts and we also had our “secret Santa” gift exchange. Fortunately, I somewhat knew the girl whose name I drew because she’s also a writer/editor, but for the online division. I bought her a red Swingline stapler, unsure if she’d get the reference. It turns out I needn’t have worried because most young folks who work desk jobs have seen the movie. Also, in her case, it was a bonus because it turns out red is her favorite color.

The gift I received was from one of the crazy ladies in the production department. She got me a Body Glove CD Wallet and filled it with 24 CD-R’s she burned of albums from her CD collection. Ever since she spotted a suspicious stray J.J.Fad song in my mp3 collection (we legally share our iTunes libraries over the intranet at work), we had been reminiscing about our love for often-cheesy ’80s R&B/dancefloor-disco/funk—stuff like Technotronic, Cameo, LL Cool J. So most of the CDs she gave me are of similar ilk and not ones I own, everything from Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow and Midnight Star to De La Soul, Pharcyde and Outkast. I’ve got a lot of listening to do, right after I’m done with my festivity-related recovery.

Last night after work, I met up with Andie to attend the opening party for McNally Robinson, the bookstore Katie and Eric are working at. Despite what The New York Times wrote about the store opening Wednesday, the “unofficial” opening was Thursday night with a reception in the store. It’s not quite ready to open yet. The place was freshly painted, still had drywall covering the front windows, and the floor on the store’s lower level only seemed about half-finished. But what they had so far was good: small sections, but with well-considered selections, combining greatest hits and best sellers with more eclectic fare; lots of comfy chairs to sit on; and a kids section, which Katie will oversee and which features tiny plastic chairs shaped like animals, sat on here by Andie and Katie.

The party was kind of a come-one, come-all affair in that, although certain people were invited (media reps, book distributors and the store’s staff), there was no burly fellow at the door with a list. So it seemed like many people walking by outside decided to just pop in for a bit to see what was up. I think it was a smart move on McNally Robinson’s part because such a ploy could work well as a word-of-mouth campaign for the store. Early on, there was a good-sized crowd packed in there, enjoying the free hors hors d’oeuvres and the champagne, which was poured exclusively and graciously by Katie and Eric.

The sales department inexplicably gave everyone in my office today a swanky Harry and David gift box that included apples, pears, a small box of chocolate, cheddar cheese, lemon shortbread cookies, mixed nuts and a slab of baklava. This is one of those gift boxes where everything is in its own little box, wrapped in festively nondenominational paper. The fruit is nestled snugly in little foam insets, each piece perfectly rounded, blemish free and heartbreakingly beautiful. It’s as if the Nazis mellowed out, gave up on the Aryans and instead bred a Master Race of fruit which Martha Stewart then wrapped. Thanks, salespeople. In return, the editorial department will be presenting you with a handsome thank-you card tomorrow with all of our signatures on it.

After work, one of my coworkers invited a bunch of folks from the office out for drinks at one of her favorite hangouts, Slate. The highlights there are several dozen pool tables and a moodily lit, 54-foot-long bartop made of inch-thick frosted glass. But it’s a favorite amongst hipster pennypinchers because of the $3.50 happy hour drafts that are served up with free appetizers, such as fried shrimp and beef strips with teriyaki dipping sauce. In addition, they have free candy in a little wicker basket in the men’s room (primarily Blow Pops for some reason), plus a guy handing you the liquid soap and paper towels to guilt you into lavishing tips upon him.

Also invited to the soirée were about a dozen of my coworker’s NYU grad school friends. It was a good thing they were all in the journalism program together because I had something in common with them to talk about, and regardless, I was the only person invited from work that actually showed up, so I didn’t have any of those bums to talk to.

One guy I spoke with was interning at ABC for 20/20, conducting research and prepping interviewees for the show. That was interesting, but then I discovered a girl who was also in on the conversation was from Delhi, so I quickly turned the conversation to “where is the best Indian food in NYC,” since there doesn’t seem to be a dearth of it around, at least in our immediate neighborhood.

She put in a passionate vote for Sapphire, which happily is located somewhat nearby, on Broadway between W. 60th and W. 61st Streets, and I pledged to check it out. A distant second was given to Tamarind, on 41 E. 22nd St. Interestingly, one of Andie and I’s favorite Indian places is also called Tamarind, but it’s on Amsterdam; it’s not clear to me whether the two are related.

I ended up drinking a Bud and four pints of Guinness in an hour-and-a-half period, which I think is a new record for me. You gotta love those happy hour specials.

Some of the ladies and I went to another cocktail reception tonight, held by Moody’s Investors Service at Gallery Henoch in Chelsea. I must exercise care with my reception consumption, lest I get all red and puffy like Ted Kennedy. Got to meet several good editorial contacts over gins-and-tonic, which was a bonus because Moody’s is of such size and importance that it’s often difficult to get ahold of someone there for a comment or an interview for the magazine.

It was an oddly brief reception, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m, so I guess those credit-ratings wonks rise early. But it was worth the drinks, hors d’oeuvres and even a bit of swag: a Zagat Survey 2005 New York City Restaurants guide. “Delightful” and “a welcome break from today’s fusion fever,” although we did have to walk in the bitter cold from 23rd and 8th all the way over to the “edge of the known universe” at 11th with one of us in heels (no, not me, smartass).

One of the editorial department ladies unexpectedly invited me to her birthday celebration tonight at Fitzpatrick’s Bar & Grill on 2nd Ave. between 85th and 86th. Treks to the Upper East Side, even for a subway fanatic such as myself, make my head hurt; there’s no subway that goes under Central Park, so to get crosstown you have to backtrack and transfer five times. Forget it; I walked. The park was dark, eerie and nearly empty except for some guy walking his dog and then, near the Guggenheim, a couple having sex up against a tree. I gave them a wide berth so as not to startle them. Ah, New York.

Arrived at the bar around 9 p.m., had a bunch of Guinnesses (Guinnessi?) and got to meet some of the ladies’ husbands and friends, in various states of inebriation and willingness to talk with the yahoo in the sassy Ben Sherman button-down he purchased especially for the occasion on-sale at Urban Outfitters. Talked about Brazil with someone, and someone else about Salman Rushdie, who I pretended to know about to in order to extend the conversation. Left around midnight. Walking through the park, I encountered no one except a NYPD paddy wagon idling incongruously on the walk just off the Great Lawn, perhaps hoping for a mugging (or that amorous couple) to pounce upon.

Went to the 94th anniversary edition of the Associated Builders and Owners of Greater New York’s black-tie dinner-dance down at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.

Incessant, bitterly cold rain, and since I was attending with some of the editorial dept. ladies, I attempted to hail a cab for a solid 15 minutes to no avail during the 6:00 p.m. rush. Poking out from under my wee umbrella, my tuxedo-ed arm was wet from all the unheeded hailing action and we were just about ready to pack it in and hoof it when a gypsy cab pulled up. Quite nice except for the bait-and-switch by the driver, who successfully haggled the fare from $10 to $15 en route. It was the cause of much consternation amongst the ladies but, because the company reimburses the fare, a moot point.

Cocktails on something like the 8th floor of the hotel, directly overlooking the neon splendor of Times Square. Multiple open bars but the coup de grâce was the complimentary single-malt scotch station, attended diligently by some guy in a kilt and a full white beard.

Dinner was crazy, held in the hotel’s ballroom, which was all decked out like a 1920s ball, complete with costumed professional dancers and stilt-walkers, balloons, confetti and peacock feathers everywhere, shining iridescently in the flashing colored lights. A bunch of middle-aged white businesspeople don’t get much more crazy. Lots of dancing, a tasty meal and plenty of champagne.

I was seated at a table with a bunch of Manhattan real estate mediafolk (including two writers from the New York Times!) and had a funny conversation with the editor of Real Estate Weekly (or something like that), a genial Scottish woman who happened the mention in the course of our brief conversion (which focused on accents and Trainspotting) that “pants” means “underwear” in Scotland, as it does in Ireland, as Dana recently pointed out.

Later in the evening, Donald Trump stopped by to present an award and cause a bunch of people to make jackass “You’re fired!” quips. A fine time was had by all.

After work, I was accompanied by the lovely ladies of the editorial department to the “Evening of Monopoly” event at the swanky Puck Building ballroom in SoHo. Sponsored by the New York University Real Estate Institute Master of Science Alumni Association, as well as many big NYC real estate companies (including the one I work for), it’s a popular semiannual social event for about 800 of Manhattan’s real estate tycoons.

Monopoly is obviously an appropriate theme for a real estate event, and there was indeed Monopoly-themed décor and actual gameboards scattered about to play. But most of the guests were more interested in partaking of the complimentary open bar. Apparently, the place turns into a real meat market after the buffet dinner, but I didn’t stick around as I had made a prior commitment.

I met up with Andie and Katie at 9:00 p.m. to carve pumpkins and watch The West Wing. Eric stopped by later, so he missed out on the hot carving action, although he did bake up a nice batch of the seeds for us to eat.

All three pumpkins would have been the same size, but we conducted our shopping independently. I think I got a good deal on my 9.26-pound bruiser ($5.46) from Westside Supermarket, a grocery a half-block up from Fairway that seems to delight in undercutting that West Side institution’s high prices.

Katie’s jack-o’-lantern is on the left (with cool ultra-glow action and nightmare-inducing expression), mine’s in the center and Andie’s is on the right (featuring a happier expression than Andie, who is disappointed with how it turned out).

Happy Halloween!

I’m no handsome devil, but going by my new photo ID, which I picked up today, I’m a sweaty child molester.

My head is haloed with jaggies, as I have been ghetto clipping-pathed with Photoshop’s Magic Wand tool. I appear to have five o’clock shadow although I shaved that day and was photographed in the morning. My forehead is sweaty, my face an ashen color. And I appear to be wearing a pair of gray-tinted glasses Wilfred Brimley might be interested in purchasing. The best, however, is my shirt. I can’t tell (or remember) which one I was wearing, but apparently it was striped and the digital camera had some difficulty parsing it. I appear either to be wearing a moiré pattern or the same shirt as Peter Gabriel on the cover of his self-titled 1980 record.

Too tired to write full entries daily during first workweek; must write daily summaries.

Monday

• I keep thinking about how when you get incarcerated, they say you gotta shank someone right away or risk becoming the cellblock bitch. On the other hand, in an office environment, you’re the new guy or gal, and everyone’s got their established routine, house style, and a close, personal way they like doing things. I decide to play it cool.
• There’s no fucking way I can remember all these people’s names. But I am trying. There are about 40 people in the office and I’ve taken to my usual tricks to aid recall: the “celebrity I most closely resemble”; the “traits shared with a past co-worker”; and the classic “what’s your name again?” which I figure I can only do for a week before people start to feel resentful.
• I have an eMac as my office computer and it’s “new,” replacing an old Bondi iMac less than a week ago. I’ve already had several people mention this. “Hey, you have a new computer!” they say, when in fact they seem to be saying, “That computer is rightly mine, new guy.”
• Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

Tuesday

• I have a telephone on my desk but no one has called yet.
• They’re not blatant, but they’re there: ‘dose New York accents. Some words float around the office and tickle my tinny Midwestern ears: Quark, arrow, drawings.
• They are a lot looser here with breaks, which are hyphenated words at the end of a line. At the candy magazines, it was a leading cause of rage to search out and destroy all breaks. Here, breaks are cool unless they’re in a way-out place, like “misinform-ed.”
• I go to get my photo ID today on the eighth floor, but because the photographer is out grieving over some recently deceased relative, I have to go to another place across the street. Some Asian guy there takes my photo with a digital camera and says, “Well, you have red eye, but we can fix that in the computer.” I would explain to him that the beauty of digital cameras is you can take another photo with little lost time or expense, but I really don’t care.
• At lunch at Wendy’s, there’s a line doubling back around the rows of stanchions, and the surly lads behind the counter encourage those at the head to step up by shouting, “Next on line!” Back in the office, I look up “on line” in the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and am surprised there’s an entry:

  on line, in line. Few besides New Yorkers stand or wait on line. In most of the English-speaking world, people stand in line. Use that wording.

• The Wendy’s lads also say: “To stay or go?” instead of “For here or to go?” but the NYT Manual remains curiously mum.
• I would have eaten the dry, just-add-water-and-microwave cup-of-soup I brought for lunch, but it exploded in my bag, powdering my paperwork with a spicy Thai noodle residue. The classic Jason would have joked about this to his coworkers in a distinctly self-deprecating manner, but the new Jason will refrain from doing so, as he does not want to immediately give the impression that he is some sort of nimrod.

Wednesday

• I have a spectacular view out the windows in my cubicle over Eighth Avenue with a clear view of the Hudson from 17 stories up. Occasionally, a boat passes. Today, a blimp hovered by.
• I must restrain myself from starting phrases by chirping, “At my old job...” no matter how staggering the similarities. Those are, in only three days:
  • dealing with PR hacks who call incessantly to pitch story ideas or “participate” in articles
  • columnists not meeting deadlines
  • curious parallels between bosses
  • how the magazines are produced, laid-out and edited/proofed
  • the eternal war waged between editorial and production
  • the loud guy
• There are differences, too:
  • It’s a big office; I am a cog.
  • I’m trying to wrap-up a mighty edit job. I’m still doing so at 5:30 when my boss says, “You don’t have to stay and edit that.” An encouraging sign, although I’m not going to assume it’ll always be like this.
  • “How much longer is that damn elevator going to take?”
  • My commute home never previously involved standing pressed-up against some guy who smells like he rubbed a pastrami sandwich in his armpit, then smeared it over himself as cologne.
• My boss tells me they still haven’t fixed the air conditioner on our floor, which has only been operating at 50% force for about a week and a half, which is good news and bad news. Good because no one had previously told me it was broken and I was worried it was always that hot. Bad because everyone will continue to be as sweaty, rumpled and haggard as Rodney Dangerfield.

Thursday

• I don’t seem to remember anything about work today. I must have been busy.
• It’s Andie’s 29th birthday! Before I leave for work, I give her what turns out to be her first birthday present of the day: stuffed animals representing microbes magnified 1,000,000 times. I got her sore throat, flu, stomach ache and, my favorite, the common cold, represented as a spiky dark-blue sphere. Might I add that MTA subway maps make for festive, free wrapping paper?
• At 9:00 p.m., Andie’s birthday celebration begins at the No Idea, a bar in the Gramercy/Flatiron neighborhood. Let’s just say that large, tasty gin and tonics for $5 are a mixed blessing.

Friday

• My first “casual Friday,” although all my casual stuff is just a little too casual, so I wear my normal dress clothes and play it safe. I’ve got to invest in some polo shirts.
• I got my first voicemail today.
• Everyone gets off at 2:30 today because the air conditioner is still broken. They’ve brought in some portable industrial fans, but the one for our department promptly broke. No one bothers to tell me we’re getting out early and when I return from lunch, my boss says, “I probably should have told you this earlier, but we typically don’t take lunch when we leave early.”
• My boss has olfactory hallucinations. “Do you smell that? It smells like something’s burning,” she’ll say, and those within earshot will stop what they’re doing to sniff, then adapt a scrunchy frown when nothing is to be smelled. She tells me she used to crack-up my predecessor by occasionally saying, “Do you smell hot dogs?” That cracks me up, too. Then again, when lyricist Ira Gershwin was dying of an undiagnosed brain tumor, he insisted he could smell burning chicken feathers, asking “What’s that smell?” up until the day he died. That’s pretty funny, too.
• I realized after work today that the editorial offices for The Onion are, like our editorial offices, on Eighth Avenue.