Friday the 7th

Friday was another excellent night, well spent with good friends. Due to my constant harassment and obsession with building backyard bonfires (or campfires) (or fireplace fires), we got together with S., R., M., Y., B. and K. and built another fire in the snowy backyard whilst drinking beer, peppermint schnapps cocoa, eating some sort of cilantro infused chicken and snacks dipped in onion dip. We played Mafia (still the best game ever), burned wood and basically just unwound after a long week. Always fun.

Saturday the 8^th

Another good day. We got up mid-morning and grabbed a rental car so that we could drive to central new jersey for K's family's "Little Christmas", which is essentially a Christmas party thrown the week after the holidays end. It's actually a nice idea, because it prolongs the holidays a little longer and the letdown of the end of the holiday season isn't the cliff it usually would be. Anyhow, we rented a Nissan Sentra and drove down to NJ, where a snowstorm was picking up and had a lovely day at Aunt K's house, where a large extended family of brothers, sisters, cousins, babies, small children and third party interlocutors (like me) sat around drinking eggnog, eating quiche, deep fried ravioli, stuffed shells, banana cream pie, meatballs and sausages and watching football or generally talking, or engaging in Christmas games for the kids. Very nice. Especially the food. Which we brought home about 15 pounds of and promptly ate. The only downside of the day was having to go sit in the freezing car and jump on a conference call where I had to listen to 30 minutes of discussion over our team's comments on the compensation discussion and analysis section of the registration statement were applicable. Not fun. But, after stepping out of the car into the snow covered neighborhood and noticing the intense soundlessness blanketed in white snow, I was okay again. The ride home was also awesome because we got to listen to the Jets-Colts game on AM radio, which is surprisingly fantastic, in some ways even better than watching a game. And that game was fucking fantastic.

Sunday the 9^th

Woke up fairly late, dicked around at home, watched the Ravens-Chiefs game on the couch in pajamas while eating more leftover food from little christmas. Decided to drag our asses off the couch and make it over to Nice Guy Eddie's bar for the Eagles-Packers game at 4:30 to meet with M. B. and D. Learned that Nice Guy Eddie's is pretty much the worst place on earth to watch sports. Shitty food, gross servers, tiny analog TVs with fuzzy and dim screens set up in a way that you can't see anything, and basically all around lameness. Note to self: Never go there again. We sent D. out as a scout, where he finally found a place called "The Edge", which in stark opposition to Nice Guy Eddie's, might be one of the best bars ever. No one there. Darts. Awesome TVs. No bullshit. Bring your own food (Sunny and Annies!). And at least 4 or 5 Tool songs came up in the playlist. Watched the Eagles loss with some disappointment, then we made our way over to Sing Sing on Avenue A where we ended up singing retarded Karaoke and drinking until 11:30, after which we came home and ate some MORE leftovers from Little Christmas.

Monday and Tuesday the 10^th and 11^th were relatively uneventful, but fairly busy on the work front. The real bitch of the week began on Wednesday, when I was supposed to fly out at 6 am to arrive in Los Angeles for a long session at the financial printers. The financial printers are something else…but I’ll come back to those.

Starting at 2 pm Tuesday, before a single snowflake had hit the ground, cancellations began rippling through the flights. As my 6 am flight was cancelled, suddenly all of Tuesday evening flights were beginning to fill up and all of the Wednesday afternoon flights were quickly getting packed. In a mad hurry, I booked a flight for the 3:30 Wednesday afternoon out of JFK. It was promptly cancelled, sending out more shockwaves of cancellations and overbookings. By 9 pm, all of the Wednesday and Thursday flights to LA were either booked or cancelled. Checking to see whether it would be reasonable to avoid late, delayed or otherwise unnecessary trip to LA, I emailed my partner to see whether I should try some scheduling gymnastics, such as, say, taking a morning train from New York to Baltimore and than catching a Baltimore flight to Los Angeles.

“I think it is important to try and get out there.”

So I booked it. In bed by 2 am, ready for another visit to the printers.

So, financial printers. No one understands what this is and frankly, I’m glad, or else everyone is a giant boring asshole. “Going to the printer” is simply going to an office full of word processors where they take your word document and convert it into a pdf document and then turn that file into an html document of some sort that can be filed electronically. Why we require entire businesses and tens of thousands of dollars to do this is beyond me. Whether this will continue to exist in the future seems unlikely. In any case, teams of lawyers and bankers and business people descend on a few lovely conference rooms, usually on the 12^th or 20^th floor of some random office building, and begin going through giant financial documents and prospectuses page by page. Thousands and thousands of pages are printed. Commas, periods, split infinitives, misspellings, defined terms, pagination, too much space between paragraphs, formatting, fonts, legally incorrect terminology, table spacing and every other nitty gritty mind number soul-crushing type of detail are hammered out, hashed out, re-read, and marked onto drafts by hand and sent into the “printer” for editing. Then, the drafts come back out with the changes made and we painstakingly proof every change and then continue marking new edits into the document. Hundreds of man hours are spent at every printer session polishing these turds until they gleam like gold and no sentence is left unprocessed into a banal platitude about corporate goals and no statement is left so specific as to invite any possibility that it could be incorrect or misleading. This continues for days.

So, back to my story, I went to bed around 2 am and woke up promptly at 6 am and began my travels. In my Indian-made grey suit (my back-up) and scuffed motorcycle boots, I dragged my travel suitcase and bookbag through the blizzarded sidewalks of slush and snow to Penn Station, where I watched for 3 hours as my train continued to get delayed. Getting tired of my book and of waiting, I eventually tried to get up and see whether I could get on another train to Baltimore – which, shockingly worked. Happy that leg one of my trip was well underway, I settled in for 3.5 hours of Modern Family and The League on my work-issued travel laptop, while frantically fielding blackberry emails relating to the deal. Arriving at BWI, I made it to my terminal where I promptly sat down and continued watching Modern Family (which I really do like, btw. Not as good as Community, but still quite charming). Made it on the plane, flew for 5.5 hours, landed in LA at 7:30 local, got into a rental car and promptly got stuck in gridlock for 45 minutes, trying to travel 5 miles. (I hate LA). Arrived at the financial printer, sweating my balls off, wearing the same suit for 18 hours, having not eaten, and proceeded to work until 3:30 am. In other words, my day had just lasted 24 hours. Luckily, I got to sleep 2 hours. And then proceeded to stress out. Editing documents, chasing down signatures, negotiating lock-up agreements with hostile partners at other law firms, inability to reach the clients during negotiations, client explosions and emergencies, all continuing from 8 am Thursday morning until Friday at 2:30 pm, another all-nighter under my belt. At 2:35, after watching the CFO of the company pop a bottle of champagne and taking a quick sip of the bubbly, I hurriedly said my goodbyes to all and got into my car, where I gridlocked my way to the airport, made my way through security and got onto my mostly empty flight, where I bought a sandwich, watched the League and slept 4 hours until touching down at JFK.

Saturday

I think Saturday was mostly just super satisfying because I knew it was a three day weekend, which fucking rules. Didn’t do shit most of the day except go to the Gym and be Fucking Productive and then went to B’s for beer and the Steelers/Ravens game (fuck Ben) after which I jetted over to R’s place where the firewood I ordered (half a face cord, 4 feet by 4 feet – yeah!) had finally been delivered by the Woodman LLC. And then we (R., S., Y., M., Me., Se.) proceeded to burn the giant pile of wood, piece by piece until we had finished all the beer and finished all the food. Love those nights.

Sunday

‘Twas a football day. We all gathered at The Edge, our new favorite football bar. Watching the Jets beat the Pats was AWESOME. Not because I’m a huge Jets fan, but that was certainly an awesome game to watch, especially with pitchers and pitchers of beer. Eventually we ended up going to Amsterdam Billiards where we played ping pong and pool (badly) while drinking more beer until we got bored (esp of D’s friends, one of whose name is Spike) and went home.

Monday – PRESIDENT’S DAY!! (January 17)

I think we tried and failed to run several errands this day, including a drop off of long held compost (retch) to the Farmer’s Market (closed) and an attempted run to the Apple Store (aborted) to pick up a new Mac. Instead, we stopped off at The Barrel (on Stuyvesant/9th and Fourth) where we had a couple of glasses of wine and beer and happy hour specials for food. After three small plates, we learned that we were actually even more hungry, so we decided to take a stroll down 10^th Street between 1^st and 2^nd for some Japanese fare, whatever it might be. We ended up at Dieci.

Ok, so Dieci was awesome. A tremendous meal. We happened to arrive during happy hour, so all of the wine (which was excellent chosen and delicious) was half off. We were 2 of only 4 people in the restaurant. And then after seeing the menu, which appears to be tapas style Japanese and Italian blends, we rattled off 6 choices. Baby Red Potato Gratine with Sea Urchin, Shrimp and Mozzarella Spring Roll, Crispy Warm Fluke Sashimi, Spicy Tuna & Grilled Brie Sushi roll with Red Pepper Puree, Spicy Bologenese Ramen and Foie Gras Egg Custared “Chawan-Mushi” with Oyster Mushroom Dashi Sauce. Rashomon was also playing in the background on a little TV. Very good meal. Everything was cooked perfectly and executed well to the tiniest detail. The plates were timed deliberately and intelligently. The space was quiet and elegant. We followed the meal by watching Inception at home. I’m not sure why everyone was so confused by that movie. But it was pretty awesome. For some reason I thought the stakes would have been higher than a corporate heist, but I suppose that’s the point of Cobb’s entire emotional arc.

Tuesday

Back to work. Lame.

BUT, we got to cook an excellent meal. K. whipped up her variation on Momofuku’s ginger scallion sauce (which she does better than he does) which we tossed into cold spaghetti (such an amazing combo, even better than on ramen). I cooked down some swiss chard into white wine, butter, garlic and chicken broth, which we topped with crispy pan fried crimini mushrooms and shallots and then topped with a fried egg. And then we drank wine and watched Community.

Wednesday

Similar to Tuesday, except a much lamer day at the gym (WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE GYM NOW? YES NEW YEARS I GET IT. PLEASE LEAVE) and we used buckwheat instead of ramen for the ginger scallion noodles, and replaced the swiss chard with kim chi and banchan mung bean sprouts, spinach and quick pickles (momofuku recipe). Excellent meal, great show.

The New Year

Thursday, the 30th: Woke up at the normal time, checked the status of the partner on the deal on the internal info system, noted he was out of the office, stayed in my pajamas and "worked from home". Actually, I managed to do some substantive legal work. In the jams. I have gone through my inbox in an attempt to understand what I may have done that day. I have no answers. I take that as a good thing. I have been informed I went to the gym. M and D wanted to go see a movie, but we refused on the basis of K's exhaustion (having returned from her holidays home). Ultimately, B. came over and we beat the shitty shitty game Medal of Honor (that I mistakenly thought was Black Ops when it was first purchased) and we drank lots of beer. So basically a solid night.

Friday, the 31st: In reflecting on what I did on December 31, I realize that we spend absolutely no time reflecting on what we do on the last day of a year, but only on what we do to start next year. Where's the joy in that? Anyway, I am quite sure we slept in for awhile and then made incredible challah, egg, butter and cheese sandwiches with hot sauce, followed by a trip to Macy's to return a Murse that K's parents bought her. Turns out, I hate Macy's. Actually, I hate going to any department stores. But I especially hate places like Macy's during the holidays. The crush of all of the people. The jostling. All of the stuff. All of the stuff. All of the stuff. The tired looking employees. The browning marble floors, worn down by time or just chosen in an unfortunate era of beige aesthetics. The overwhelming Christmas decorations everywhere. The muggy body heat. The sting of slightly sweating under a winter coat and scarf worn indoors. The sore back and heels of standing in line for 20 minutes. Just hate it. So we did that. And then came back and chilled at the apartment with B and K for awhile until M&D called to meet them at a bar on 13th and A with R. and J. Had a couple of drinks there then head over to AB's for her New Year's Eve party which. was. utter. madness. Four Loko, shoulder to shoulder people filling the entire apartment, spilling into the hallway and rooftop, don't remember much of it all except I did have my fill to drink and discussions with people's whose names I'd already forgotten, even though I already pissed off a girl named Katie for not remembering her name was Katie. Strong move. Party was a party, 'twas a merry old time and enjoyed myself. I don't really recall leaving.

January 1: K woke up with a wicked hangover that lasted most of the day. That was fun. K and I went to The Strand and B&N to see if we could find Rise to Globalism (still one of the best history books ever) after having long and drawn out discussions of world history triggered by the both of us reading "Nothing to Envy", which is one of the best "history" books i have read in the past few years. After reading incessantly about North Korean starvation and deprivation, we decided to convince M, D and B to join us for Korean Barbecue at Woo Chon, which is a fantastic Korean barbecue joint where we loaded up on Banchan and grilled meats and beers. Afterwards, we blindly followed D's recommendation to go to a rooftop bar on top of the motherfucking La Quinta Inn in Koreatown (Me Bar). Turns out the place motherfucking rocked. I like it. Will return.

January 2: Woke up at 2:00. Football. All Day. Week 17. Awesome. Oh, and watched Zhang Yi Mou's "Huo Zhe" with K in bed. Nothing gets us ready for bed like watching the misery of unleashing Mao on good people.

January 3: Returned to work. K home sick. Malaised all day. Unable to work efficiently. Came home, cooked a kickass meal with K of Barley Soup (with chicken stock, fingerlings, carrots, leeks, celery, onions, garlic), with 2.5 lb roasted chicken, and lemon juice chaat masala braised red cabbage. And then we watched Community for 3 hours and went to bed. Glory glory.

Today: Got up, went to work, worked and dicked around until 7:30. Came home. Ate barley soup (better the next day) with bacon crumbles, scallions, two cheddars and a baguette with K and watched more Community. This was too many days to do at once. Luckily today was uneventful and there's nothing to say about it!