Zip It
Leasing a car:
– Lease, Honda Civic: $225
– Auto Insurance: $265
– Garage: $280
– Gas: $100
Monthly Total: $870
Zipcar:
– 4 x all day Saturday & Sunday: $680
– 8 x 3 hours weekday: $190
Monthly Total: $870
Contingencies
Everything, apparently, hinges on everything else. Which is how a handful of minor delays and small problems can cascade their way to a slew of disasters that consume months with non-stop firefighting.
Or, at least, that’s how things have been going here of late. Fortunately, looks like all the flames are nearly extinguished, and I’m still holding my breath. Here’s hoping I end this all no worse scathed than thickly covered with soot.
Back to it.
Update!
As hoped, I survived this latest stretch of standard startup-wrangling disaster with company, sanity and personal relationships all fortunately and firmly in tact. Regular blogging now to continue apace.
Ode
Jess: I read your post for yesterday.
Me: And?
Jess: [Shrugs]
Me: I know. I’m having trouble coming up with good topics to write about.
Jess: You should probably just write all your posts about how beautiful I am.
Far Flung Foodie
A month or two back, walking with Jess through Central Park, we passed through Time Warner Center on our way back home. And as we needed to buy a few ingredients for dinner, we headed downstairs to Whole Foods.
A mere eight blocks from our apartment, that Whole Foods had still, previously, seemed needlessly far to go for groceries. But, perusing produce and inspecting butchery, it became clear that Whole Foods’ foods were indeed wholly better, quite possibly worth the trip.
So, since then, we’ve been buying food there. But not all our food, and not our non-food items. Because, for many basics, the price difference for the same thing at any of our more local supermarkets seems too offensively large for me to stomach. And also because, for countless other items, such as plastic cups or Coke, the only available Whole Foods versions appear to be made entirely of hemp.
Of course, as soon as you diverge from the American supermarket model, from the idea that the best way to buy food is to have it all collected in one central place, you instead begin sliding down the slippery slope of preferring quality, and of consequently convincing yourself that shopping three different places for a meal isn’t any crazier than two, which isn’t so much saner than four, then five, etc.
Pretty soon, aided and abetted by the (aside from this weekend) warming weather and your central location, you find yourself, Sunday afternoon, not only at Whole Foods but also the Food Emporium and Amish Market and Duane Reade and that place with the good cookies on Ninth Avenue and the mochi ice cream you can pick up the next afternoon at the place near your office and also don’t forget to stop at the Stiles Farmer’s Market while it’s open because they have such great local produce for so cheap.
And the worst part is, it self-reinforces. Because, after all that walking around, you’re so completely starved that the foods you’ve assembled from across the City taste like – whether or not they really, actually are – the best you’ve ever eaten.
Discombobulated Days
“In times of stress, be bold and valiant.”
– Horace
“The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.”
– Elbert Hubbard
Tele-tard
As previously extensively blogged about, I wasn’t really a television watcher before I met Jess. When she moved in, however, for the first time I had cable installed in my (or, rather, our) apartment.
Jess watches relatively little TV. And, when she does, it’s mainly as relaxing background noise while multi-tasking: replying to emails, paging through magazines relevant to her job in the world of fashion design.
I, however, am far less able to healthily cope. Sitting at our desk, with my back to the screen, I find myself frequently swiveling around to catch more of what Heidi, say, might be saying to Spencer on the latest episode of The Hills. I even watch the commercials. And then I try to discuss them with Jess, who, having built more effective defenses against the tube, stares at me blankly, having completely ignored such unwanted interstitial content.
I don’t know if I’ll develop similar immunity with practice, or if I’m simply congenitally unable to sit in a room with television playing and not pay attention.
Either way, though, at least for the time being, if anyone needs to know exactly what Sanjaya said to Paula this week, or who does the Marshall’s celebrity voice-over, I’m pretty much your go-to guy.
Hurry Up and Wait
People often ask me what I actually do as CEO of a small company. In short: fundraise. First for seed capital to turn the notional company into something real. Then for more capital to keep the young company moving ahead while its expenses still outpace its income. And then, once the company turns profitable, for capital to fund expansion, to underwrite the large new projects that drive growth.
And, frankly, fundraising sucks. Not least of all because you have to ask people to give you large sums of money. But also because, even when they want to, you’re still a far, far back priority to the main concerns of their own lives.
So, in short, you wait. You wait for emails and calls and faxed contracts. And you balance a ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’ tack with the knowledge that if you pester them too much, they’re more likely to wash their hands of the whole thing, rather than cough up cash.
Even once papers are signed, things are often no better: by then, you’re waiting for their wire to arrive, obsessively reloading the online banking site.
And, the whole time, bills pile up, along with demands for that still-not-arrived money, money that you can’t really make arrive any faster than it is. But, since you’re the middle man, the face that they see, people tell you again and again to do the impossible: to make all of this process, which moves on investor time, move instantly, on their time instead.
That said, if it’s the film business, then at least once every couple of months you get to walk down a red carpet somewhere. So it’s all worth it. It’s all worth it. Or, at least, that’s what you repeat to yourself, like a mantra, as you reload, reload, reload Chase and WaMu.com.