I’ve been managing the design, production, and distribution of our catalogs and flyers. Here are my favorites:

Gogol Bordello

I went to the Gogol Bordello concert in Terminal 5 on December 30th, 2011. I’m waiting for one of my friends to post the pictures, but this video is a taste of the experience. I make a sweaty cameo at around 3:00 minutes into the video.

My life completely changed in 2011.

Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park, November 15, 2011

As most of us have by now read or heard that the Occupy Wall Street protesters were forced out of Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan (financial district) at about 1am on November 15th, 2011, after two months of occupation. I work for an independent publishing firm across the street from Zuccotti Park on Broadway, and I walk Zuccotti Park at least twice a day. It was very eerie this morning – the park was completely cleared of the tents and sleepy protesters and replaced with hundreds of NYPD with masks.

The protesters crowded the streets surrounding the park during the day before they were allowed back in under close supervision of the NYPD. I walked around after 5:45pm – the tense and ominous environment was very different than it was the past two months. These protesters weren’t just angry about abstract ideas and wikipedia explanations of economics – they were angry at something specific now.

I went back to Zuccotti Park at 8:30pm and started listening to and photographing one of their unique meetings – the protesters aren’t allowed to utilize megaphones, so their method of mass communication is for the main speaker to deliver phrases or short sentences, and for the crowd to repeat those exact words in an organized manner. It’s actually pretty impressive that this seemed to work, although many people present were like me – not really “occupying,” but witnessing without participating.

completely destroyed landscaping

the protesters wave their hands kind of like “jazz hands” if they agree with the main speaker

I heard one of the protesters near me yell in an angry tone. I wasn’t planning to use the camera on my ipod nano because it’s poor quality at night, but I suspected that his taunts will lead to something. He provoked by antagonizing the NYPD by yelling at them. I suppose the rest of the crowd assumed that the NYPD were guilty of something, and soon everyone joined him. I didn’t see NYPD respond at all, but instead witnessed the entire park lose their focus on their meeting and scream at the NYPD collectively.

Protesters and press climb the park ledge and
swarm  two NYPD officers

90% of NYPD isn’t even near the park

All photographs and video copyrighted by Adrianna Grezak

Here is what I videotaped – it’s low quality but it captures what I experienced.

 

I’m trying to adjust to this new “small” physical identity

Last year I couldn’t run for longer than 30 seconds without getting winded. In less than one year later I reached my goal to run 5 miles…. and lost 40 pounds and 4.5 inches off my waist along the way. (Note, I ran 5 miles for the first time in July 2011.)

Academic publishing never looked so fierce

Lately I’ve been running “only’ 2-3 miles about three times a week. I ran five miles per day when I was unemployed and had all that untapped energy. I’m three weeks into my new job so I don’t have that kind of energy at 7pm after a full day’s work. I haven’t been eating as diligently as I did January-May, but I think that hasn’t been too big of a problem because I still don’t eat dairy and white bread/rolls. My weight hasn’t been yo-yoing the way it has in the past – I used to gain and loose 5-10 pounds quickly. I think all the conscious eating and rigorous exercise I completed the first six months changed the rate of my metabolism.  I don’t eat as many veggies/fruits as I should, but I don’t eat 1000 calories worth of chocolate and pasta drenched in heavy cream every single day either.

This whole job thing was surreal during the first week. I spent the previous four months in cut off denim shorts and old undershirts – I felt awkward when I adjusted to dressing in adult clothes to take an adult commute to sit at my adult desk. I spent all of my college years yearning to have a “real” job with a title and responsibilities, but suddenly I was resistant to all of that when I finally got it. On my first day of work I wanted to crawl back to the days where all I had to worry about was whether or not I shelved a book correctly. It was a twisted and watered down sense of nostalgia, considering that I surpassed the I Only Shelve Books, I Don’t Know Anything stage years ago.

I’m not really attached to the new bookstore on Broadway because I only worked limited hours on that salesfloor for six months (compared to the two years of weekly 20-28 hours I spent in the Washington location). Regardless, the space still represents a certain start to my career. I still live in the East Village so I commute via the R train to the financial district – so I walk by that bookstore twice a day. It’s the last thing I see before I board the train to work, and it’s the first thing I see when I leave the train station to walk home. I’m mostly happy that I’m no longer at a point in my life where I have to wear an apron on a busy salesfloor to earn an hourly wage – but some days I feel a tinge of melancholy.

New York City seems to be the location where many people come after college and therefore there’s an incredible demand for jobs in New York City – people from all kinds of locations and work experiences apply for the same positions.

Well in some cases the NYU grads are techincally employed, but waitressing and working in retail doesn’t require expensive college degrees. It’s awkward to walk into my apartment building and see a friend serve beer to drunken frat boys to pay for her student loans. It’s more awkward to be served at a local restaurant by a former classmate, who spent her senior year working on her 50-page comparative literature honors thesis… in French. I felt incredibly incompetent next to her in class, and now she’s setting my lunch in front of me.

Labor Day weekend marks the end of the summer. What I’ve done this summer:

- graduated college
- attended Parsons for a summer intensive graphic design course
- took an illustration course at SVA
- worked on my tan during two months of unemployment
- ran 5 miles
- lost more weight (I normally gain weight in the summer)
- wore shorts daily for the first time.. ever
- got a job in the book publishing industry
- survived an earthquake
- survived a hurricane
- listened to a lot of Lady Gaga

This man is a genius

(New York City subway)

Hurricane Irene in the East Village

There was a very weird energy in stores this morning. I left my apartment at 9am and noticed that some small private businesses took extra hurricane precautions when they closed down. The fact that all these places were closed was surreal enough.

I went looking for lighters and flashlights to Duane Reade, Walgreens, KMart, and St Marks grocery store. There was a weird energy in each store, especially KMart. People were moving quickly as the employees covered merchandise with black garbage bags. The water and battery aisles were almost bare, along with the snack/chips shelves and beer. It was the first time I’ve seen people shop in bulk/the suburban way during the four years I’ve been here. It seemed like people were buying bottled water and batteries because they heard that other people were buying those things. I was more concerned with finding lighters to ignite my stove to cook. I actually once lost power for six days in the Poconos during the Ice Storm of January 2005, and I immediately thought back to what I had to do to eat. There’s a high chance ConEd will shut off the power, so I filled my freezer with 15 bottles/containers of purified water.

I started to feel vibrating from one side of the office and assumed it was something weird with the construction going on on our office floor. I looked up and saw the floor lamp shake. It took about three more seconds for my cubicle neighbor to notice. He immediately panicked and stood up to investigate.

I lived above a major subway for a year and therefore I don’t really respond to violent vibrations the same way a normal person would. But I never felt something like this before – I never felt brief waves of vibrations coming from a horizontal direction. On the eighth floor of a high-rise building.

Construction? Everyone else in the office felt this, interestingly seconds after I did. For a split second I thought a terrorist attack was more plausible in New York City than an earthquake.

One of the intern’s sister texted him, saying that she just felt shaking.

What’s amazing about the current state of the internet and social media is that we figured out what happened within three minutes through Facebook. My coworkers’ friends from different locations instantly updated their statuses, myself included. We quickly realized that this was a wide-spread earthquake, ranging from at least Virginia to New York City. We figured out and processed what happened about 3o minutes before the information was available through a “real” or “legitimate” media source, such as the Washington Post and even Google.

One of the stereotypes of the Los Angeles / California area is that there’s a lot of emphasis on looks and fitness as an entire lifestyle – you’re yoga-skinny but muscular, and you spend your day in athletic attire  because there’s no reason to waste your time with “normal” clothes if you just have to change later on to work out. I actually met one of these stereotypes in college – Mary* was in both of my Intensive Italian classes, so I saw her 5 days a week for ten months.

I was stunned by how thin she was. She was also very muscular for her tiny size which was a bit unnerving. In some ways she kind of looked like Bethenny Frankel – skin pulled tight over muscles on a tiny frame. People in Manhattan and NYU are thin – but few women are this athletic at our age. This was somebody who didn’t have to fidget with their clothes to hide anything.  Over time I learned that she was vegan and a former gymnast. She gave me the impression that she had a fairly active lifestyle and made sacrifices to maintain that lifestyle – she broke numerous bones including her back and even had some sort of corrective surgery in her leg where the surgeons basically ripped apart her muscles – all before the age of 18.

I guess what got me concerned was when we were studying the food chapter in Italian. She revealed that she basically eats a fruit and/or salad each meal – no bread, pasta, fish, etc. She commented that she doesn’t get hungry because she takes vitamins. She didn’t view food/the meal ritual the same way other people do – a lot of people associate food with a specific cultural value or emotion. She hated going to restaurants because it was a waste of time. This was the semester when I was changing my diet, and I made an offhand comment that I ate 20-25 oranges a week because I kept craving them. (My body was probably recovering from the nasty flu I had.) She was shocked and even blurted out that I was wasting oranges. What?

At first I thought her hair looked so unhealthy because she straightened it, but I’m sure her diet was a factor. Her face was covered in acne and other blemishes. The skin on her body kind of freaked me out because it looked like it was stressed, dry, and pulled tight over her body. In some ways I’m passing judgement, but how healthy is all of this?