{"id":5181,"date":"2015-12-28T21:45:58","date_gmt":"2015-12-29T02:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=5181"},"modified":"2021-12-27T23:31:11","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T03:31:11","slug":"seasonal-brain-wash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2015\/12\/28\/seasonal-brain-wash.html","title":{"rendered":"Seasonal Brain Wash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI cannot formulate a coherent stream of thought this day. Things\u00a0started out early and positively energized as I went down to Union Square area to see the first of the new Link devices which its makers promise will replace thousands of NYC payphones and rake in tons of cash money.<\/p>\n

By the time I got there the device had been shrouded in a giant bag, looking like a very tall twin-size mattress. No big deal for me but I couldn\u2019t really write anything about it that has not been picked up by other sources. I went ahead and tried anyway<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Heading uptown to the 181 I got unwittingly trapped in the belly of the midtown holiday hell hole beast. I stupidly thought the crowds at Rockefeller Center would dissipate after Christmas.\u00a0I do not think I have ever seen the Concourse so apocalyptically crowded. There was even a very lengthy line of men waiting to use the restroom. It\u2019s unfair how this happens but typically it is only women\u2019s public restrooms where such long lines form.<\/p>\n

I thought I would use my midtown smarts and hit the public space in the Onassis Cultural Center across from St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral but the freakin\u2019 bathroom was out of order due to flooding \u2013 or so the signage said. Signs are powerful messengers but I suspect many of them serve as a form of crowd control or social engineering.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case my next bet was the Trump Tower, where I encountered the more typical scenario of a lengthy line of women waiting to pee while a parade of men sauntered in and out of the sparsely populated restroom for our efficiently-peeing\u00a0gender. The men were peppered with comments from some of the women who muttered \u201cOh, men.\u201d This two-word bit of sarcasm came after the women realized that the person cutting in line was not actually getting in front of them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is a stupid scenario that seems fixable either by sensibly building more facilities for women or else implementing some kind of crowd control that would allow women to use the men\u2019s room in an organized way that prevents the unthinkable<\/em><\/strong> situation of peeing next to a member of the opposite sex. Something like a traffic cop for the bathrooms.<\/p>\n

One strange incident involved an older woman who appeared to be butting ahead in the line for the women\u2019s room. Other women she passed made comments to the effect that she should go to the end of the line. She responded that she was not looking for the bathroom but for the payphone. One of the other women responded \u201cIs there even such a thing as a payphone anymore?\u201d Her comment drew laughter from the tightly-packed gathering of strangers united in the need to pee. I chuckled, too, but offered no comment.<\/p>\n

There is one lone payphone in the Trump Tower basement<\/a><\/strong> but it has not worked for years. It is one of countless payphones abandoned by Verizon, left to rot its way to eyesore status.<\/p>\n

I think the woman\u2019s claim that she was looking for the payphone was just a ruse to get ahead in the line. As I exited I saw her standing just ahead of the payphone, having blended in with the line after only appearing to actually use the non-working phone.<\/p>\n

The irritability and claustrophobia caused by my presence in this midtown melee turned to seasonal depression, as the clouds took away the sun and the skies returned to the gloominess that has characterized most of the last week. I waited for a bus that never came, realized I could have tried the bathroom at UniQlo on 5th<\/sup> Avenue, found nothing at the 181, and all-in-all felt I had wasted an afternoon that could have been better spent managing the web server transition. All these routine annoyances were made to feel all the more disastrous by the washing away with sadness of any positive energy.<\/p>\n

I am moving all my web sites to a server in Canada, leaving behind the hosting company I have been with for over 20 years, as well as another company I\u2019d been with for about 2 years. The former company is one that I can hardly believe still exists, as the data center seems like it is held together with coat hangers and fishing line. The latter company is perfectly reputable but things change fast in this realm, and the deal I thought I was getting with them turns out to be pretty lame compared to others. For about $50 less a month I\u2019ll get about triple hard drive storage space and 3-4 times the RAM, along with DDoS attack protection, RAID redundancy, a very large backup disk, and who knows what other tricks and trifles. The server is so fast it\u2019s kinda scary, but at the moment I\u2019m experiencing more DNS propagation issues than I expected. The importance of giving DNS enough time to advertise new IP addresses is one of those things I always underestimate.<\/p>\n

As I force myself to type these words I feel my mental energies coming back to clarity, endorphins dancing over the abyss. The strange thing about these waves of seasonal despair is how clearly I hear myself being alive. Crinkling of cartilage, internal bodily tic, swallowing of coffee \u2013 my mind amplifies these sensations and sounds as silence surrounds\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

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