orange

This week's This American Life centred around a rest stop on 87 just a stones throw away from where I lived when I was in New York. First they interviewed some foreign students, one of whom signed up to work there because it was in New York thinking, as most people do, that if it is in New York then it is close to New York City. It's actually not all that far away from NYC, but without a car, you might as well be in Buffalo. In a later segment they interviewed the guy who runs the information office there and the reporter refers to my old home as "the middle of nowhere" but the manager hurls a few gazillion superlatives about the wonderful attractions in the region. As I am listening to this in my head I have no problem at all with the idea that the Hudson Valley is both the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, where you will most likely die of boredom, and at the same time offers a myriad of outdoor recreational activities that could keep you busy for the rest of your life. Most places I have lived are like that, an ever shifting contradiction. The Company itself, where I worked for almost six years in New York, follows this pattern.

Today at work we had a four hour meeting on the redesign of the product that I work on. I am pretty excited about this, as it turns out, because I think it will be an interesting challenge with which I will have a large degree of actual control. I think it will also be a good thing to talk about on future job interviews. Really you don't want to work on anything that is too perfect because then there wouldn't be anything to fix!