7:00am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.

7:07am Alarm goes off again.  Groan, didn’t sleep well again last night.  Get out of bed and switch on the coffee maker.  Get myself cleaned and dressed.  Eat my breakfast of oatmeal and oj while flipping through Time Out NY.

8:00am  Video Skype with you-know-who while drinking my coffee and complaining about how tired I am.

8:30am Take the train to work, remembering to bring the Christmas package with me.   Somehow I have great train karma and even get a seat.  Begin transcript read-through number three.

9:00am  Arrive at work.  My research assistant calls in sick again, and my other two coworkers are out, so I have the office to myself.  Yippee!  I go to the post office website and attempt to print out the postage and customs forms for my package, but then notice in the fine print that they don’t allow you to drop international packages in the slot and I’ll have to stand in line to hand it to someone.  I give up on trying to find an easy way out, and walk over to the post office.

9:50am  Get a little lip when I ask a question from a postal worker, but maybe it’s because I rolled my eyes when he told me I was using the wrong packaging.  I always seem to forget what a pain in the ass it is to send an package internationally.  But, I stand in line and mail it off.  It should arrive in Germany in 10 days, they say.

10:30am Work work work.

3:20pm   Leave for an event about the collaboration of the criminal justice system in New York City around sexual assault.  There is a panel made up of members of each of the city’s task forces on sexual assault (one per borough).  These task forces bring together voices from the District Attorney’s offices, the NYPD, the hospitals and the rape crisis counselors, in order to talk about the best way to integrate services and serve survivors better.  The purpose of the event is to try to determine how to measure the success of these task forces.  As someone who does program evaluation as a living, it’s easy to notice how vague everyone is about what the goals of the task forces are, even though everyone is extremely interested in measuring their success.  And of course, those goals weren’t really clarified at all during the event.  But that is the kind of challenge I love — getting people to the place where they can figure out why they really do what the do, so that then you can start to figure out whether you’re making an impact.  I talked to the coordinator of the event after it was over, and shared some of my thoughts with her and maybe we can figure something out.

5:15pm  Leave the event for my German class.  As I arrive at the train platform, it is filled with people.  The local train evidently hasn’t come in a long time.  I keep hearing over the loud speakers “Police to platform. Police Police to platform. Police.”  Hmm.  After a long time, a local train pulls up, the crowds move forward towards the closed doors, which take several minutes to open.  Instantaneously, the empty train is now completely full.  I rush for a seat.  We sit.  An announcement, “The next stop on this local train will be 42nd Street.”  Almost everyone gets off the train, because of course, the whole purpose of taking the local is so you can go local, not 50+ blocks in one fell swoop.  Then the train stands there some more, and finally “Everyone get off the train.”  The train empties out and leaves the station.  Meanwhile, more and more people are building on the platform.  Another local train arrives, but it does not stop.  And then finally, we are let on board the next train and it is instantly filled to capacity.  I grab a sit again and feel lucky as everyone else crowds on and stands.  The man standing in front of me has his fly unzipped.  I try not to look, but it’s directly in front of me and at eye-level.  I am forced to close my eyes until we reach my stop.

5:55pm  Grab a bagel and an apple from Au Bon Pain before class.

6:00pm  Class starts.  As usual,  we spend way more time in conversation than we do going through the lesson in the book.   Sometimes that is great, but sometimes it leaves me feeling like I haven’t learned key grammar points that are going to come up in my next classes.  Today is the last class of the course, and the last class of the “beginner’s” courses.  In January, I will start my first intermediate course — woohoo!

8 :30pm  Head home, and develop a terrible headache on the train.

9:15pm   Arrive home, head throbbing and exhausted.  Ignore the dishes.  Wash up and go straight to bed.