After staying out way too late on a date last night, salsa dancing at a little club on the Lower East Side, I woke up this morning with a sore throat, a slight fever, and a general case of the I-don’t-want-to-leave-my-apartment blaahs.

So, with that in mind, and with my pending move cross-town to Hell’s Kitchen only about a month off, I spent most of today taking everything I own off of shelves and out of closets and cabinets, and then putting everything back in place, in an attempt to weed out the random items that clutter my home despite the fact that I’ll never, ever use them again.

The pile I’ve accumulated in the center of my living room now contains such gems as a circa 1997 cell phone (approximate weight, 32 pounds), a Gap sweater vest (also, apparently, circa 1997, as I don’t believe I’ve seen one worn since – ah, if only I still had a pair of carpenter jeans to complete the quasi-retro look), and the utterly fascinating read Advanced Computational Techniques in Biological Statistics.

Yessir, I may still feel stick as a dog, but now I’m also brimming with the joy of good-Samaritan-ness, as I’ll be giving that pile away and helping people! Whoo boy will some homeless guy be lucky to get his hands on that stat textbook! Even better, this being New York (where even McDonalds delivers), apparently I don’t even have to leave my home to make the donation. Come Monday morning, some poor sap from Goodwill will be coming to my apartment to cart all those gems away.

But that’s just the kind of guy I am: helping to change the world, one act of lazy indifference that, being reasonably borderline in terms of global karmic impact, might be mistakenly construed as loving kindness at a time.

Regarding the merits of having a wall of windows in your bedroom:

Pro: Room is well lit.

Con: Room is well lit, even if the shades are drawn and you were out drinking until five in the morning plus you slept comparably little the night before and mainly you just want to get some god damned sleep so you can stop it already with these pointless, rambling run-on sentences.

Since 9/11, a slew of pundits have suggested that airports install biometric sensors, such as retinal or fingerprint scanners, at check-in counters, security checkpoints or boarding gates. Perhaps they’ll want to narrow that suggestion to just retinal scanners, as a Japanese scientist has recently determined a way to make gummy fingers from lifted fingerprints that fool fingerprint scanners over 80% of the time. Worse, the process can be done with less than $10 of materials and equipment found in an average kitchen.

At times like these, I’m oh so glad I live in perhaps the US’s most likely bombing target, half a block from the United Nations and sandwiched between a number of controversial embassies.

I’m off to a Mets game with Randy Wolfe, a Yale friend who’s up from DC for the weekend to interview for hedge fund jobs. He’s been crashing at my apartment since Thursday, and has therefore unwittingly been dragged along to my first two movie-world networking bashes – one hosted by Stellar Network on Thursday evening, another by GenArt Friday night. We also found time to hit the club scene, as well as the inimitable Jean Georges (Zagat’s highest rated restaurant in New York) for dinner last night. Thanks to another of our Yale friends, Melissa, who hostesses there (and joined us for dinner), we snagged a usually impossible 7:30 window table and a ridiculously reduced meal price. I’m still full.

This coming week, I join the movie business in earnest, with a slew of meetings with lawyers, investors, producers, directors, graphic designers and commercial real estate agents – all the people we need in getting Cyan Pictures off the ground. In fact, I’m booked nearly solid for lunches and dinners through late May, and have just started scheduling business breakfasts as well. Who needs sleep?

It is Good Friday, but I don’t care. After all, I am Jewish, and, due to last week’s vacation, have way too much work to take off the holiday. So I am at my office. The rooms are deserted. It is eerily quiet. I am reminded of Yale’s antediluvian Sterling Memorial Library – where I didn’t study even once during my four years. Without a hum of background activity, I am completely unproductive.

To compensate, Miles Davis’ Sessions at the Plugged Nickel pours out of a tinny set of Harman/Kardon speakers. I fight the urge to return home for my stereo system (or at least a decent pair of headphones – Beyerdynamic or Etymotics). I sink into my chair, enveloped in the strains of “Stella by Starlight,” and get to work.

From my window on the 24th floor, I can see all the way uptown. On a clear day, thirty, forty blocks up.

When it rains, the clouds descend, sitting low outside my window. They elide the view, bringing buildings on the Upper East Side oddly, hazily close.

On those rainy days, the air outside my window is thick and heavy. It can be scooped with a ladle. The city is quieter, slower, weighed down by the heavy air. I spend all morning lying in bed, pinned by the weight of the clouds, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat of raindrops on pane glass.

Six month anniversary. Headed to the roof with my trumpet, played Taps facing downtown. Read the Mourner’s Kaddish, a hebrew prayer of remembrance. Never forget.

I work down the street from the Yale Club of New York, and have been exercising my alumni-ship by working out there several mornings a week. While the equipment is sparse and a bit rusty, they have a decent collection of bars, plates and benches, which is pretty much all I need. The real downside, however, is the locker room. While brief stints of nudity are the locker room norm, the Yale Club is truly in a league of its own. Never before have I seen crowds of old fat guys lounging around on couches completely naked, watching CNBC or reading the Wall St. Journal. They prance around, letting it all hang out, seemingly without a care in the world. While I’m thrilled they’re enjoying themselves, that much pasty, jiggly flesh early in the morning just isn’t a good way to start the day.