travails

i feel like taking on some painful and arduous journey for the sake of self-exploration, etc. i'll admit the impetus for this desire; reading the story of two men who walked the camino de santiago, the 500-mile pilgrimmage across spain, was enough to set me off, despite the long, graphic descriptions of thumb-sized blisters and dingy hostels. i'm not sure about spain though. maybe something in california; there's the pacific crest trail, but that's 2,600 miles, if you count oregon and washington. a bit much to start with. i'll have to come up with something shorter.

in other news, one of the escalators in my building is down for maintenance. while there are elevators that serve most of the 30 floors, the escalators run from floors 1-4, and are much more convenient. but when they shut down, they are truly a pain. well, not the escalators themselves. it's the damn building management. instead of simply allowing people to walk up the escalators as if they were steps, they set up yellow barricades around the broken segment. that's fine, i suppose, but then i end up going down one floor and finding the next escalator broken. then i'm taking the elevator to or from the second floor, and i get glares of death from other people heading up 10 stories, who believe i'm the laziest sad sack in the city. he can't even ride the escalator for one floor, the pathetic, servile, wretched waste of human life, their slight shift upon seeing me enter the elevator seems to say. and this isn't some occasional occurrence. oh no. these escalators break down more than glenn beck on one of his patriotism kicks. it's really unacceptable. on the other hand, the building management reworked the toilets (you'll have to scroll down to my earlier post about their inadequate flow rate) and now they suck with the force of a jet engine. more green and efficient than flushing three times to, ahem, clear the decks? that's debatable.