Stephen Mejias

I gotta tell ya, hon':

When the morning sun shines through my white curtains like it did today, there's nothing more I'd rather do than just sit down and feel it and listen to music and think of things. Things. I think I'd listen to Joanna Newsom followed by Bill Callahan followed by Richard Buckner followed by Iron & Wine followed by I don't know what else and it'd all be good.

I think I'd smile and think about good things. I was thinking about how my mom recently purchased a new enormous flat-screen television to replace the other new enormous flat-screen television in her living room, and she tried to explain herself: "I just love it. Look at the colors. Maybe I'm crazy," she said. But she's not crazy, and there's no need for her to explain herself, and the idea that she should is kind of a shame because why should she have to explain the things she loves and why would anyone call her crazy for loving something?

And have you heard Joanna Newsom playing "The Book of Right-On"? And have you heard it through my stereo? You haven't really heard it at all if you haven't heard it in my apartment when the morning sun is shining through my white curtains. You really haven't. I gotta tell ya.

It would've been nice to stay home today and just listen to things. Especially because a few of us here on the 5th and 6th floors of 261 Madison Avenue are experiencing network problems, and I'm one of those few people, which means I can't do a lot of the work I was hoping to do today.

Please know we are working as quickly as possible to resolve the issue. We had hoped to have this fixed a half hour ago but it's looking like it will take 30 to 45 more minutes. Please stand by. We recognize and apologize for the great inconvenience this is.

Isn't that a nice message? This person said "please" not once but twice, she assured us that she cares about the situation and is urgently working to resolve it, and she even expressed sympathy for how much it might mean to us. What more could a person ask for? I am totally not being sarcastic. I want to hug the person who sent it. I gotta say, for an IT person, she seems radically human. But, this message was sent about two hours ago. I put in the ticket this morning. As I type, it's approaching 3pm. It doesn't bother me too much, really. I've got a lot of other stuff to do—proofreading some wonderful equipment reports and other things. And, for obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot about CES lately. I went back and dug up my first-ever CES report. Gosh, I sound young and excitable, don't I?

I like it.

Because I've been reading Cormac McCarthy, I've been thinking about how it seems the world is becoming increasingly violent. And I'm not just thinking about the violence in the streets and in the homes and in the schools, though that's there too, but I'm mostly thinking about the violence of man against this world. You see it in the big cities and you see it in the little islands. For instance, here in Manhattan—at once a big city and a little island—I can't walk two blocks without having to dodge construction crews and weave under and around all sorts of scaffolding and machinery. What are they building? Where do they think that skyscraper's going to go? My beautiful friend Jaime says that the new building over there by Bryant Park is going to be the "greenest" building in the entire city.

"Well," I told her, "it would've been a whole lot greener if they didn't build it at all."

"When did you become so cynical?" she wanted to know. Well, I want to know, too.

I was sitting in the cold back seat of Roo, feeling a little drunk and loose and open, I suppose, when I tried to explain the tendency of some audiophiles to argue about things like double-blind testing and their desire to prove that their ways of constructing a system and listening to music are the only ways of constructing a system and listening to music in light of this idea that the world is becoming an increasingly violent place with humans' tendency to build and build and build until there is nothing left to build upon. It's all connected, you see, like the physics of complex systems, but I wasn't making any sense and I dropped it. I don't think the guys understood what I was getting on about, but it doesn't matter. Back at the bar, a girl was choreographing a funny dance, and a man with no body sat on his head in the shadows of the jukebox.

This is true.

As I'm sure you all know, this is still not resolved. I have no further update other than they are working on it. Thanks.

Hmm. A little less nice. But can you imagine being the VP of Information Technology on a day like this when everything's broken? I bet she's getting skewered. And now it's about a quarter to four and Joanna Newsom is singing:

There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road
There are some dragons who were built to have and hold
And some machines are dropped from great heights lovingly
And some great bellies ache with many bumblebees
And they sting so terribly

I really don't know what she's getting on about, but it doesn't matter. I have an idea it's something good. And at least it's Friday.

I can't say we are completely out of the woods, but I am hearing reports that the network has stabilized and people are able to access their network drives again. Please give it a try.

Again I sincerely appreciate the hardship this prolonged outage has caused. We apologize for how it has affected your workday.

Thank you for your patience.