the holy invasion

I figured out how to get onto the roof at work and went up there one morning witih a coworker to look at the skyline. We noticed a strange airplane flying low over the city. It seemed to have only one wing. Then we realized it was carrying a large payload that looked like a missile but turned out to be a large cargo helicopter, strapped to its underbelly. When the plane released the helicopter, it hovered over the building next to ours and landed. Dozens of people streamed out of it and spread out over the other building's roof. They figured out how to get over to our roof and started crowding around us, too. They appeared to be college fraternity brothers, all wearing matching tie-dye shirts with Christian slogans. My coworker was worried they were aliens and ran for the door to the stairs. I got the nerve to ask one of them who they were. They claimed to be a service club airlifted in from the east side to protest rising heating bills for all the poor residents of the West Village. There were hundreds of them---I could see helicopters landing on other roofs nearby and letting off even more of these boys. Before I could ask them another question, the helicopter morphed into an all-terrain land vehicle and kind of climbed over onto our roof. The group leader driving the land-helicopter turned on a megaphone and instructed everyone to head inside for a pizza party. I took a different stairwell and ended up at a study party where my friends from high school had apparently been waiting over ten years for me to show up.

yet another apocalypse

When the bombing started I was on the road in Nebraska. I stopped in at a bar and watched on TV as the bombs descended on Berlin and London. They fell slow and placid, looking like a swarm of giant fat black jellyfish that turned to bright orange flame when they landed on buildings and public squares. The other people in the bar stared blankly as panicked Europeans ran at and around the screen.

The response across America was hard to gauge. I stayed with friends in Nebraska, a family that lived on a compound in the middle of nowhere. One woman there was worried about her children, who her good-for-nothing ex-husband had shipped off to boarding school in England. She wondered if her children were still alive, if she should begin to mourn. I wondered how her ex managed to afford boarding school on the limited salary of an unemployed alcoholic.

I stopped off in a high-end mall on the way back to New York. The associates at the Nordstroms there seemed more upset about a new competitor who had taken over the bulk of the under-occupied mall at half their rent, drawing away their customers with fancy white pillars and warmly glowing display cases. But that was the result of another catastrophe, well on its way and nearly forgotten by the time this other situation arose.

Back in New York, we carefully moved the tomato plants from the roof into the bathroom, just in case. But I kept going to work. Everyone carried on almost like normal. The TV stopped getting an international feed. The military started up the draft again, but it was only to stop domestic violence, the potential looting and pillaging that one expects when it seems like the world is about to end.

At work I engaged in some emotional looting and pillaging. I'm not proud of it. But for some reason a few of us in the editorial department felt justified in going down to the production department and intimidating their staff. We acted all tough and entitled. We messed up paperwork, drew mustaches on design mock-ups, played around with people's computers. A supervisor came by and asked just what we thought we were doing, and we fled back upstairs, ashamed.

not the best day to play hookie

I skipped work to meet my friends for lunch in the East Village and buy some new soccer cleats. Lunch was great, but unfortunately an alien from an alternate dimension was also shopping for some new cleats. It ripped through the space-time fabric of 9th street on a Tuesday afternoon. All anyone could see anywhere were these giant purplish tentacles, which started grabbing shoes and people who looked like they might be good at soccer (apparently this was also a recruiting trip). Luckily, I'm not such a hot player these days, and I escaped with my shoes and headed over to Troy, Michigan to meet my friend Steve for a drink. He took me to this members-only hipster bar on Big Beaver. No one seemed happy to see me. No one there seemed that happy to see anyone, actually. There was a walk-in clinic next door, so I decided to go get some alien-related injuries checked out while I was there and then head back to work to at least put in an appearance.

spa fail, work fail

My friend Julie and I wanted to lose some weight, so we signed up for this sleep-away spa where they use industrial floor polishers to buff the fat right off you. I know, it sounds like a bad idea. I realized this when they were halfway through my calves and accidentally sanded through to bone. I threatened to sue, and they refunded the money for the rest of the treatments, but I was limping for the rest of the weekend.

At work on Monday, I was assigned to write the next edition of our division's newsletter. The previous edition was mostly about cute cats. I wasn't sure where to start. I thought I had a pretty good first page going, about the impact of the financial crisis on our industry, but all the publicity assistants came over to my computer and made fun of it. I started researching other cute animals, preferably ones wearing clothing.

the new world

I joined an improv troupe, but our chemistry was all wrong. We just weren't funny, and I think two of the other girls were clinically depressed. The rest of the group decided to order in some fried chicken, stay up all night, and work everything out, but I jumped ship and headed to Michigan to hang out with my coworkers.

They were eating dinner at the house of one of the publicity assistants' parents, which was on a Manhattan city block transposed over one of the hilly forested areas near Ann Arbor. The publicity assistant was mad because one of the publicists had taken over her bedroom and filled it with baby-related gear. The really annoying part was that the publicist doesn't even have a baby. Still, I liked what she'd done with the place. Everyone was debating whether or not to head over to a party on 6th Ave. It was only one block away, but that block was steep and icy and covered with heavy forest.

We decided to drive to the frozen yogurt place instead. It was a no-name Pinkberry imitator, and they weren't doing so well. The place was a mess, with napkins and fruit bits and yogurt residue covering every surface. I was almost to the front of the line when the place totally broke down and became two narrow strips of land running in parallel across the Atlantic Ocean. A neverending train of prehistoric animals, from pink brontosauruses to baby-blue woolly mammoths, trudged along the isthmuses toward their new homes.

I cut a perilous path between all those giant, adorable legs and soon found myself in a small port city somewhere in Spain, full of notable architecture and elevated causeways. At every corner, there was a park with artfully arranged bushes and benches, so that the heads of the people who sat there poked up like rows of cabbage, making out, taking naps, or just taking in the scenery.

brief summaries

I wanted to buy a large inflatable apple from Goodwill, but it wasn't for sale.

I got a job arranging plastic food for a banquet in a model home.

I read a book and realized it was set in my apartment, two years before I moved in.

I found out George Harrison had written a Beatles song about me. It had my name in it, but he spelled it wrong.

I needed a copy editor to work on a book by these twins who own a pizzeria and play dodgeball, but they had all gone to the seashore to take pictures. The copy editors were all fully dressed in tweed and corduroy, and they were getting wet sand all over their sensible shoes.

snakes and authors

One of our authors hired me to reorganize his work space, so I took the train upstate with some of my coworkers to check it out. The place was kind of awful. It was a one-bedroom ground-level railroad. The author slept in the back, then rented out the bedroom during the day to a college student who only went outside after dark.

We all arrived the night before and crowded together to sleep in the bedroom. Then the college kid arrived and tossed all our stuff into the main office. Already the place was a disaster. The author and his employees did most of their work huddled in the kitchen area, piling stacks of paper precariously along the edge of the counter. I suggested moving the main work area over to a large and unused table in the middle of the room. They were skeptical, but decided to humor me.

The author stayed over by the kitchen. He seemed to be cooking. I had been hoping he would be working on the book he owed us. Then random people started trickling in off the street and placing sandwich orders. The author explained how his office doubled as a deli at lunch time to bring in extra cash.

After the lunch rush, we went outside to check out the store front. The front wall of the building appeared to be plastered with stickers from stock racing teams and skateboarding retailers. It was hard to tell what the building was supposed to be.

I was about to explain the importance of easy-to-read signage when my boss came running around the corner screaming. There was a large orange snake wrapped around his neck. The author seemed nonplussed. "We don't have any poisonous snakes around here," he said, and went back inside to make more sandwiches. That didn't console my boss, who continued to scream and run laps around the building.

escaping, cheating, celebritizing

I had to attend an event for work at the President's Club, some sort of exclusive secret society where celebrities come to watch variety shows at the top of a fancy hotel.

We came with Matt Lauer, who was having a hard time getting in. He kept saying, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Matt Lauer!"

The people at the door shrugged. "To be honest," one of them said, "I don't think you're famous enough, Matt." I had to help some people carry in some equipment from the van, but when I got back we were clear for entry, so Matt must have demonstrated enough celebrity credentials, or paid off the bouncers.

Upstairs, the room was packed with famous people, but not the ones you would necessarily expect. I saw Mariah Carey, and George Clooney (actually, he probably is one of the ones you'd expect). I didn't recognize the rest of the people, but I assumed they were famous for things I didn't know about. I haven't been keeping up with People and US Weekly lately.

All that famous in one place kind of freaked me out. It freaked out my coworker, too. We decided to make an early exit, but we were worried people would see us and realize we weren't famous. We knew that would mean big trouble. Unfortunately, the elevators would only come if you had a registered celebrity ID, so we were kind of stuck. We stood by the elevator bank looking around nervously until another celebrity arrived and we were able to slip into the elevator as he got out.

I was so happy when we got out of that place. But then I ran into my friend, who confessed to me that she was cheating on her boyfriend with the guy I'm dating. I couldn't tell if she knew I was dating him, but I acted supportive anyway. "You're just doing what's right for you," I said. In truth, I was really mad at her. Her boyfriend is a great guy, and I couldn't understand why she would ever do that to him. It seemed very out of character for her.

Only later did it occur to me that I should have been mad at her for sleeping with my boyfriend.

adventures, babysitting, swamp

There's this big swamp right by the Hudson River in New York. At one end, there's a dock where people desperately try to get on boats and emigrate to the other side. Jersey, I guess. Things must really be bad in New York. There's also an outdoor bar at one end of the swamp, with tree stumps for chairs and vines all over the place, where I spent hours with two friends from work trying to find something good on the jukebox.

We'd just about given up when we met this guy who writes for an adventure magazine. Their thing is to profile crazy adventurers by taking the whole staff and reliving entire journeys. Every month, the publisher and the writers and the copy editors and the sales team and the intern would all take off for a remote locale, climbing Mount Everest in t-shirts, crossing the Pacific in a dinky little raft. This month they were living in the swamp, which is full of snakes and alligators in the wet bit in the middle. This guy had just walked/swam across, and he looked terrible. We all felt bad for him and bought him drinks.

Later that day I had to babysit these two kids, a little girl and a little boy. I'm not sure where I got them. I had a feeling they were my niece and nephew, but that didn't seem quite right. These kids HATED each other. They were constantly fighting over who was better. The little boy was a lot like the guy who swam across the swamp. The little girl was a lot like me.

A bar is no place for small children, and I had to get back to work anyway. So I took the kids with me to the office. They immediately started to complain to my boss about all the horrible things they had done to each other. The boy pushed the girl into the swamp. The girl gave the boy cooties and played Hootie and the Blowfish on the jukebox. I began to think maybe these terrors belonged to my boss after all. I wanted to lock them in a room with a movie so I could get some peace and quiet. Does that mean I'm going to be a bad parent one day? I did take the girl to the bathroom to wash her hands, holding her over the sink so she could reach and making sure she used enough soap. Who knows what she got on her hands in that swamp?

From my office there's this great view of the swamp, a big green-blue bowl cutting into the landscape. Across the river, a giant sandbar juts out into the water. It looks like Jersey City created it as a parking lot, because it's covered with cars. From here, it doesn't look too hard to just walk across the barely submerged sand. I'd be in New Jersey in no time.