Tag Archives: battery park

Photo Excursion: Battery Park

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, just pictures, living in new york is neat
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A few of my friends and I have big, fancy cameras and no idea what to do with them, so we decided to start a photo excursion club and take periodic jaunts in photogenic locations to improve our skillz.

Well, Anthony,

Jeff,

and I have big, fancy cameras. Jack has an iPhone. But he’s really serious with that iPhone:

We started out in Battery Park, which is just in front of our office building and has the most incredible views of Brooklyn, New Jersey, Ellis Island, and of course, the Statue of Liberty:

Look! Look! She’s in the foreground and background! See how clever I am?

We took about a zillion photos of flowers and bees landing on them (Anthony even tried to demonstrate to us that you can grab a bee and let it go before it realizes what’s going on, but after a few attempts, I think I convinced him he was going to lose a hand), but naturally I didn’t have my shutter speed set fast enough and didn’t capture a single good-looking shot.

Jack did manage to find some slower-moving wildlife, though:

We creepily watched other people’s kids play in the Battery Park fountain,

and saw a woman who may or may not have been Sinead O’Connor wearing a superhero costume play a concert inside Castle Clinton until the sun began to set:

We had been planning to walk up the East side of Manhattan, but the promise of the smoggy Jersey City moonlight drew us West to Battery Park City and the lovely promenade that spans its length. We stopped to watch a blues concert on the water, and I thought about how wonderful it is to live in a city where something like that is going on every second of the day.

Of course, it’s also the kind of city that commissions poop-shaped sculptures for its parks, so maybe it’s a trade-off:

Passing a group of chess tables, we jeered Anthony into planking (or “lying down game”, as Wikipedia calls it):

and then hilariously looked not ten feet away to see another dude copying him.

After that, Jack lost to himself in a sad game of imaginary chess, which I took a picture of:

and Anthony took a picture of:

and Jeff took a picture of (while accidentally using his color picker function, rendering about half of the photos he took black, white, and blue):

To show that he was more important than we are, Anthony pretended to assume professional photo-taking postures but was really just using them as an excuse to air out his crotch:

The sky went from blue

to black before we knew it

and we apropos-ly ended our photo expedition at the in-progress 9/11 memorial. Freedom Tower, as it was known. Or One World Trade, as we fondly call it:

We passed finance types lounging drunkenly at crowded outdoor cafes, collars unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, and headed somewhere a little more our style:

Because as Jeff’s photos show, clearly we don’t know how to handle ourselves in public:

Attacked by the Bubble Man

Filed under living in new york sucks so hard
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There are these gypsy vendors near the Bowling Green subway station every night who sell ties for $5, earrings for $2, perfume for $10, candy for $1, and so on. Most of them are harmless, and indeed, I almost enjoy hearing the guy with the huge dreadlocks boom, “Everything a dollar!” and seeing the candy lady sitting at her cart and reading in between customers every day. I like to think about how many books she finishes in a week.

But every now and then, there’s a guy selling bubble guns. He’s really aggressive with people he has no chance of selling to, like young women in impressive suits and bachelors with popped collars. He repeats, “Get your bubbles; take a LOOK!” and shoots bubbles at the people who ignore him.

Last night, he was directing his bubbles right into the face of a little Japanese kid in a stroller while the parents just smiled, and I passed by without looking at him. He said, “Get your bubbles; take a LOOK!” right into my ear, and I ignored him, so he stalked after me and shot bubbles at me halfway down the stairs to the subway.

Can I file harassment charges?

It’s Not My Fault You Hate Your Job (and Your Life)

Filed under jobby jobby job job, my uber-confrontational personality
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On Friday afternoon, I got an e-mail from my manager, who works in our Chicago office, saying that “someone” in my office complained to HR that I’m late to work “all of the time”.

This shouldn’t have affected me. The peon-y nature of my job shields me from a lot of the corporate bullcrap that other people have to deal with. On the other hand, because my job is so peon-y, if someone makes a complaint about me, you know he or she had to dig reeeeeeally deep to find something to complain about. This is obviously the sort of person who sues McDonald’s for not printing “Caution: contents hot” on their coffee cups. Or takes his next-door neighbors to court because their dog bit him in the butt after he shot it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

I don’t want to be the waitress who accuses her table of being cheapskates when their poor tip is based entirely on her terrible service, so I’ll admit that I’m often not in the office right at 9 a.m. Because I take public transportation, I can arrive anywhere between 9 and 9:15. But everyone in my office takes the same public transportation, so everyone‘s arriving between 9 and 9:15, and in fact, many people are arriving between 9:15 and 9:30.

What really bothers me is that I have a personal relationship with every single person in my office. We’re a huge software company with thousands of employees worldwide, but my office only has 20 employees, and every single one of them knows the details of my life outside of work, and I know theirs, too. So the idea of someone not only complaining about me but going behind my back to complain to HR seems pretty unbelievable.

And really, I don’t so much mind being complained about. If the worst thing someone can think to say about me is that I’m not always at work at 9 a.m., then I figure I’m doing pretty well. The problem for me is that because I don’t know who did it, I’m going to be deprived of the joy I’d get out of ruining this person’s life in small ways. “Accidentally” forgetting to order his lunch on Fridays when the company buys for all of us, making sure we always happen to be out of whatever coffee he enjoys drinking, not ordering cakes when I know it’s his birthday. Fun, right?

I had two people pegged as possible suspects on Friday, but every time I asked one of my co-workers if they thought it could be one of those guys, they all said no way. And unfortunately, they all offered up the alternative of this group of visiting employees from another of our offices. In particular, they were blaming this guy who had come to my desk shortly after I arrived, and I had tried to make nice with him by asking him polite questions I didn’t at all care about the answers to, but he couldn’t have acted less interested in talking to me. Likely because he felt guilty about having just reported me to HR in our Canadian office.

Since those guys only come to our office once every couple of months, I’m going to have a really hard time properly punishing him for his transgression. About the most I can do is “forget” to add his name to the security list so he has to wait in the lobby until I decide to call down to tell the guards to let him up. I know you have to discipline a dog within moments of its wrongdoing for it to properly learn its lesson, but at least I’ll feel better about myself.

Dumpy Butt

Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, living in new york sucks so hard, stuff i like
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I don’t mean to jab at anyone’s sense of style, because I live in granny sweaters, but I spent a lot of my time in NYC thinking, “It is so sad that she spent so much time and effort to look like that.”

Most interesting designs, I think, look wonderful in theory and terrible in practice.

But even I surprise myself sometimes with the things I like these days. Like t-straps and saddle shoes, which my mom used to force me into against my will when I was kid.

Even lately, I’ve found myself not totally hating the idea of things like harem pants, which appeared in jumpsuit form in this season of “Project Runway”, looked pretty amazing, and won a challenge to end up on a Time Square billboard:


photo by Modelinia

But last night, on my way to the subway, I walked behind this girl, who proved my “terrible in practice” theory:

But I applaud her for trying.

Neighborhood Erotica: NYC’s Financial District

Filed under bigtime celebrity, living in new york is neat
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Check out my second NYC neighborhood “erotica” on the NabeWise blog.

For those of you at work, the dirtiest thing in it is the word manbits.

For those of you not at work, please feel free to write your own slash based on the relationship between the Wall Street bull and the 1 train and submit it in the comments.