Signal Interruptions

It has been quite some time and a happy, New Year to all.

The usual excuses will arise for being incognito for a nice chunk of time. The main one of having no time remains true. It's been a very chaotic couple of months with school schedules, work insanity and other factors keeping me from expressing myself. I will vehemently state that this hiatus has been very difficult for me. I need to write and get my thoughts out. When I do not have that vehicle to express my frustrations or pondering, it takes a toll on me emotionally and mentally. One friend mentioned that things that probably would not bother me normally seem to be getting to me lately. The fact that it's been raised by this person a number of times doesn't go unnoticed, trust me.

I decided to take a bit of control in diminishing my anger by staying home today. It's quiet and there are fewer interruptions so it's an easy fix to maintain my sanity when the office environment is less than ideal.

When I thought I could make lots of work progress, I was thrown the monkey wrench of having internet outages. As I worked on a task, midway through the internet connect would drop and I would have to wait until it came back up. This happened all morning long. I called the internet provider company and they said it was an issue in the area. (Uh, yes, it is an issue in the area. Hello? That's why I am calling. Can you tell me when it will end?) Instead of flipping a gasket, I decided I'd work on a blog entry! YAY!

It's easier to get back your concentration when you are working on something you really want to do than on something where you are still scratching your head. Lo and behold, here I am. Venting and being creative in my one special place. :)

Let's hope that the interruptions in signal will cease and that I can make some headway. If not, I'll have accomplished a long forgotten task of posting a blog entry.

The Big Rat

On any given day if you walk around NYC, you are bound to see a big rat standing in front of some building. I am not talking about an enormous live rat but an inflatable one. It’s always a disturbing site for a number of reasons:

1)      It’s a big frigging rat

2)      It signifies that someone in the building or a company in the building does things in a dirty way or conducts things in an underhanded way

Neither of these reasons gives me warm or fuzzy feelings.

As a New Yorker, rats don’t phase me too much. I watch them in the subway tracks and observe where they go. This year I’ve been ‘greeted’ more than ever on my morning walks to the train by at least two that scurry along any of the blocks I walk on (we happen to have a serious problem on our hands this year since we didn’t have a cold winter) Yes, they are gross but as long as I have protective shoes (hence, not any open toe shoes or flip flops), I’m ok.

But this inflatable rat is bothersome because it really taps into so many people’s fears. It’s an enormous rat with beady red eyes – even if rats don’t ‘bother’ me, this is disgusting. And to think that I see one of these on a pretty consistent basis makes me wonder about the conditions that people are working in. In this day and age, you’d think people would treat each other with more respect but it seems to be getting worse. Just as the real rat population is growing, it seems the human rat population continues to get worse as well.