Before passing judgment, I must preface this post with the fact that I work for a very casual software company where the majority of developers don’t even bother coming into the office before 11am unless there’s an emergency. As such, we have a collegial environment that I have always loved since Day One. In fact, it’s a large part of why I came to work here three years ago — who could pass up a job where your boss has a nose ring?

That being said, I’ve been making a concerted effort lately to improve my level of professionalism at work by dressing up on a regular basis. It makes me feel good to wear pretty dresses or nice pants — at least more formal attire than flip-flops and jeans, though it’s perfectly acceptable here. This morning was no exception and I thought I looked pretty chic walking out the door.

However, it really doesn’t matter how good you look when you totally eat the pavement in front of a conference room full of people. And the shame you feel when that happens is further compounded when the dozen or so people in said conference room don’t even *react*. Seriously? Can’t you at least laugh at me when you see I’m alright? I mean, yes, my arm is gashed open, but can you please acknowledge the fact that I just majorly biffed it? It’s comedy pure gold!

Lord have mercy.

Dear Sirs,

I have been having critical performance issues with my Pocket PC including the following:
- spontaneous hard-resetting

- no notification of new voicemail
- extremely short battery life
- keys that no longer work, scratched screen

I took the phone to a Sprint service center in Liberty, Missouri over the holidays where they hard-reset my phone to try and fix the problem. Needless to say, it wasn’t fixed. The service rep told me to call customer service at *2 to receive better support (which begs the question of why you provide an in-store support network whose costs are built into my nickel-and-dimed plan, but I digress).

Well, when I flew back home to Brooklyn, NY and tried to dial *2 to call customer service, the touch screen no longer worked, I could not unlock my phone, and thereby cannot make any outgoing calls. Moreover, I was unable to stop the recurring alarms I had set and was powerless to do anything besides bang my head against the wall until the batter drained entirely. The phone has since stopped charging when plugged into the wall, and when I try to charge it via the sync cable, it starts cycling into an on/off series where WinMobile boots up then fails over and over. Nice.

I have no idea what to do, and since I do not have a land line, email is the only way to reach me. I’m sure I’ll get a nicely-phrased auto-reply from someone in your customer care department informing me I need to take the phone into a store 45 minutes away by subway, but I hope this is not my only option. Weather.com tells me it’s 19 degrees outside right now with a windchill of -10 and I don’t have a car.

Please let me know what I can do to get a new phone before I throw this one against the wall. Is that covered by the insurance plan I pay for every month?

Happy New Year,
Jill

I had planned for many months to travel to India last December for the wedding of a close friend from college. Friends from all over the globe whom I hadn’t seen in years promised to reunite in the tiny southwestern state of Goa, overlooking the Arabian Sea. The trip was fabulous. Sure, we had a Seinfeld moment and missed the wedding ceremony completely… and then went to the wrong reception, but that didn’t stop us from having a blast.

However, I had a big surprise waiting for me at home in Brooklyn. While I was away, my boyfriend fell in love with another woman - Annette Obrestad.

When I returned home after three weeks of traveling, I found lots of suspicious evidence indicting his affair with the Norwegian poker princess. Videos illicitly showing her hole cards. Highlight reels of her EPT win. Voyeuristic screenshots of graphs showing her ROI upswing. And folders upon folders of glamour shots!

The nerve.

Now, I consider myself a fairly respectable live poker player. I can tear up a $1/$2 No-Limit Hold’em table with panache, and I delight in using my womanly charms at the expense of the suit-wearing calling stations who call me “honey” at the table. I’ll keep smiling and flirting, just so long as they keep rebuying when I bust them. But at least I’m old enough to get into a casino. Did I mention Annette is 19?!

I get it that my boyfriend is wooed by her online aggression - it’s the classic submission fantasy. He, along with legions of other fans, sits at her Pokerstars tourney tables, chattering away in the box as her 4d7d busts some poor soul’s high card Ace with a straight and his kid’s college tuition dwindles. She represents the picture-perfect model of youth, of intellect, of competitive spirit and international chic - everything I’m not when I ask him for the fifteenth time to get his underwear off the floor.

Now, I can’t hate on Annette because she certainly brings lots of respect for women players. But here’s a tip for you donkeys crushing on Miss Obrestad: Keep it a secret from your girl. It’s the most +EV thing you can do for your relationship.

Every sane New Yorker goes through semi-regular phases during which they repeatedly ask themselves the penultimate question: “WTF.” Usually this is followed up with “Why do I live here? In a box?” except in instances where said New Yorker is in the investment banking industry. Then, that question usually doesn’t matter because they’re either still in their grey Goldman Sachs cube crunching numbers, or at their ridiculously swank Wall Street studio, drowning their sorrows - alone - in a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue. Tell me - does a $200 bottle of blended whisky taste better when you’re alone?

Since I did not sell my soul to the University of Chicago economics department, and rather preferred to sell it to the heartful upstart that touches children’s lives while protecting their stingy wallets, I am not in the latter category. Instead, I get by on meager allowances and use my personal credit card for work expenses so that I may accrue enough ThankYouPoints to one day get my tail on a plane and escape.

… How depressing.

Today, I’ve fallen victim to another of what I call the seasonal blues in NYC. In the summer, it’s lack-of-central-AC depression. In the fall, it’s why-can’t-I-live-close-enough-to-Central-Park-to-have-falling-leaves-and- movie-moments blues. In winter, it typically laments the fact that the walking distance to the gym, when combined with the ridiculously freezing temperatures and hurricane-force outer-borough winds, prevents any real physical fitness from taking place. Nevermind that my gym boasts a 24-hour schedule. Screw that. The windchill outside is 16 degrees and you’re asking me to walk 15 minutes each way?! No, thanks.

Yes, I would like some cheese with my whine, thanks. But let’s just say that I’ve spent the large majority of my evening perusing Craigslist for better apartments, in better locations, for money I can never afford just to shake myself out of my seasonal funk.

I guess I’ll just go watch the Food Network. At least that will guarantee large living… literally.

Somehow, I’ve managed to make friends with a group of ladies whom I affectionately refer to as my MILFs. Yes, you read me right. They are a boisterous group of smoking hot women who own and manage a dance studio in Bensonhurst, and I am always at my wit’s end to try and keep up with them when we go out. Having three kids apiece, putting them through the paces of the competitive NYC high school world, and sending them off to college don’t slow these sexy moms down. Oh, no. There is always time for an impromptu spanking contest at a beefcake bar.

Last night, in celebration of a birthday, we went out to Lai Yuen for dinner, an upscale Chinese restaurant at the foot of the Verrazano Narrows bridge with a breath-taking view. (On a side-note, be sure to check out the HDR photography of gordonf238 by clicking on the bridge photo below — his NYC work is stunning.) The restaurant didn’t disappoint, and neither did the dramz. There were old flames at the bar, beach club cabana queens, and the ubiquitous old Italian couple, sporting a hideous comb-over and draped in gold jewelry.

It’s always a blast to hang out with my lady-friends, and the feeling is mutual. I am the crass Midwestern girl who travels all over the globe and is captivated by their quintessentially Brooklyn stories; they are my sharp-tongued, middle-aged muses in slinky dresses who joke that the most travel they do is driving to Dyker Heights in their boyfriends’ BMWs.

What’s even greater about my MILFs is that their “destination bar” is a hole-in-the-wall literally across the street from my house, the Wicked Monk. Now, four or five days out of the week, I curse my proximity to this bar and its stumbling-drunk, rowdy patrons and bad cover bands. But oh, when the ladies come to party, it’s on.

Last night, about 4AM as I was leaving for my thirty-second walk home, I confirmed with the ladies that we’re going out next month again for another birthday — this time, a 40th birthday party for a 50-year-old woman. If you’d made me guess, she wasn’t a day over 35.

Boy, I cannot wait.

According to the Brooklyn Paper, FEMA has finally released relief funds for the F2 tornado that touched down in Bay Ridge on August 8th and brought winds of 136mph to Brooklyn for the first time in over a century (1889, to be exact). Photoblog coverage here.

The Brooklyn Paper instructs those in need of aid:

To apply for financial assistance, affected residents should call (800) 621–FEMA or visit www.fema.gov.

The NYTimes elaborates on the available funds:

The designation will make low-interest loans and grants available to Brooklyn homeowners for repairs, replacement of lost property and temporary rentals.

Here’s looking at you, Auntie Em. Take your tornadoes back to Kansas and leave ‘em there!

One tool I can’t stop using this weekend is NateFind, a real estate search engine that grabs all the big listing agents’ feeds and parses them for easy browsing. It has some great features and seems to be more up-to-date than Trulia.

Points of interest:

• Calculates how long the property has been on the market. Nice.
• Displays any changes to price over its current listing life. Plus, you can sign up to get notified.
• Allows browsing for all apartments listed TODAY. No lag.

FtLoB is happy. Search engines rule. When will Google Labs bring us Google Real Estate?

Tonight, a friend and I went for burgers at Heartland Brewery in Union Square after finishing a workout at the gym. On the subway ride home, I decided to take the local train and read the paper instead of my usual route. It was bone-chilling outside and I wanted to stay as warm as humanly possible. Entering Brooklyn, we stopped at Court Street on the R line. Two officers boarded the train, approached me (as I was reading The Onion), and asked me to step off the train with them. Never one to disobey law enforcement, I followed.

The first officer, affecting a lilting Caribbean accent, informed me softly that I had committed a “summonsable” offense and asked me to sit down. I could hardly hear him and kept asking him to repeat what he was saying. Needless to say, I was in total disbelief as he explained to me that propping my feet up on the seat in front of me was a violation of the “quality of life” code of the subway…

… which would cost $50.

After he’d delayed me twenty minutes and I’d missed the next two trains home, he finally finished filling out my paperwork. In the time that it took him to complete the summons, four other officers had appeared and had pulled four other people off the subway to write them similar citations. As if 3.5% city tax, 4.5% state tax, and my federal taxes don’t pay enough people’s salaries to fix potholes in the roads on which I don’t drive.

At this point, I struck up a conversation with three of the officers, asking general questions. I would like to share what I learned, for the sake of the general public:

1) I asked the officers if they cite tourists. Answer: Yes.
2) Apparently, to ticket subway violators, you must wear a bulletproof vest and carry no fewer than one handgun.
3) I expressed my sympathy to the officers that they had to do this, as opposed to fighting “real crime.” They voiced their agreement in the affirmative.
4) This particular infraction, according to my Caribbean officer, is not specifically named in the posted list of infractions. Rather, it is included in a “catch-all” statement that apparently exists at each subway kiosk. Congratulations, 90% of NYC’s English-as-a-second-language population: The good news is that you’re screwed.
5) Police officers will suggest that since you’re relatively new to the city, you may not have a realistic view of crime because you possess a Missouri ID.
6) Police officers will then laugh whole-heartedly when you fake a Southern accent in mockery of the fact that you used to live on the South Side of Chicago for four years and are insulted that they think NYC is a dangerous place.

Monday evening, my roommate and I had the fortune of attending a live taping of The Colbert Report. Before the show, Stephen Colbert teased us with a little Q&A session during which he stated he would answer “any question we could possibly think of.” Well, then.

The initial questions were pretty basic, barring the bawdy fanfic question that someone asked him (which in turn spawned this AMAZING post on his official website, clearly written by The Man Himself). So, after Monday’s show, I highly anticipated getting to see it again last night, as I had a second set of tickets and planned to take another friend. Yes, I admit to being a fangirl. This time, however, I knew I had to come up with a question for him. Thus, much of my week was spent in preparation and yesterday I finally arrived at the moment of truth. I came up with a killer question:

• “Stephen, as the ‘intelligent designer’ of Saturday Night Live’s Ambiguously Gay Duo, what are the first three questions you think Ace and Gary would have asked Harriet Miers at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing?”

So, I shopped the question around at work and got some fabulous laughs. A friend’s feedback consisted of how awesome it is to be “speculating on what the role of a fictional gay duo would be were they on the Senate judiciary committee.” I practiced my delivery and promised myself it was all or nothing - I had to ask. Fast-forward to the show. Stephen came out and spoke to the audience for a moment before asking for questions - no one was biting. Finally, I raised my hand.

…and totally botched the question. Mid-sentence, I accidentally said the “Incredibly Gay Duo,” at which point, Stephen asked me how Freudian this question was. The entire audience laughed at my expense. I smirked and threw back at him: “Well, you wrote it. And they were incredibly gay.” I continued my question after the banter and here is what he answered:

• “What do you think of these pumps?”
• “Will you hold my water bottle while I stretch?”

(At this point, after delivering the first two questions dryly, Stephen giggles, then doubles over laughing, catches his breath, and re-assumes character.)

• “Who do you think has better calves? Me or Gary?”

There you have it, folks. *I* made Stephen Colbert laugh.

Residing in New York City provides me with all the creature comforts I could ask for, like Fairway’s bakery and live tapings of the Colbert Report. I spend every day at the so-called center of the universe in Manhattan, in a five-by-six-foot cubicle on the fourteenth floor of a building that overlooks Madison Square Park. The remaining 60 hours that I’m not working or sleeping, I spend shuttling myself back and forth across the bridge to Brooklyn, taking the elevator to the gym on the fourth floor, or staring at my laptop/television/latest book. Sure, they say that one of the keys to happiness is making the best of your current situation - and I do. But I’m starting to feel the nagging itch of restlessness. I don’t know if this is symptomatic of the intense wanderlust that’s been bubbling just beneath my skin for a decade — or perhaps just having disposable discretionary income.

This morning, I read part of an alumni newsletter from the University of Chicago, which had a brief section on faculty-led “study trips.” Now, I would NEVER typically consider doing something so gauchely marketed - I’m sure most of the other muklukkers are former ScavHunt leaders. But upon closer inspection, I realized they are offering a trip to Antarctica with one of the foremost evolutionary paleobiologists(!).

Wow. Just earlier this week, I was daydreaming on the train (as I am prone to do), and decided that Antarctica is one of the places I must see before I die. Of course, there’s no way I can afford the trip at my current salary and current student loan repayment schedule. In an ensuing conversation, I asked the following question:

Is it possible for me to go back to school to get my Ph.D in EXPLORATION?

I vote we bring back the times of royally-funded exploration. Traversing the Silk Road to China. Mapping the coast of Tunisia. I am not even opposed to travelling in a potentially-dangerous land, people. BRING ON THE TERRORISTS!

Or… barring the ascension of royalty to the democratically-elected throne of the United States of In-My-Dreams, maybe I should get a job that is focused on travelling. And doing something productive. Journalism? International development? I am wont to write. Surely that would predispose me to some travelling.