Subway Surfing and Oral Histories

Our third to last Friday in the city was a good one. I woke up and headed to the Paley Center. My mission on Friday was to create pivot tables in Excel.

But what are pivot tables, you might ask. That's exactly what I wondered. Luckily Marni, my boss, explained them and helped me create one before unleashing me into Excel.

Basically a pivot table allows you to look at data from multiple angles and discover new trends. We were looking at a variety of stats on traffic to the Paley Center over a long period of time.

It surprised me that I enjoyed making pivot tables. After working so long in Excel last summer for the first-year program, I do sort of feel at home in Excel.

I did leave the Paley Center early on Friday to head north to the Bronx. I visited the TAG group to see how the iPod drive was going.

We had one donation!!!!! Yippee! :)

And I got to spend some time with the teens, which was awesome. I bonded with some girls over One Direction (I did write a paper sophomore year about them, because I somehow found a way to write about boy bands in college! Haha), and we also bonded over books.

Obviously.

Then it was back on the subway and I was headed to the same stop I started at when I left the Paley Center, 50th Street. We had a movie event at MoMA.

It was a documentary called The Stories We Tell. It was made by a Canadian woman and in my opinion, was an oral history. It told the story of her mom and one event that changed the director and her family's lives. It was a fascinating documentary and the director, Sarah, was there for a post-film talk back.


That's probably been one of my favorite parts of the film events, the talk backs. I love hearing from the director and I love seeing what other people initially thought about the film.

Since the movie was so early, few of us had eaten. So post-movie we grabbed some food and chatted.

This sentence seems to be trend in my post: An excellent way to spend a Friday.