Right into it:

The commute: This is the big one. You tell some people you have a 50-minute train ride every day and they’ll fill you up with crap like, “oh, but that’s your time to unwind, just relax, read a book or something, and you’ll get used to it.”

No. Incorrect. My commuting time is absolutely not my own. It belongs to the lady who eats broccoli on the morning train that smells up the whole car, and to the huge guy who crams himself into the middle seat on the ride home then splays his elbows so I have to do all my reading and unwinding with my gut spilling over the armrest.

If that time — and it’s about an hour and ten minutes, door to door — were my own I could be doing so many more awesome things, like watching TV or playing the guitar or even reading and actually unwinding in the comfort of my La-Z-Boy.

Besides that, you learn to live your life on Metro-North’s schedule. If you don’t leave the house by 8:09, you can forget about that 8:16 train. Leave before 8:07 and you can stop in the deli for coffee. Make it to the first crosswalk before you see the train and you know you’ll catch it. Make it to the second crosswalk and you know you won’t have to run. Stand near the back of the train so you can exit at Grand Central North. Stand about three cars from the front on the way back so you can get off by the stairs.

There’s some grotesque pleasure in mastering the commute, but it’s the most pathetic of accomplishments.

Oh and two more things: 1) You see the same people literally every single day on the train platform, and hardly anyone ever acknowledges anybody. It’s bizarre. I mean, let’s forget about learning each other’s names because we all know we’re not planning on sitting next to each other and chatting for the whole commute. But we’re not even going to smile and nod? I see you every day!

(I should note that I say what’s up to Mike from Trainjotting when I run into him, and there’s one lady that smiles or says hello. But there are like 10 other people that I see all the time who make no effort at all.)

Oh, yeah, 2) If you’re doing something in the city, you can’t just go home. If you’re willing to pay for a cab, you can get a ride to Grand Central, then you have to sit there and wait 20 minutes like a goon until the next train to your station is leaving. I know I sound whiny right now, and I get that compared to the way people traveled for most of civilization the Metro-North is pretty damn impressive. But once you get used to living on a subway line it’s just hard to see it that way.

The car: I know I said I liked driving, and I do. I don’t like that I need to get in the car to go pretty much anywhere. You leave your house, you go right to the car. Almost always. There’s a deli and a pizzeria within walking distance, which is useful for the times my wife needs to leave me without the car. And I can walk to the train in the morning, and I guess if I wanted to figure it out I could take the train to get to stuff within walking distance of the other stops on the line.

But other than that, you need the car for getting anywhere you’re going to go. The car becomes this weird exoskeleton, something attached to you practically any time you’re more than a half mile from your home. Oh, and for some reason Westchester’s variety of tough guys love to speed through parking garages.

Stuff I need to deal with: Man, the suburbs come with a lot of stuff you need to deal with. When it snows in the city, you have to deal with stepping over the gross slushy gravy that forms at every corner. But when it snows in the suburbs, you need to endure an intense 45-minute cardio workout before you can even leave your house.

And there’s the lawn, and the heating oil, and the car needing oil change, a bunch of stuff like that. I know, I know: Not real problems. I should be happy I have heat. But I’m spoiled by years of pampered urban living.

Soon, on to the good and bad things about the city.

If you haven’t noticed, much of my attention over the past few weeks has been dedicated to the ever-harrowing but still very exciting moving process. I’m leaving the comforts of suburbia for the convenience of Manhattan this weekend.

Things might slow down here a bit for a couple of days. Monday will feature some re-posted greatest hits, my self-applauding means of introducing new readers to old content and reminding old readers about various posts they may have enjoyed in the past. By Tuesday I should be back online weighing in on all that’s new and stupid.

This is the first of a four-part series that will roll out today and tomorrow. I hope. I haven’t written any of it yet, so I reserve the right to get too busy and bail.

Almost everything about moving — in this area and on my budget, at least — involves trade-offs. To find an apartment you can afford in a desirable location, you must concede some floor space. To live someplace closer to restaurants and nightlife, you must accept more street noise. Stuff like that. I assume you’ve moved at some time in your life, so I probably don’t need to explain it in great detail.

Anyway, on the whole this move should be a net positive. But there are at least three things I’ll miss about life in suburbia. In no particular order:

The backyard: I had no idea what I intended to do in my backyard when we moved to Hawthorne a couple years ago. I just knew that after five years of living in Brooklyn I was psyched to have one. I figured I’d play more lawn games and such, though that never really happened.

It turned out my backyard was awesome for two things: barbecuing and gardening. A bunch of my friends gave me a smoker as a wedding gift, and with it I endeavored countless cooking projects. I got really good at making ribs, if I do say so myself, and developed some pretty strong barbecue instincts. I smoked briskets, chickens, pork butts and turkeys. I even made bacon once. Plus we had a small charcoal grill next to the smoker, which helped produce all sorts of delicious burgers.

More often than not, I served those meats with something from our garden. The garden ran the length of our house and got direct sunlight for most of every summer day. Our vegetables grew like tomacco. Plus, gardens are invaluable for metaphors. Just about everything in life is kind of like a garden: You put in some effort and you reap more fruit, but there’s always a lot of randomness in play.

Driving: Everything in our neck of Westchester is pretty far apart, at least compared to what I grew used to living on Long Island, in D.C. and in Brooklyn. The Taco Bell is over four miles away; the nearest retail areas are almost ten miles.

We got a new car on June 7, 2010. By the time we move into the city for good, that car will have nearly 25,000 miles on it. And we don’t often take road trips.

But I like driving, especially on the type of (normally) lightly trafficked roads you can find in Westchester. Even the local roads feature fewer stop lights than their counterparts on Long Island, and many of the parkways are hilly, scenic and ripe with interesting roadkill. I like driving aimlessly, maybe with some token errand in mind, then trying to find an alternate route home. Westchester’s pretty great for that.

The moon: I know the moon also shines over Manhattan, so don’t tell me I’m in for a pleasant surprise when I get there. Until I moved to Hawthorne I had no idea there was anyplace within 100 miles of the city so free of light pollution. Our block has one streetlight and it’s not close to our house. On clear nights, we can see all the constellations vividly, not just some hazy suggestion of Orion.

And the moon shines so brightly it casts shadows, and pours this almost eerie blue glow into our kitchen. It’s awesome. The first clear full-moon night we lived there I woke up thinking there might be a UFO overhead. It’s hard to explain. Everything looks like a Gregory Crewdson photograph.

Whoa, my memories of the suburbs are on the whole way lamer than I expected them to be. I suspect the forthcoming complaints will be a little funnier. I hope. Jeez.

Thanks much for all the feedback in yesterday’s anonymous suggestion box. It turns out people who read this site like this site, which is great for the ol’ ego. I appreciate it. I guess it would have been more helpful to survey the people who don’t read this site to figure out what the hell is wrong with them.

Seriously though, thanks. It seemed like most people who responded were pretty happy with the mix of content here. Some people wanted more random stuff, some wanted more sports. Some wanted less Jets, some wanted more Giants, some wanted no football stuff whatsoever. Some suggested more long-form pieces, others preferred more frequent short posts.

I appreciate all the feedback, and you’re always welcome to send me more at tberg@sny.tv or via the comments tab on top of this page.

Two people asked about the origin of the Eddy Curry Fat wheel in the background image (and on my desk). That was a prop for an episode of The Nooner, a now-defunct daily sports-comedy show on SNY.tv that I co-wrote. The episode is the first one here (but do stay for the second).

A ton of people asked for more sandwich reviews, and I should be able to oblige soon. I signed a lease last night for an apartment in Manhattan. Moving to the city should provide me both better access to sandwiches and more time with which to pursue them, so look out for more of those on the horizon.

Speaking of: I’m currently taking recommendations for sandwiches accessible via the 6 train. Also, for pizza and bagels on the Upper East Side.

Anyway, a few comments of note:

I liked the format on Flushing Fussing better than Tedquarters. Why did you change the blog?

A few reasons. Mostly, I wanted the flexibility to write about more than just the Mets, and in different lengths than the 600-1,000 word columns typical of that space. It was also among our first efforts to move most of the SNY.tv content away from the old article pages and on to blogs, so this started as a test of sorts. And I was getting busier with all the other aspects of my job, so it became difficult to regularly churn out posts of that length.

Does anyone else prefer the old format? One thing I’ll admit is this: Since I wasn’t concerned then about keeping a reasonably steady stream of content flowing, I typically spent a lot more time playing around with the ideas in my head before typing them out. And I find now that when I hold off on writing something and think about it for a few days, I make new connections that strengthen the points I’m trying to get across. I should probably do that more often.

I enjoy your baseball and food related posts.  One question, though–why is it that on Metsblog, and the other related blogs, there is a tab for other SNY blogs, including yours, but there is no similar tab on yours–making navigation more difficult?

Good question — I don’t know. I didn’t set up the tabs on this site. I intended to reconfigure them, but it’s way time-consuming to do with this theme than it was with the last. Does anyone else use those tabs? Did you before the recent redesign?

Either way I’ll figure out a way to have links back to the other SNY.tv sites. You can always click the SNY.tv logo on the bottom of the page to get to the SNY.tv homepage, which provides a roundup of stories from all our blogs.

boobs

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

I like this site because it’s like returning to an old friend. It’s a little weird, but I feel like I know you. And if we hung out, it wouldn’t be weird.

Well, it might be weird. Real-life me doesn’t have the filter of propriety demanded by this site’s affiliation. I really do like sandwiches, though.

A wolf and a monkey that were believed to have escaped the carnage were later declared dead. The monkey, which had herpes, was eaten by one of the tigers, according to CBS News.

– Michael Sheridan and Cory Siemaszko, N.Y. Daily News.

I really don’t want to make light of this crazed suicidal zookeeper story because in truth I think exotic animals are awesome, and seeing the pictures of all the dead tigers made me really sad even if I understand that it was not in anyone’s best interest for them to be roaming loose in Ohio.

But this one tidbit here — “the monkey, which had herpes, was eaten by one of the tigers” — I’m sorry, that’s the silver lining in this whole mess. Not for the monkey or the tiger, which is also dead now, but for those who appreciate the inherent (if, in this case, dark) humor in reports of a tiger eating a herpes-addled monkey.

First of all, why did they even have to say that the monkey had herpes? I suppose if it were still on the lam it might be good to disseminate that information to protect the monkey from lovelorn perverts and vice versa. But reporting on the monkey’s herpes posthumously just seems like a way to further humiliate a monkey that already endured the shame of being caught by the tiger and, of course, the physical suffering inherent in both living with monkey herpes and being eaten by a tiger.

At least one of the other freed monkeys was eaten by one of the lions. I’m really down on monkeys right now. I would’ve hoped they’d prove more elusive than that, and more adaptive to the Ohio environment.

Authorities believe no more animals are on the loose, but I’m hoping at least one lion or tiger slipped through their grasp and will enjoy a long, happy life terrorizing Ohio livestock. Or maybe that a male lion and a female tiger escaped and now all of a sudden Zanesville, Ohio has a liger problem on its hands.

I haven’t done a survey thing in a while, but I want to try something different this time. I don’t want to bother with demographics or your responses to questions I write myself. Just give me something. Why do you read this site? What don’t you like about this site? If you could change one thing about TedQuarters, what would it be?

I’m looking for honest feedback. I’d appreciate anything from a sentence to a 1000-word screed. I’m not collecting your email and I didn’t even include a spot for your name. Go to town:

I got an email today from reader Katie asking me to help her promote a friend and fellow reader’s forthcoming metal festival. Gladly.

There is precedent for this. If you have a metal band and I know for a fact you read this blog, it’s a pretty safe bet I’ll help you promote it. Most other bands too.

I do that partly because I assume all regular readers are pretty awesome and I’m generally happy to help awesome people share their awesomeness with the world. But mostly I feel so indebted to all the friends and family that indulged my own performances (in various pursuits) for so long that I feel compelled to, well, pay it forward a bit. So check out the Metal Suckfest.

Thinking about posting a link to that show — and thinking about why I should post it — got me feeling a bit nostalgic for the days when I actually did stuff. (Also at least a little bit depressed, since I realized it has been about five years now since I’ve done any regular public performing, which I always very much enjoyed. Maybe I should get back into that somehow.)

So in the spirit of nostalgia, the three most satisfying performances I can remember, in chronological order:

Ted Berg and Pizza Night, December, 2000: I did a lot of standup comedy during my first two years of college. I won some campus contest early in freshman year, and my class’ student government always booked me for the end-of-semester pre-finals events. The winter of my sophomore year I was charged with doing 75 minutes, which is really, really hard. There was to be free pizza there, guaranteeing a pretty solid crowd.

And — I apologize for the utter lack of humility here — I nailed it. I can’t even remember most of the material now and I regret that no one thought to tape it. I spent a ton of time thinking about it beforehand (instead of, you know, studying and stuff), and I worked out clean segues and callbacks to earlier jokes and all that stuff. And for that night, it just worked.

When you’re doing standup comedy and things are going well, it’s about the best feeling in the world. All I have is a microphone and I’m keeping all these people entertained! Awesome for the ego.

Some stupid conference, February, 2003: The guy who directed the jazz band at Georgetown also booked jazz combos for local events. A group of six guys from the jazz band made up his cheap-rate jazz combo. We were thrilled to be playing for any money at all, and at most of the gigs we could score free drinks during breaks. We played some cocktail hours at weddings and a bunch of catered receptions for business conferences.

The guy always insisted that we play for the entire length of time we agreed to play for, even if there was no one left at the event. I guess he had been burned on that in the past or something.

At the reception for some stupid conference, we were booked from 5-8, but everyone was gone by 6:45. We kept playing, but ditched the jazz charts to jam on band-room funk classics. Then the coolest thing ever happened: The catering crew cleaning up after the reception started dancing, and gathered in front of where we were playing for a spontaneous funk throwdown. It was hilarious and totally sweet.

Protocol show, August, 2006: Protocol played a particularly nerdy brand of eclectic funk, with lyrics about zombies and plate tectonics and songs in all sorts of odd meters and modes. We practiced a ton, though, and by the end of our three-year run we were pretty tight.

This was the second-to-last Protocol show. I had started my job at MLB.com a couple months earlier, and I used that as an excuse to quit the band. Truth is I thought it had run its course, and my living in Brooklyn made it logistically tough to join the other guys at practice as often as any of us would have liked.

This was our last gig at the Continental, an East Village spot where we played bi-weekly. Because it was our last time playing in Manhattan, we managed to draw a ton of people out — including my boss and a couple of new co-workers. We made our bizarre rock with as much enthusiasm and energy as we ever did, and people responded.

That was, incidentally, the night that inspired the mustache headshot that ran with my old SNY.tv column. We had a song called “Mustache,” which I sang while wearing a fake mustache. When I started writing the column, my boss feared I looked too young to be taken seriously and suggested I use a photo of myself in the fake mustache he saw at the show. Obviously I obliged.

OK, this is getting awful long but I shouldn’t brag about those successes without mentioning these three career lows:

DC Improv, February, 2000: Remember when I said how great it feels to put on a successful standup show? That high is not nearly as extreme as the awful feeling of utterly bombing. I was in college, so I made a lot of reasonably immature college-kid jokes about beer and porn and stuff. At my lone appearance at the DC Improv, I went on before Lewis Black, who does a bunch of political humor and draws a good and varied crowd in DC.

I told my first joke about porn and spotted in the first row a girl of about 14 sitting with her parents. I froze up. I managed to stumble through the short set, but it all sucked. Very lonely feeling, very sparse laughs.

Moo Shoo Porkestra, December, 2002: The Moo Shoo Porkestra played many incredibly fun shows, and I’d say it produced more in terms of total satisfaction than Protocol did. This one came during a snowstorm on a Tuesday night at the Tombs, a popular college bar near Georgetown. We were tired, we went on late, and by the time we finished, only my friend Scott (who sometimes comments here) was paying any attention. That’s actually the image that comes to mind when I think about how I owe it to the world to help promote other people’s shows: Scott, sitting behind his half-drunk beer at a large and otherwise empty table about 10 feet from where we were playing. So Katie, you should thank Scott.

Protocol show, April, 2005: I can’t remember the bar, but we played in a basement on the Upper East Side to a crowd of about 10-15 people. I had a hernia at the time and played the show from a stool. It sucked.

If Earth were in Orlando and the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, were in Los Angeles, then NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft, the most distant manmade objects, have traveled just one mile.

– Kenneth Chang, N.Y. Times.

Yeah, I hate to sound defeatist but it doesn’t sound likely we’re going to be exploring other star systems anytime in our lifetimes. Which is total b.s.