6.16 935amchecked my email downstairs, then went to cambridge. only partly on the subway though, due to some unexpected construction i believe. the good news is that a bus ride to the MIT stop, though slower, let me see more of the city, and i bet you can guess how i felt about that. ;-) anyway, once i got to cambridge and oriented myself, i spent oodles of time in the cambridge coop (a delicious bookstore). got some sunglasses (i lost them during the farmers market debacle the day before), and some lunch. walked down JFK street to the festival, and after i'd walked all the way thru, sat down to write.
yesterday was a blast and to prove the point i am sore from head to toe. i finished the FT around 7, then i took the ferry back to boston (was in charlestown) but not before having a nice convo w/m since i missed the first ferry by 30 seconds. she lost another tooth, no surprise. cracked before i left. soon she will have no lower teeth. :/
today i'm going to cambridge for a festival and just to check the town out. possibly go to a museum but can't say. i blew some of my 'museum' money on photo stuff ($25 or so) so not really sure we can afford that.
but i'm not going to worry about $ now, just enjoy being here. which i am, SO MUCH. i think i would adore living in new england or the east coast (especially mid/north) because of the history. i could tell i started to tune out a little yesterday, basking in so much, but even so i felt in love with the whole wide world. everywhere i looked i saw something beautiful. which is why i used 3 rolls of film yesterday. :-p
ok time to get going.
6.16 322pmeven though i was in the shade when i wrote that, i got pretty hot a few minutes later so i stopped for what turned out to be badass ice cream. standing in line for the ice cream led to yet another incident of me being pleasantly surprised by how nice everyone was. not like i think everyone in california is a brat, but..my whole trip, everywhere i went, people were randomly talking to me, so i'd end up talking to them. just about mundane, nice little things, but still. it made me feel very welcome.
well i just sat down to comment on how awesome the diversity of community vendors was, when i got asked do to a survey on the festival! so i got to give feedback on that (albeit briefly) but still. how cool! and i got two starburst as reward, which i am now enjoying. my favorites actually, lemon+strawberry. =)
the view here is amazing. i'm under two large trees overlooking the charles river, a very large, old building on the other side, and a groovy old bridge just down to my right. earlier i had lunch at a great little bakery called au bon pain. scrumptious little roast beef and herb cream chese sandwich on tomato parmesan bread, right in the middle of harvard square. i'm going to go over that way again later today, almost done with the festival here but i'm glad i came.
back to the point that led me here - the community groups were amazing. sure, women's groups, homeless, cultural - the usual. but we also had ones about archeology, linguistics and a few other ologies i forgot about already. criminy! i'm so jealous of this environment. and it's so lovely. no wonder i'm enjoying it so goddamn much.
i know it would be difficult to live here. i'm sure very expensive, and i can tell it gets muggy as shit. it's only supposedly in the mid 70's today but the humidity makes it seem like mid 80s. i forgot what that was like. this would be hard on my skin long term although i've done ok so far, amazingly.
incidentally i've also noticed a preponderance of white people and i mean WHITE. just as white as me. it kinda cracks me up. but as i said, makes me feel a little more 'normal', not that i let that get to me much in general.
being here also makes me really glad we plan to move. because being somewhere new is really doing wonders in the whole AG department. as in not thinking about her, because i'm not surrounded by the places where i have a history of musing in her direction. at any rate, this makes me hopeful. i know it's avoidance but that's all i've got. i am a total sucker for her and i know it.
ok enough. i got some more walking to do, sights to drink in.
made my way back to JFK. found a badass comics shop, walked around harvard and its wobbly sidewalks, then ambled my way back towards the main subway stop. en route i hit another bookstore because at this point i was on the prowl for a new book. i knew i would finish my snoozer in short order. didn't find a cheap+interesting enough book for me there, but a block from the subway was a man selling tons of books, propped up in 20 or so boxes, on the sidewalk. all books, $2.
this is a man after my own wallet. so i browsed and browsed and finally found this. i read a brief interview with the author a long time ago and it struck me as being interesting, but obviously not enough for me to get it until today. i did my usual -- back flap, inside flap, a page in the middle, a page at the start -- and decided it met my standards for wicked observations. i started it on the way back to the hostel and immediately felt crabby that i still had the other book to finish first (i can be methodical).
back at my room, i couldn't decide what i wanted for dinner, so i consulted an area map and then started wandering. i came upon a whole foods and was very disappointed, but did procure an extremely yummy peach. circling back on massachusettes ave, i landed at a burrito place i'd seen before. had a very tasty but too-spicy mango burrito. lucky for me a wendy's was down the block, where i discovered the tastiest frosty known to mankind. back at the hostel, i said hi to y'all then crashed upstairs, hoping to finish my mediocre book.
6.17
sunday my master plan was to explore newbury street for several hours, get lunch around there, then zip over to the airport, but holy shit. mugginess off the charts. had a crappy lunch (johnny rockets) at the airport and then my plane got delayed. so:
329pmi ended up reading the rest of my book while waiting for that 2nd airplane. then i jet blue'd home (getting to watch the mediocre 4400 season opener) and then here i was.
interesting how i keep writing around the same time each day even though i'm doing something different every time.
well it's my last afternoon in boston. i'm at the airport and have been here much longer than i planned because it was too damn humid to lug around my luggage all day. i'd planned to lunch and shop on newbury street. instead i barreled through half of it at a breakneck pace in order to get to the closest subway stop and hightail it over here.
and i'm grateful i did, just to stop sweating. and keep my bag from tipping over.
i got checked in, gave my subway pass to a family of 5, and finished reading that dreadful iles book. ok, it was fair. but there were no real surprises and several of the characters were annoyingly stupid. the only thing i really liked about it were the illicit possibilities with the protagonist and his hot babysitter. sure, it had SOME suspense but not nearly enough for my taste. and the writing style - so bland. but it really takes an atrocious book to make me stop reading. the atrociousness, in this case, stopped about page 20 so i kept on.
i am reading a more interesting book now. girls guide to hunting and fishing, which i heard about a long time ago. i got it for $2 in cambridge yesterday, from a street vendor with way too many books. this book is interesting because it skips around but more so because it is funny in an offbeat, unplanned kind of way. which is the way a lot of my humor works so i like that. also, it's rather real in its vignettes -- like seeing a series of commercials, or getting the cliff notes version of a relationship (or series of them). it's mostly coherent, plus witty and insightful enough that i am devouring it. well that and just being a fast reader helps.
the protagonist in this one is a girl who grows up (at least at this point) to be an associate editor at a publishing house in NY. so of course i connect with this fairly well as a writer and someone who, at one point, could've gone that route herself.
i have thought that a couple times this weekend -- about what would've happened if we'd moved to NY like we talked about at one point, for grad school. so many paths my life could've taken. the astronomer, the engineer, the psychologist, sociologist, the recording engineer, producer, writer and journalist, and the one i fell into, the webhead. which works but the former and most persistent one, the writer, keeps rearing her pretty little head.
i know i will come to that eventually and by that i mean, give more of myself to it as time goes by but i must say i long for those days to come. when it envelops me more fully, like now. it makes me realise - remember? - how complete i feel inside myself. how i'd probably be fine with part time lovers rather than a wife, just due to my need for solitude. how much i actually enjoy it! enjoy and delight in these isolated forays, which then often lead me to writing.
but that is not the life i have. and there are many things i like, love about that life. things are going pretty well between the two of us. way better than they were. not perfect of course - what is - but sooo much better than before.
ok time to read. things are filling up around here, and jeez if i'm not surrounded by pp/eb employees! but that's amusing, too, in its own way.
so that's it. not too shabby really, especially considering i spent about $250 for the whole deal (not including the airfare, which was free to me). and in case you were wondering, i heart boston. for me, it was full of delightfully friendly people, wonderful food, rich history, gorgeous architecture, and i would go there again in a heartbeat. and thanks for slogging thru my recaps. ;-)
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