magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

I'm doing all the right things to fight this cold, but it seems determined to run its week plus course anyway. Of course that's probably because I'm doing all the wrong things too and achieving no net gain.

On the plus side: sleeping in, drinking lots of glasses of hot water and fizzy vitamin C, eating soup. On the minus side: drinking, ice skating, wandering around town in the cold.

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I slept late. Got a coffee. And headed up to Rockefeller Center to take one last daytime look at Democracy Plaza before going into the office.

The Making Your Vote Count exhibit had been completely taken down. All the broadcast risers were gone. The WNBC booth had been torn down. Some of the signage was being dismantled. This is what the last two months of my life amounts to. A small surplus in the bank (to be used when I find a new apartment). And in installation on the scale of three city blocks, being packed up or thrown out.

This is not a complaint. Just a reflection. This next bit is a complaint.

I ran into Charlie at the plaza. He's a freelance graphic designer that PDG called in the week that John.S wasn't around to help with the project. This was the first time that he had seen it since it was being put up. We stopped to talk, and while talking I saw Claire, in her green coat, standing out from the masses in their typical New York black. She was showing the plaza to someone, friends or family it seemed, on her lunch break.

I wanted to extricate myself from the conversation that I was in in order to catch her eye, and say hello, but thought that would be rude to Charlie, and that maybe I'd be able to catch sight of her again. But I didn't.

So the office. And an errand, running around town looking for Apple-branded DVD-Rs for a couple of hours.

And back to the plaza for ice skating, while the rest of the project came down around us. I hadn't been on ice skates since I was about five or six years old and had gone one winter up to the rink at Hotchkiss School. But I have good balance, and picked it up pretty quickly and had a good time, but for the fact that of the PDG group who where there I was the only one without a date. That, and falling on my last time around the ice, banging up my knee, and being laughed at by a group of little kids.

Cybèle, as it happens, did make it into the city today, and she and Chris met up with me at the plaza, and three three of us went out for Japanese noodle soup with Caitlin from work and her boyfriend Alex.

Then back to Brooklyn. Conversation at my house, then Kings County (with drinks). And eventually home to bed.