A Day In The Life

I know it has been a little to long between posts, but I'm just uninspired. But I feel like I have to write something since my friend Joe has told me that I need to post more often as it is, and I might get another email from my brother-in-law telling me to get off my ass and post something more often than once a week.

But do we really want to force it? Do a little surfing around the blogosphere sometime. 98% of blogs are boring shit about people's boring lives. Why some people think that writing about their parent-teacher conferences at their kids' school or their tip to the dentist is interesting to anyone besides them I'll never know.

But hey, if you want quantity over quality (not that you get either here) I can play that game. So I'll tell you about my mundane day yesterday.

I puttered around the apartment in the morning, drinking coffee. The last of my Mexican blend from Whole Food, so I made a mental note to get more coffee. My beautiful wife came home briefly in the mid-morning to grab something to have for lunch since she wouldn't be able to get out later. That was nice, but it made me leave later than I wanted to run some errands.

I took off for the subway to run downtown. I grabbed a 5 train from 59th/Lexington to Union Square. I had two things I needed to accomplish there. First, my Sony CD Walkman has been slowly dying for the last several weeks. The buttons don't work all the time and I have had to whack it a bunch of times before I can get it to play. It finally got to the point yesterday that it wouldn't cooperate even after multiple smacks.

Being without my portable music is like being without legs, so this has to be remedied immediately. I went to the Virgin Megastore to check out their selection. Guess what? They have no selection. What the fuck? They sell CDs but not portable CD players. Tons of fucking iPods and mp3 (or as I like to call them, shit files) players, but no portable CD players. So I run over to the Circuit City to see what they've got.

Now normally, having my headphones on in these kind of stores is crucial because their employees are always trying to help you and I hate that. I just want to look at shit and pick out what I want on my own and if I have any questions I'll call you dammit. But my player is crapped out so I had to just leave my headphones on and pretend I was listening to something. In this situation it was really useful because when you go to a store to get a CD Walkman these days some ass hole ties to get you to buy an iPod instead. And I wasn't really in the mood to explain to some snot nose with his pants waist around his knees that iPods are for novice, uninformed, casual music listeners and that I'm not one of those so please kindly fuck off.

Anyway, they had like two to choose from there ans they both sucked. I ran over to the Staples across the Square for something else I needed.

Last week I got one of those Case Logic wallets that has pages and pages of sleeves to hold non-cased CDs. I've been needing a way to store my live show bootlegs. At this point I've been putting them in single two-sided sleeves and leaving them just kind of stacked around the apartment. This is not my lovely wife's preferred way for me to store them. Or mine, I can never find what the hell I'm looking for. So I got one that holds 208 discs. Anything bigger than that was too bulky and I figure when I needed to expand I would get another instead of having one that holds over 300 because those are just too huge. And I figured this one would be good for a while.

Wrong. I didn't even come close to fitting all my bootlegs in that one.

I needed another so I went to the same place I got the last one since I wanted the same exact thing.

One thing I hate about the big stores like Staples lately is that they camp an employee out by the door to say hello to people. This always weirds me out. Even though I'm 36 years old I still feel like I'm being watched like a teenager in a record store when this happens. The person at the door says "Hi there, how are you today," but I know what they really mean is "I've got my eye on you, so don't even think about stealing anything you stupid hippy."

I walked into the Staples and I couldn't figure out what was going on. The whole place was switched around and nothing was where it was the last time I was there. And then when I finally found the media storage stuff, horror of horrors, they didn't have my 208-disc holder.

"Dammit, I'm running 0-for-2" I thought.

Then it hit me that I was at the wrong Staples. I had bought it at the one over in Chelsea not the one in Union Square. And that one is right across 6th Avenue from a Best Buy, which would have made it a much better place to go than Union Square. Crap.

Now it's too late for me to go up to Chelsea because I've got to get to the Lower East Side. I catch the subway down to 2nd and Houston and buy a couple of tickets at The Mercury Lounge for next month's Southern Culture On The Skids show that my buddy Joe and I will be attending. I like to buy tickets at the box office whenever possible to avoid service charges.

Now it's almost 1:30 and I have to get back to the Upper East Side for a training session for a standardized patient case (I wrote about this line of work I'm in before) I'm playing next month at Cornell Medical School. I catch a M15 bus up 1st Avenue.

Despite New York City being the center of good public transportation in America, the east side of Manhattan is woefully under-served by the subway, which is why I'm on a slow moving bus heading north on 1st Avenue. On the plus side they come about every 30 seconds during the day, but on the down side you are stuck in the same traffic as all of the ass holes who think driving in New York is a good idea. On top of that, since I didn't get a new CD player I had to listen to people talk on their cell phones on the bus. Another thing, among the hundreds, that's better about the subway is that cell phones don't work under ground.

I get done with Cornell at 4:00 and I'm still annoyed that I only got one of three things done that I wanted to get done, though I am really happy that I got the Southern Culture tickets. But I'm the kind of person that gets really obsessed with, well, everything so I just can't accept that I don't have my CD player or my disc storage thingy yet.

Once again I'm on the subway towards downtown. I hit the Staples and Best Buy in Chelsea and have the stuff I need in no time, which makes me even more annoyed with myself for my earlier bad decision to hit Union Square instead. But at least I've got my new music player and music storage case so I'm happy. And I make it home in time to greet my honey when she comes home from work.

So that was my day.

See, that's the kind of mundane nonsense that I could give you everyday if I wanted to make sure I was posting often enough. It would be OK if my life was more interesting, but it's not. Don't get me wrong, after we go to Southeast Asia in November I'll have a bunch of interesting journal type entries to add.

But do you really want me to keep a daily diary like all of those bored housewives with blogs out there?