Best Of, or Something Like It

The happiest I've been this week was today at lunch hour. I took a slightly long lunch break to wander to the grocery market across the street from my apartment, and then home, to assemble exactly the sandwich I'd suddenly started craving at 11:45 (smoked turkey, apple, brie, romaine, and a little bit of mayo on decent honey-wheat bread) to eat with fresh strawberries and the good kind of potato chips, with a box fan going in the window in the living room, while watching on DVD the episode of The Office where Dwight tries to wrest control of the branch from Michael. I'm serious, this felt about as good as it gets. So I think I'm officially back to Regular Old Connecticut Life again.

Walking back to the office, in a refreshing slight rain not heavy enough to actually get me noticeably wet, I thought, How am I ever going to have any ambitions, if making a sandwich makes me this happy? I'm just going to end up happy without accomplishing anything. And then I thought, I guess the point is you're supposed to parlay your happiness into the energy to have greater ambitions. And then I also thought, Part of the reason making a sandwich made me this happy today is because I'm satisfied from a recent interesting trip abroad, and that took at least a little bit of ambition to put together. So maybe deriving satisfaction out of modest activity is kind of an ambition dividend, of some sort. And then I got back to the office, so I didn't think anything else again for a while.

(This constitutes the approximately bi-monthly "Bemused Page Out of Everyday Life" post I do. I figure someday I'll want to know what I was thinking in everyday life. Oh, and also, I had a really satisfying haircut yesterday.)

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Every year, the New Haven Advocate (the city's alt-weekly) runs its Best of New Haven issue, and it kind of cracks me up. Because there's some useful stuff in there, but a lot of it is Best by default.

For example, I wholeheartedly believe in Criterion Cinemas (not pictured, right) as the Best Movie Theater in town, since there are no actual other movie theaters in town. (A friend-of-a-friend once described New Haven as "like a normal city but there's only one of everything," which is not far off from the truth.) Then you have the stuff like naming Red Bull the Best Energy Drink (though, in a coup, Sam Adams took over Best Domestic Beer from Budweiser this year) or the Yale Art Gallery as the Best Art Gallery. Thanks for the tip! Feels good to be "in the know" now.

Somewhat more helpfully, Best Bowling Alley points out AMF Lanes in Milford as #1, beating out the AMF Lanes in East Haven and the AMF Lanes in Hamden. Don't even bring up Best Bagels, though.

Toad's Place, about the only place to hear a concert, took Best Place to Hear a Concert, reminding me of the testimonial delivered to the audience by Pat Metheny when he played the Shubert Theater (Best Theater!) a couple months ago: "For a certain generation of musicians, New Haven was really synonymous with Toad's Place. Maybe you guys can tell me, does that place still exist?"

They didn't poll their readers for Best Regional Transit Route but I'm thinking the Metro North to Grand Central would be a pretty good bet.

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At least that all's not quite as bad as the weekend review of various chain restaurants (Applebee's, Chili's, etc.) that ran in the regional section of last Sunday's New York Times. Some snobbishness-related complaints have been registered on The Internet, but what I hold against it is that the reviews basically seem to say "Yeah, it's pretty much OK" in all cases, which would seem to be something that everyone probably already knew before picking up the paper.

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If you can name the episode of The Simpsons that the New Haven Uptown Uniplex appears in, you are a huge dork.