The Doree Chronicles

Just filed my story for Wednesday. I’m not a big New Year’s person but there’s something so sad about being in the office on New Year’s Eve, which is why I’m leaving right this second.

The Observer stops for no man. Or new year.

A tall soy chai latte from Starbucks has 170 calories, 2 grams of fat, 65 mg of sodium, 1 gram of fiber, 32 grams of sugar (eek), and 75 mg of caffeine.

That’s not HORRIBLE but I should probably switch to green tea.

I almost can’t believe that Conde Nast hasn’t pulled the plug on Flip, their horribly misguided effort at targeting teen girls online, yet. It seems obvious that no one is using it. In the “most viewed” tab on the homepage, the most popular flipbook (a staff-made one about Lauren Conrad) has 4627 views. Not too impressive!

After today, everyone I worked with at Gawker will be gone.

This morning the subway was practically empty because most people don’t have to work today. Sadly, I do. This is who was in my immediate range of vision on the train this morning:

1. To my right, a father and son. The father probably weighed about 300 pounds and the son (who looked to be about 13) seemed to be well on his way there. They were sharing a muffin and both of them were spewing crumbs down their shirts. At one point the dad grabbed the muffin away from the son. I had my iPod on so I didn’t have to listen to their conversation, but the snippets I caught seemed to consist of the son whining about people he didn’t like (teachers, other kids) and the dad egging him on.

2. In front of me, a woman holding a vintage pink dress decorated with sequined roses on her lap.

3. A guy who got on at Canal and looked like a grad student or adjunct professor. He was pretty hot, probably in his late 30s, and reading a paperback copy of Don Quixote that looked like it was 1,000 years old. And underlining!

Wow! How could I have slept on this Dave Fischoff album (Secretly Canadian, Nov. 21, 2006) for so long! It’s super!

This Amy Millan CD (Arts & Crafts, June 12, 2006) is great!

I was feeling restless this afternoon, so I took out the vacuum cleaner (see below) and vacuumed the living room, and then I decided that the time had come to go through the CDs that live under my desk. They’ve been sitting in dusty, precarious piles since I moved here, and as I’ve gotten more I’ve just added to the piles, mostly because some PR agencies and record labels still think I review music. A lot of these CDs were unopened because I figured oh, well, I’d get to listening to them… someday. And what if there was some hidden gem in there? (Now I realize: fat chance. The musical slush pile is almost as bad as the publishing one.)

So I divided them into three piles: stuff I definitely wanted to keep, stuff I wanted to listen to before deciding whether to keep it, and stuff I definitely wanted to give away.

Right now the “stuff I definitely wanted to give away” pile is winning. That feels good. If 2007 was the year of acquisitions, then 2008 is the year of divestiture. I’ll make a minimalist out of myself yet.*

* I reserve the right to renege on this statement.

Emptying my vacuum cleaner filter is one of the grosser activities of life. HOW DOES ONE ANIMAL GENERATE SO MUCH HAIR.

I love Lee but sometimes I wish she were bald.

We are trying to figure out if Sam just won $30,000 on a scratch-off poker game. That would be kind of awesome.

Sam and I saw Juno today. I liked it more than he did but I realized that one thing that annoyed me was Jennifer Garner’s relationship with Jason Bateman hewed to that same old tired Judd Apatow-ish trope: uptight, perfectionist woman somewhat inexplicably with the cool, funny musician guy. When are we going to get the movie where the chick is the one who sits around and gets stoned all day while her husband works all day and then comes home and vacuums the entire McMansion? I think Emily might have to be the one to make it.