One friend put it perfectly: Dating today is more like a job interview… there is no romance in meeting someone new. It’s an interview process that focuses on three questions:

Elephants are signs of luck and longevity in India and China cultures. Many elephant statues are made of jade, thought to have its own luck providing powers, and a stone I hold near to my heart. Elephants are known to be “large and powerful, intelligent, useful, and long-lived” thus leading the pack as a symbol of strength, wisdom, happiness, and longevity. Elephants are religious symbols in the Hindu faith; in Sri Lanka, crawling under an elephant’s belly is said to protect you from the evil eye and drive away your protects you from the evil eye while driving away fears. There is a wide-spread belief that a lucky elephant holds its trunk pointed up. I plan to follow the elephant’s luck and always walk with my head held high and looking ahead in 2009.

I’m working on a report due the moment I walk in the office Monday morning. I’ve spent the past few months working on this in hopes it delivers exactly what we need: notoriety. In working on this report, I’ve spent countless hours on phone interviews, email chats with analysts overseas and online researching stats and forecasts. Today I devoted all day to completing this report. My reward: window shopping at the Natick Collection tomorrow. I’m a firm believer in window shopping – no need to purchase; a little imagination goes a long way.

In order to stay true to my deadline, I needed a change of scenery. I’ve worked on this report in the office and in the apartment and everything is just stale. This morning, I bundled up, grabbed my laptop and walked to Starbucks. I grabbed the first table near an outlet, spread out my paper work and powered up the HP. I ordered my grande Pike Place, got my 10 percent off thanks to my Starbucks Gold Card, and started writing.

Louie Armstrong is blowing his horn over the sound system. It’s the holidays, and everything from the paper cups to the tracks spinning on the Starbucks stereo system says so.

The lines come and go, and Jenna behind the counter comes out to check on me every so often.

“You doing OK? Can I get you anything?”

“Nah, I’m OK… just plugging away.”

“That man would like to buy you a coffee,” she says, and points to a white-haired and wrinkled older gentleman who I’ve seen around the neighborhood. He’s a friend of my landlord’s; I believe his name is Gus.

“Thanks,” I say, and wink in Gus’ direction.

The place is filling up again. Starbucks seems like everyone’s retreat. Here, there doesn’t seem to be a recession – at least not one that a good cappuccino or a salted hot chocolate can’t fix.

We decided to break free from the office at 5pm tonight and go see a movie.

The screen: “Four Christmases”
The time: 5:15 p.m.
The place: Boston Common Loews Movie Theater, cinema 6

We grabbed popcorn and a soda and found two prime seats in the theater. Feet up, seat back, dark room … and ‘action!’

Two hours later and feeling good from some serious Vince Vaughn hilarity, we left the theater with every intention to go home. We were stopped at cinema 8 by a young girl wearing a grey wool coat, matching headband and carrying a clipboard. Her friend/co-worker/Stepford wife look-a-like was next to her furiously typing on her blackberry.

“You girls want to watch a free screening tonight?”

“Uhhhh… of what?”

“It’s a new prime time TV show on TNT called Leverage. We’re screening it tonight at 8pm, but there’s live entertainment beforehand.”

“Live entertainment? Like dancers and jugglers?”

“No, just a little magic show. Oh, and Timothy Hutton is going to be here!”

(PR note: This is your hook, ladies. Start with the Oscar winner when trying to lure people into the theater, then move into the side entertainment.)

“OH, I love Timothy Hutton! ‘Beautiful Girls’ was a great movie!” I said. The Stepford ladies looked at me blankly – they probably don’t even know who Timothy Hutton is – but in we went to the theater.

We were coerced into sitting up front – I think to make the ‘entertainment’ feel valuable – and had prime seats for the freak show of people that were walking through the door. It’s a truly weird concept when you can look around the room and realize out of the 70 people sitting there, you’re the most normal.

Nearly 25 minutes later the “entertainment” started. He’s a magician with blue hair. He took a dollar from a lady and made it disappear. Then he took a ring from a lady and made it disappear. Meanwhile, one man refused to read a card (part of the trick) and another man sitting five rows back felt a good long belch would liven things up. The lady in the front row keeps asking, “what are you doing?” as she watches the magic trick take place. The magician – ignoring the background noises of odd seat-fillers – made the dollar and the ring reappear, handed out Starbucks gift cards and casually walked off the scene.

The theater-goers shuffled seats to be in prime viewing location for the TNT special. We chose to sit in the back… better to watch the craziness unfold as it happens, instead of having to turn around throughout the show.

“I just don’t know what is going to happen next,” said Bail. And she wasn’t talking about the show.

“Leverage” – which airs this Sunday night at 10 p.m. on TNT – was a decent show. I liked it because of Timothy Hutton. I could have done without the stupid blond and the French sidekick (a la “DiVinci Code”) – both who were given the obvious roles of distracting the ugly while the real thieves did the dirty work. The plot was semi-interesting: steal from the rich and make a profit off of them. I give it 2.5 stars out of five. But the night wasn’t over at the end of the show…

As promised, Timothy Hutton did show up. A rather good-looking man both on-screen and in person. The moderator threw the first question to the audience and the rest of the night is a bit of a blur. I struggled to find a legitimate question for the celebrity actor because I was so flabbergasted by the ridiculousness of the crowd. Moreso, I was amazed that the Stepford girls still have a job this far into the night.

I’m not sure how the night ended, actually. I remember someone asked if there were plans to do a “Beautiful Girls, Part 2: 15 Years Later,” which I fully support, although I don’t know that I’m ready to admit it’s been 15 years.

What started off as a simple movie to rid our heads of the workday chaos turned into a night of complete confusion that left us walking out of the theater wondering, ‘what the fuck was that???’

It’s a strange realization when the most normal part of your day was at work.

I started my morning at 6:30. I found my way to the gym in a haze of uncaffeinatation, got on the treadmill and starting running. And running… and running. Before I knew it, I was 5.5 miles into “Good Morning, America”.

News of the morning: The market is down, mortgages are folding, people are losing their jobs and their homes, the weather looks nice this weekend, a man was arrested after an attempted kidnap of a 6-year-old boy, and ‘that one’ is being accused of befriending terrorists while the ‘other one’ is trying to find his way out of the camera’s shot.

The country is literally falling apart, I thought, as I upped the speed on the treadmill.

Finally, 7:30 a.m. and it’s time to meet my trainer. We hit the benches. I was bench pressing the weight of my stress, and it felt great. An hour later I hit the showers, put on my face and walked up to the front desk to turn in my locker key and get my gym pass back. To my surprise and elation, the front desk attendant had a large cup of coffee waiting for me.

“There was enough [coffee] left for one large cup,” he said as he handed me the cup.

Amazing how the world can seem a little calmer with a large cup of coffee, a good workout, and a friendly gesture.