Second Wednesday and Thursday

Wednesday:

I had a really lovely evening Wednesday night with a high school friend visiting NYC with a couple of her law school buddies. We haven't seen each other in five or six years, but it was like we hadn't missed a day. Well, except for all the catching up and stuff.

Being far more cultured than I, she took me to see a spoken word performance hosted by writer Jonathan Ames. The show consisted of six medium-wigs telling stories, and the theme was the news. So we had:

- the host, Ames, who told 2 stories, one about smoking weed on a Caribbean island somewhere on assignment and another about taking his father to see a porn shoot (apparently, after coming out of the studio, his father called his mother, and the first thing he said was, "It was very dark in there, I almost tripped!");
- the author of The Orientalist, who was a very longwinded and boring storyteller;
- a TV news producer and only woman, who spoke about being in Rome when 9/11 happened;
- a TV news anchor, who told stories about when he thought he'd made career-ending mistakes: once, when he was reporting a story about the "credit card crunch," he mistakenly said "and now a story about the credit c*nt crunch" -- ON THE AIR!; another time, he nearly missed the press plane when he was a White House correspondent and had to run after it on the runway;
- another TV news producer, an elderly man who talked about the day JFK was shot (and ended with the great line, "You shut up -- I was there"); and
- Moby, the musician, who told 2 stories about gossip and news.

I'm rather surprised I remember the details of all the stories as well as I do. But that's what I remember -- stories. The facts of the case, not the legal theory. The fun stuff. The lives that people live.

What story would you tell, if you had 10 minutes to tell a story to an audience?

Thursday:

Went to a firm function -- bowling night -- tonight, with the kids. Oof. Five years too late for these things. I drank, I bowled a 7 and a strike, I talked, I looked for the cute associate I worked with yesterday who called today to thank me for my work and asked if I was going to this thing tonight (he didn't show up, though, bastard), I left with a Chinese girl and we looked unsuccessfully in DSW for shoes, and then I sat on the Columbia Univ. campus for a while and talked to Fearless T and Double M.

Big things are afoot in the lives of the people I know -- births, deaths, graduations, new jobs, new cities. Life seems to be on fast forward these days, like that time-lapse credit card commercial where you see the young couple use a series of credit cards from the same company as they graduate, move into their house, have kids, have grand kids. It's almost too much sometimes. It's too easy to constantly be doing things, and never contemplate them.

What story will I tell, at the end of this life? What story do I want to tell?