From commercials:

- Earning your bachelor’s degree online can take as little as three years.
- Get your degree in video game design or film production!
- Calling [insert online college name here] will put you on the path to SUCCESS!
- Call now!
- CALL NOW!!!
- CALL NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From the TV show Cheaters:

- If you really want answers for why your partner is cheating on you, leave the camera crew at home.
- No one really minds being “the other man/woman.” They will say things like “she should have seen the writing on the wall,” and “he hasn’t loved her for months now.”
- When confronting your cheating boy or girlfriend, it is unlikely that the television host’s comments will contribute anything useful to the conversation. Leave him at home with the camera crew.
- Cops comes on right after Cheaters, so if you’re not careful, you could end up watching the first few minutes of Cops by accident. Beware.

Other Miscellanea: 

- Battlestar Galactica is awesome.

So what have I been up to, anyway? A lot of things, I guess. Allow me to enumerate.

1. Work. It’s a fact. I’ve been working. Same job at the hedge fund. It’s good, but my departure from said job is imminent. See #2.

2. Getting into grad school. Also a fact. After several weeks of compulsive email checking and checking those cursed forums on The Grad Cafe, the letter finally came. This fall, I will be enrolling in the Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Chicago. I’m pretty excited about this.

3. Watching bad, bad movies. Jon-the-Roommate convinced us to go see National Treasure: Book of Assclownery one fateful Friday night, and I still haven’t forgiven him. In retribution, I (somehow) convinced him to pay real, legal tender to see 27 Dresses the next week. As we sat watching ”The Twenty” before the movie, group after group of single women filed into the theatre, and Jon knew what he was in for. I laughed and laughed. Even though I had to sit through this god-awful chick flick too, knowing I had suckered Jon into coming along somehow made it worth my troubles. But man, was that movie terrible.

And then there are the movies I’ve watched at home. A sampling:

Employee of the Month . This is that movie where Jessica Simpson or whatever her name is inexplicably does it with whoever is crowned “Employee of the Month” at the local Wal-Mart. Lucky for us viewers, that employee happens to be the hunky Dane Cook, not one of those old-ass greeter dudes at the front door. As you might imagine, the whole situation gets pretty crazy, and at some point it almost looks like he might possibly not get the girl. Then he gets her anyway.

Although this movie sucked, I found myself “lol-ing” now and again, in spite of Jon’s scornful glances.

Wild Hogs. Okay, we only watched the second half, but man… seriously? Did we really watch this? I guess John Travolta wanted to… diversify his roles, but his overacting as the high-strung jobless dude is just embarrassing. Tim Allen is much better, and that’s sayin’ something. Because he was bad, too.

Meatballs. This movie is actually pretty awesome. This may be Bill Murray’s first “Bill Murray Inspirational Speech,” too (“It just doesn’t matter!”). And the rag-tag summer camp versus rich kid camp competition at the end is a classic matchup. All this movie lacks is Corey Feldman. For that, you need to watch Meatballs 4.

Beerfest. Another pretty awesome movie. Inspiring, even. Just thinking about this movie makes me too stupid to write anything witty or even sensible, but that’s the joy in it. Want stupid fun? See Beerfest.

In the Good Movie Department, we also saw The Bank Job this weekend. They say it’s “based on a true story,” but as far as I’m concerned, that probably means that there was really a bank, and someone once had a job. I don’t much care about the authenticity of the plot, though. It was just a good crime story. And I like me a good crime story.

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I have also been corresponding with a friend who is looking for a job, which has resulted in many links offering resume and cover letter help.

All of this points to one sad fact: Google thinks I am an unemployed cat lady.

Yesterday I spent several hours pulling hundreds of addresses out of a database, cleaning up the data for a batch geocoder, plotting these points on a map, then checking the mean distances of these points with another set of points I had already derived.

Thanks to all of this work, I can now tell you what proportion of our employees live within 1 mile of an Equinox Fitness Club.

See? Complex problem solving, multiple layers of analysis, less-than-riveting questions.

The thing is, I don’t particularly mind this. First, there is a difference between dull and unimportant.  The work I do has very real implications, and I know this.  But more importantly, the bulk of my time is not spent pondering the dullness of the question; it is spent finding answers. And as dull as many of these questions might seem compared to the Grand Questions of the World, they are never easy. The company dress code might be lax, the rhetoric might be hip and fun, but the methodology is muthafuckin’ rigorous. There will be no slacking. Guessing is okay, but only if it’s the “best unbiased estimate” you can muster. When it comes to data analysis, they mean business.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that made its fortunes building hypercomplex algorithms to beat the stock markets would be so quantitatively driven in other ways. What’s surprising is the degree to which this ethos permeates everything that happens there. Even the company’s interior aesthetic, as designed by architect Steven Holl, emphasizes the presence of order in what looks to be random. Over a staircase on my floor hangs a 9-foot-tall tapestry depicting pi to the nth decimal place. You cannot walk to the coffee maker and back without seeing something to remind you that there truly is order in the universe.

Astronomers look for this order in the stars. Geneticists find it in chromosomes. I search for it in the average employee’s mean proximity to high end health clubs. So what?

Option 1: The “Hang In There!” Kitty

Option 2: Dogs Playing Poker

Tough call, right?

Most people who live in New York—the ones I know, anyway—loathe Midtown. We scoff at its overpriced, gimmicky eateries and grumble at the impenetrable crowds of tourists clogging the sidewalks. With proper motivation—a new exhibit at MoMa, or some fancy new restaurant, for instance—we might bite the bullet and brave the crowds, but for the most part, Midtown is something to be avoided. Midtown, we scoff, isn’t the “real” New York.

I have to admit that, after moving to New York, it did not take long for me to adopt this attitude. But in all fairness, it’s not exactly the kind of neighborhood you go to for… anything. Not the stuff of daily life, anyway. If you’re looking for an Everybody Loves Raymond coffee mug, Midtown is the place to be. Otherwise, you’re usually better off finding your goods and services elsewhere.

But this particular morning, as I sat in a conference room in the 30-somethingeth floor of this office building looking out over Times Square and the oversized advertisements for Broadway shows like Rent and Beauty and the Beast (last show July 29th!), I remembered what it was like to visit New York for the first time. I remembered how exciting it was to walk down Broadway, marveling at the gigantic ads and news tickers. For a minute, anyway, all my distaste for the neighborhood melted away and I actually got kind of nostalgic.

I first visited New York when I was 17, in August of 1994. The trip was a year-early graduation present from my uncle Brad. We stayed in Midtown and managed to do all the things a tourist is expected to do in our four day trip: World Trade Center, Times Square, Wall Street, a Broadway musical (Grease!), shopping in SoHo, and of course, the Statue of Liberty. We even managed to take a quick detour off Broadway to CBGB’s, which we found surprisingly lifeless and dumpy at noon on a weekday. (It was not until my next trip that I would discover that it was pretty much always dumpy, even when not lifeless.) We never strayed far off the first-time NYC tourist’s to-do list, but it didn’t matter.

On that trip, Midtown was New York to me, and it delivered all the glitz and excitement and bustle that I had imagined. As I sat in that office looking down at it all, it occurred to me that when I first fell in love with New York, I was falling in love with Midtown. In subsequent vacations and over my years living here, I have fallen in and out of love with many neighborhoods, and I’m always finding new reasons to love (and hate) them. But Midtown was where it started.

That morning, in the office of one of those big financial companies that are the reason so many of us dislike the area (the irony is not lost on me), a hint of that wonder and excitement came back to me. It was a nice reminder.