Shannon made a doll for me for Christmas. It's fantastic.
This makes all the gifts I'm giving people seem like flaming bags of feces. It's annoying to have friends who are so talented, but damn it if it isn't great when they give you nice things!
Update: What if, say, you wanted to just see a quick shot of it instead of going to Flickr? Maybe you could have that if you wanted. Maybe indeed.
TWU has given everyone in NYC a nice Christmas gift: a big, fat strike. Here we are, the whole city paralyzed by these jerks, and then I start seeing TWU commercials saying things like, "we're TWU, we're New York," and "now they want to cut my pension and benefits." Maybe the TWU should spend less time making commercials with false statements in them and more time figuring out a deal. Roger Toussaint, who I can't stand anyway, called for a stike the week before Christmas and I don't care what the situation is, this is clearly an attempt to extort the people and city of New York into giving them whatever they want.
I understand their frustration with the MTA. The MTA is probably one of the most corrupt government organizations in the world—they've stolen money, lied, broken the law, screwed over employees and riders, the list goes on—but that doesn't give the TWU an excuse to use the people of the city against the MTA. Transit workers work for us, and they're hurting us with this strike. It's unacceptable.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just strike? What if you just decided this year you wanted a 10% raise and you weren't going to accept anything less (regardless of how much money your company had)? You might as well strike—your boss can't fire you anyway, what do you have to lose? Unions piss me off.
It would be one thing if the transit workers here in NYC did a good job when they had a contract, but they don't. The transit system here is slow, dirty, and inefficient. The workers are rude, lazy, dumb (or a combination) and clearly don't care about their jobs or our safety. Why would they expect me to be on their side when they don't do a good job normally, and now they're striking because they aren't getting exactly what they want?
When Bush said "internets" in the second presidential debate back in October of 2004, it was instantly clear that people would be making jokes about it the next day. But I didn't think I'd still be hearing people saying it. I am. And I want it to stop.
It's been over a year, it wasn't all that funny to begin with, and you all jumped the shark about eleven and a half months ago.
Update: Since I've received plenty of angry emails about it, I guess my subtle joke of using another annoying expression to complain about an annoying expression didn't come through. It's not you, it's me.
Oscar has been sick since November. It started with what they thought was a UTI—he was going into the litter box every five minutes, scratching and going generally crazy, like he always had to urinate but couldn't—and after a week of anti-biotics, he wasn't any better. We took him back to the vet and they took x-rays—no stones—and concluded he must have Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease, or FLUTD as they call it, and that there was no cure. FLUTD makes him feel like he's gotta go when he doesn't, and, in general, makes him pretty damned unhappy. We gave him some antispasmodic drugs to lower the urge and after a week or so we had to leave for Japan so we took him to my mom's house so she could watch him while we were away. We felt really awful, but we figured he'd be better there than alone at home (with only people coming to feed them once every other day).
Luckily, he seemed to improve over the two weeks at my mom's house. When we got back from Japan he seemed to be back to normal and when we took him home he was running around and eating and acting like a regular cat. Then, a few days later, he started going into the box every five minutes again. We called the vet, took him in again to check for a blockage (that's the biggest threat of FLUTD—if they get blocked they can die), got more antispasmodics and were told to hope for the best. Things did not improve.
At the end of last week he started crying a lot. One night he wailed all night. Wailed like a dog. A dying dog. He was in the litter box for thirty minutes at a time, crying and scratching, and the rest of the time he was sitting like a pigeon on the corner of the bed, his pupils fully dilated, looking very unhappy. I took him back in to the vet and they checked him for a blockage again (none) and gave him fluids and a steroid shot and then noticed that he had crystals in his urine. They think he might have had them all along, they were just too small to register before but they're getting bigger and they're making it painful to urinate (hence the wailing). So then, surgery was required.
He had surgery on Monday afternoon. It took about an hour and the doctor said they cleaned his bladder out until he was "finally urinating crystal clear." Apparently his bladder was really inflamed. They started giving him fluids and kept him overnight and I picked him up yesterday after work. I was expecting to see a sad, mad little guy in the carrier but when they brought him out he was rolling around inside. When I started talking to him and sticking my fingers in he started petting himself against me hard, purring almost instantly. He was going crazy in there. It looked like he was actually happy for the first time in two months.
When we got home I gave him some of his new special food and he ate like I've never seen him eat before. He just kept eating and eating and eating. When he was finally done (or at least couldn't fit anymore in), he rolled around on the ground and stretched and cleaned and did all the things he hasn't done since what feels like forever.
He seems better. Finally. Hopefully things will continue to improve.
Before we left Tokyo, we took a day-trip to Nikko, which is about 2 hours north by train. A small mountain town, Nikko is crammed with shrines (and features a waterfall and lake which we didn't get a chance to visit). In the near-winter weather, Nikko was crisp but not too cold—being in the woods in the mountains was a nice change of pace from Tokyo for the day.
After walking around all day, we ate dinner in the town before heading back to Tokyo. It was a little too overcast and dark up in the woods, so I didn't take a lot of pictures, but you can find 30 of them in my Nikko set on Flickr.
We had so much fun in Tokyo—we didn't want to leave. The city is so immense, so huge and so busy, but so clean and so safe... it's hard to wrap your mind around as a New Yorker.
There was no garbage on the street in the city and yet there were no garbage cans. We would walk around carrying little bits of garbage for hours sometimes, keeping a lookout for a trash can but they were few and far between. It's sort of like the chicken and the egg—which comes first, no garbage cans or no garbage? Truthfully, I think it's a little of both. People don't eat on the street in Japan, and that helps a lot. Aside from that, they're a much more socially conscious people and I think they're genuinely interested in keeping their city safe and clean.
People smoke like chimneys in Japan, and yet there were nearly no cigarette butts on the street. They smoke in public, but not on the sidewalk in most places as it's frowned upon. There are "smoking stations" every few blocks, which consist of two or three large ashtrays to collect ash and butts. People will stop, smoke a cigarette, dispose of their butt and then continue on. We saw a few people carrying personal ashtrays where they could ash into a little case and then put it in their pocket. Compare this to New York where there are no fewer than four million cigarette butts per square meter. Also note that I saw no gum on the street. Compare this again to New York where there are no fewer than 500 blackened gum spots on every square of sidewalk. It's hard to fathom. The city is huge—over 2,000 square kilometers and over 12 million people—and yet it's clean and safe. If they can do it, why can't we?
Tokyo Metro (their subway system) is beyond efficient. A few simple things the NYC subway system could learn from TM:
Number every station. For instance—each line in Tokyo is given a letter and each station a number. The numbers go in order from the "start" of the line to the "end." We were staying just off the Akasaka-Mitsuke station on the Marunouchi Line, which is station M13 (it's also on the Ginza line as G05). To go from our station to, say, Tokyo station (M17), we just had to look for the train heading "up" on the line. Simple. Even if they didn't provide English names for the stops (which they do) or have all recordings playing in both Japanese and English (which they do), you could easily find your way around.
You don't need computer-operated trains to run an efficient service. All of the trains in Tokyo were being operated by human drivers. MTA claims service can't get better until computers are driving, but I think that's nuts. Frankly, it scares me. The last thing I need is a single-conductor train with a computer at the wheel. In Japan, all trains (that we saw) at two conductors and someone standing on the platform during busy times to make sure everyone got on and off safely. MTA wants to cut down the amount of people, I think Tokyo's got it the better way.
Announcements in spanish. Japan has announcements in Japanese and English because those are the two primary languages there. NYC should have announcements in English and Spanish for the same reason. NYC has over 2.2 million hispanic residents and spanish announcements would be helpful to a lot of people.
We took the subway a lot and we also used our JR passes to travel between the airport, Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, as well as to our day trips to Nikko and Nara. Japan's rail system is fast and efficient, and taking the shinkansen was easy and smooth. It's remarkable the first time a bullet train zooms past a station—it scared the hell out of Katia. In case you're traveling to Japan in the future, you buy your JR pass before you enter the country and pick it up once inside. It's significantly cheaper and allows unlimited travel on all the ordinary trains. It was well worth the money.
I'm uploading 92 photos from Tokyo, you can see them in my Tokyo set on Flickr.
We're home now. The trip back was long—we started at 8AM on Saturday morning in Japan and took two trains (about 4 hours combined) and a 12 hour flight, ending up in NYC at 4PM EST—but we got plenty of sleep on the plane so hopefully the jet-lag will be minimal. We'll see how things go.
I have a lot of stuff to write about and about 600 photos to upload once I go through all of them (there are 1222 in total from the whole trip). Not having reliable internet access in Japan was a bummer at first, but in the long-run I'm actually kind of glad because it was one less thing to worry about and allowed me to just enjoy the vacation and not worry about uploading to Flickr or writing here. The next post will be about Tokyo.
