heyMamas

It Could Always Be Worse

My sister always tells me whenever either of us throws ourselves a pity party {which does not happen often as we are extremely well grounded and thankful for our lives}, "it could always be worse" or as my boss likes to say "I mean, c'mon we are not in Afghanistan here."

So Monday morning as I rolled over to turn off my cell phone alarm that I have come to despise so much, I wondered how it is that I manage to get up and get into work so early, five days a week. 

How do people do it, day after day?  Leave their families, the comfort of their home to haul ass to work? To possibly take shit from their boss, deal with annoying co-workers (not you Karen, promise), deal with a miserable commute, and the list could just keep going...... 

And a Monday morning is that much harder, and a cold, wintery New York City Monday morning is even worse. So I sat and pondered how exactly it is that I get up out of my bed, my California King sized bed that I swear is the most comfortable bed I have ever laid on.  Although the flip side of my love for the bed, is Drew's hatred of the bed, he feels like he sinks right into the middle of it. 

Last year when we moved into our new house, our movers thought it was a good idea to fold the mattress in half for the eight or so hours it took to make it from one house to the other.  But as much as he loathes it and threatens to replace it, I love it and can't get enough of it. 

Back to my pity party.  So Monday morning, I got up at 5:45am as I do everyday, got ready, left my house and arrived at the train station only to find everyone standing OUTSIDE the train car when they should be sitting comfortably INSIDE the train car.

We stood outside in the cold for thirty-five minutes ON THE COLDEST DAY OF THE YEAR TO DATE {the dial in our car said six degrees}, while I watched the Long Island Rail Road workers, unhitch seven train cars from the rest of the train, drive them away and then drive some new ones back THIRTY minutes later. 

Then there was the whole re-hitching the cars process and hmm, this is fun BUT I WEAR DRESSES TO WORK!!  I thought I was going to die. So after they re-hitch the cars and we finally board the train, I arrived at work forty minutes late.

I decided after that ridiculous ordeal I should at least treat myself to the subway instead of walking the ten blocks and one avenue to my office.  Surprise, surprise.... one of the lines to the machines that sells Metrocards was broken and there were twenty-five people waiting to use the only other operating machine. 

So no dice in the pampering subway ride.  Need I remind you how desperate someone has to be to call a NYC subway ride, pampering.  I had a chill in my bones that lasted through lunch time.

Lunch time.

Lunch, now that's a whole other dysfunctional topic in my life because for someone who gets to work at 7:30am, I seem to eat my lunch closer to the time that one should be having their late afternoon snack.  When I make the stupid decision to eat lunch that late in the day, I get an unbelievably painful headache that then takes sixteen tylenol to get rid of. 

I can almost feel my liver dying a little more with each passing pill.  

So 5pm comes, it's time to go home and I walk to Penn Station only to find that my express train has been cancelled and they are combining trains with another and making it a local.  That equates to about ten stops to my house and everyone is crammed into cars that they don't belong in due to the severe overcrowding, and we have to wait at each stop for people that are in the wrong cars to make it to the right cars so they can be let off the train. 

YUP...

So I wrote this post while I was crammed in the middle of an aisle with my ass in someones face during which I start to ponder AGAIN, for the second time that day, why it is that I choose to live where I live? 

And in my ear I can hear my sister's words, it could always be worse.... 

And then it got worse, right there and then on that train. 

My phone lost it's internet connection.

My phone lost it's internet connection.  Yeah, that's right.

My calls failed, I could send any emails, get any emails, and couldn't send any text messages!!  Thank goodness I had my work blackberry or I would have been walking home. 

That night Drew tried everything he could to figure out what could have happened to my phone to make it act this way. 

He re-booted it, to no avail.  He reprogrammed it, nope, nada, nothing.  Dead.

Nothing we did could fix this thing. 

The next morning, I went to an AT&T Store and promptly found out that some clown at the local mall had added himself to my account as an authorized user, used our upgrades, bought himself three brand new iphones and in the process hijacked all of our cell phone numbers so that they no longer worked for us, but worked for him, just as I was on that train ride home.

At least I am not in Afghanistan.... 

2011

Happy New Year 2011!  I remember exactly what Drew and I did on New Year's Eve 2000 and I can not believe it has been eleven years since then.

I hope you all had a great holiday and New Years with your family and friends.  I took a little break from heyMamas to chill with the family and we had a great time.  I am sure for many of you that were off and were able to have extended family time, when your alarm rang this morning jolting you back to reality, you probably felt just like I did.

All day I have been trying to think of something meaningful to say about this past year as I look forward to the year ahead.  One thing I have to say is this past week as I read some of my favorite blogs and browsed through their wonderful 2010 recaps, I can't help but wonder how everyone does it?

Where does everyone find the time to devote to their posts?  Yes, of course some of those blogs that I love are done by full time bloggers where it's their job to blog everyday and put wonderful memory filled posts together with handy links to past stories, but alas I am just a working mother of two, that commutes at an ungodly hour into the city, stays inside a building all day and then commutes back  home to my wonderful family.

Needless to say, as Drew and I try tirelessly to raise two solid and conscientious children, be good spouses to each other and run our household, yearly 2010 recaps are just not getting done. 

I digress, and someday.....someday when I have more time to myself and my little blog here, I too will do a yearly recap with pictures, favorite posts and maybe even some music. 

Someday.

That should be one of my resolutions.

By the way, trying to raise conscientious children in this world takes ALOT of mental energy.  

ALOT. 

If I had one theme about this past year it would probably be that.  Holy cow, did I use more mental energy than I ever thought possible trying to explain things to my two precious girls. 

I'm just saying....

One night at dinner, we went around the table and shared with eachother what our New Years Resolutions were. Each one of us talked about what we could either do more of, or be better at in the coming year.

Nothing that I contributed at that dinner inspired any special thoughts, which is why it is January 3rd and I haven't written anything yet.

But, today at work, after talking to many of my co-workers who went back to their hometowns for the break and found themselves questioning why the hell they were in New York.  Now here is a subject that sparked a meaningful thought inside me.  

They talked about why were they spending most of their money to live in a tiny shoebox apartment when they could live in their hometowns in a beautiful rental house for 1/100 of the price?  Or why do they eat out every night or buy eight hundred dollar shoes and spend the better part of their day locked in a building behind four computer screens?  Why are they tired all the time?  Why do they feel like people are more competitive here than any other place they have ever been?  Why do they do it and how long will they keep it up?

I love hearing these stories and often daydream about the quality of life in other cities.  Being a native New Yorker and only knowing one pace basically my whole life, I need these stories.  I need to know that there are better ways to live.

Inside, I know there is a better way, but I feel like I will never truly find places like that because I have nothing to compare my current existence too.   I have a crazy life.  I run all over the place every single day from morning until evening.  I never sit down, I never relax, hell I don't really even know how to relax.  I don't.  I am in project mode all the time.  Sometimes, I will literally stand above my bed at night waiting to get in it.  I have to tell Drew to yell at me to get into my bed so that I just stop what I am doing and just lay. 

So here is my resolution and hopefully one I can really get behind and not just pay lip service to.  

Even though I live in New York and am totally and completely crazy and overbooked on any given day, I am going to try to live in a way that is completely true to myself.  I am going to try to adopt a total anti-New York attitude in terms of lifestyle and spending habits.

I am going to try to live the life I want to live.  A life that would be easier to live if I was not in New York.  A low key life where things are not valued as much as living a good life.  I am going to follow my own pace, set achievable goals, sit on my couch every now and then, not feel compelled to spend eight hundred dollars on shoes, not renovate my house because that's what everyone else does, talk with my girls more about things that don't cost money, and not get caught up in gossip.  Well, maybe just a little gossip here and there.

That's it.  That is my most major resolution and the one I am going to try the hardest to stick to. 

I have to. 

I have to, if I want to live the kind of life that I want to live.  Wish me luck...

 

What was your most challenging resolution? 

Donuts, Beer & Commuting

I am going to post a picture tonight because it makes me laugh outloud when I look at it.  I am almost certain you will not see the humor in it at all, in fact you may even think it is downright stupid but I need to post it anyway.

The backdrop....last night was a rough night for me.  It started with a nearly two hour commute on a night when I really wanted to get home early to meet my girls at the dentist.  It was going to be Belle's first cavity and first shot and she had been nervous about it all weekend.  Nervous, but tough.  Just like Belle.

So earlier in the day I called the dentist's office to ask if the dentist would do that shaking thing that some dentists do to lesson the pain when they give you a shot to numb up your mouth. 

Yes, crazy.  I know.  But I asked.

So when they finished laughing, they said yes of course they would do that, but I thought me being there would provide Belle more comfort than a dentist shaking her face violently.

So I run to Penn Station to catch the train and as I am headed down into the normal track, I see that the train has been cancelled and now combined with a later train.  A later train, that is A LOCAL!!  A local train is a BIG deal because I live on the last stop of the train line and after a long day, taking a local home instead of an express can make you feel like they are never going to get the f**k home. 

And there I was an hour and forty five minutes later, we were delayed and they tortured us by making us sit and wait so the express trains that left Penn Station after us could safely pass.  How does that make any sense at all?

So I finally arrive home and since it was a workout night and I am trying really hard to stick to a workout routine, I actually worked out. 

I finally sit down to eat around 8pm when everyone else was done, and I was not in a pleasant mood at all.  Drew sits down next to me and proceeds to take about 15 minutes without saying a word just fixing, moving things, more fixing and more moving things, lining them up just right, until he was good and ready to start eating his donut and drinking his beer. 

It just made me laugh totally and completely.

 

Old Friends In New York

I literally just ran from the Cornell Club in midtown, where I had the best calamari I have ever had, and that's saying alot, to catch my train home to see my girls before they went to bed.

Tonight I met up with some old colleagues and had a surprisingly wonderful time. Although I don't usually hang around to see it that often, New York City is such a magical place at night, especially at this time of year.

One of the guys I was with at dinner told us a story about how he had just checked into his hotel and stood next to Stevie Ray Vaughan. Now that's cool and so New York. 

Friday at work, Jennifer Aniston was outside my building shooting a movie and most people could not have cared less, they sped right past her without even so much as a backwards glance.  Also, so New York.

New York City is like no place on earth and when I actually get a chance to stop and take it all in, I know exactly why it is that I could never live anywhere else. 

So often the effort to go out seems so daunting, especially after a twelve hour work day.  But today I pushed through that feeling and as I sit here on the train sweating my ass off and nauseous from making my body do terrible things so that I could make my train, not to mention the giant glass of cabernet and the plate of calamari I had just consumed, I am really happy that I did.

And I am going to try to do it more often because it is usually well worth the effort.

New York Nuisance: A brilliant idea

A while back I posted about tourists in our great City, and how it is extremely difficult to navigate around them especially when they constantly STOP right smack in the middle of the street. 

They also travel in large groups and like to walk in rows of no less than five people across which makes it incredibly hard to pass them without venturing into the street and getting plowed down by a bus.

So not only was I way ahead of the curve with my ideas in that post, but it seems as if someone else is suggesting the very same thing only this person took this issue to a whole new level and actually did something about it instead of just complaining about it on her blog. 

So this person and they believe it to be an artist, literally cut the sidewalk in half, one side for New Yorkers who actually want to walk and one side for Tourists, who don't want to get pushed around when they want to stop and stare for long periods of time with rows of five across.

 

And you know what?  Kudos to that person who came up with this idea as it is majorly brilliant .

I believe it would certainly ease the nerves of everyone involved. 

New Yorkers rushing as we always do to get to our destination wouldn't get pissed at the tourists who stand right smack in the middle of the sidewalk staring up at buildings.

Everybody's happy.