I have just had what my sister calls a Brown Girls’ Day Out: she, my cousin and I have been trekking around the DC greater metropolitan area in search of shoes for the wedding, my bridesmaid dress, the mysteries of the Target tights section, and what I can only refer to as the Great IKEA Massacre of 2009. I can’t really talk about it, because I still don’t know quite what happened, but suddenly I found myself making for the checkout lines with a big yellow bag stuffed with $75 worth of repeating homewares.
I have no idea how I am going to get this back to Boston (not least because I still don’t know how I’m getting back, period – please note how efficient I am with the application of my fiscal priorities!), but my heart lifted a little bit at the idea that one could purchase, if not happiness, at least a little organization in a chaotic and lawless world.
17.1.09
just another roadside attraction
We are ensconced at a roadside diner after having been rousted out of bed far too early. When I look back on my visits to Washington, this is what I see in my mind’s eye: a constant stream of television and pizza delivery, eating out at “healthy” fast food places and shopping at big box stores. Waking too early and never ever opening windowshades. Drowning in brown microsuede. Whenever I come home, the textures of my own (decidedly not always healthy) life feel wholesome, grounding, a return to the values of the earth and my place on it.
I don’t own a television, and I cook most of my own food. There is a quiet dignity in this that can get lost among the constant barrage of Papa John’s and reality television, a constant striving and the choking belief of a certain type of American that if we watch enough other people better their lives, it will trickle down to ours and we will never even have to leave the couch. When I get home, there is a vital pleasure in bedding back down on my couch with a glass of water and some pasta or fish or soup or veggies I’ve just prepared, a new and promising recipe I’ve just tried, turning on Pandora and eating everything from fine white plates with dedicated silverware.
There is not much plastic in my home, and I hate eating with it. Everything is decanted onto nice plates (even Chipotle!) I couldn’t get through The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but what I took away from that book, and from my own struggles with food, is that it must be grounded in pleasure, in communication, in emotion and in healing. Feeding is not enough because existence is not enough – your food, like your daily life, should nourish.
This is an argument for a different day, though, and right now I am ordering flapjacks. They come, along with my scrambled eggs (almost assuredly from a carton) and my potato pancakes (the less said about these reconstituted potato chips, garnished pathetically with a meager twist of thick sour cream sealed in paper, the better). They are delivered by a cute waiter, who teases me about my vegetarianism (I fail to flirt back; I have my sensors firmly set to off with family), and I start thinking about how it feels to be working class in the District.
This is probably a sign of my own inner snobbery, but no matter what job I was doing, I’ve never fundamentally felt working class as such. I’ve felt more like a dilettante, moonlighting as a restaurant hostess or a call center employee but always looking onward, upward, ahead. I always found myself surrounded by a peculiar feeling of pretense and a slight shame, as if even by being there and doing a job that I didn’t need to pay my bills, I was spitting in the face of someone who might need the money to care for a sick child or make ends meet on a mortgage whose future is in doubt.
Now, though, I live on my own. My salary is paying all of my bills, and enabling me to save (a little bit). My rent is over 60% of my monthly income; living alone is an extravagance at the best of times, and in a city like Boston, it is always my biggest indulgence. Although not flat busted, I am frequently broke, and I joke that the percentage of living expenses puts me below the poverty line with a funny feeling that’s half self-mocking and half a wry admitting of the truth. But for those whose primary jobs are the sort of positions that people (me too?) look down on, I always wonder how they feel about things: their lives, their futures, their prospects, dreams and plans.
I go back and forth as to whether or not this is condescending. After all, our society is much more oriented towards curiosity about the rich. No one will ever successfully market a show entitled Lifestyles of the Lower Middle Class and Nondescript. But at the same time, it’s easy to be fascinated with rich people, especially the sort who splash up on those shows. The extravagance, the luxury, the expense, and most of all the waste: it’s interesting, or at least it makes for good thirty minute exposés.
What I find more fascinating, absolutely compelling, is the idea of living with dignity when titles or money or prestige doesn’t make it easy for you to swan through life never having to trudge through snow (a subject that is sore on my mind of late). I guess I’ve always been curious about the things that don’t get studied, that don’t get seen. While other people stare at male peacocks, I am mesmerized by the million different subtleties in the females’ quiet shades of brown. It is breathtaking, and it is ignored, and it is beautiful in a way that feels richer, deeper, more subtle and honest, inscrutable and true.
So I stare at my waiter. I wonder what he’s doing for the inauguration. I wonder if he’s happy, if he’s sad. I wonder about his accent, and I want to point out that even though my sister’s fiancée is attempting to stiff him on the tip and that makes our entire group seem over-privileged and entitled, we are closer than we seem. We are all immigrants, or first generation Americans. We are all striving, rising upwards or drifting sideways but moving, being ruminated upon by the great thoughtful cow that is our country now. We are working through the stomachs; we are being tried by tiny everyday fires. We are compelled to believe that we will reach the other side washed clean.
I don’t own a television, and I cook most of my own food. There is a quiet dignity in this that can get lost among the constant barrage of Papa John’s and reality television, a constant striving and the choking belief of a certain type of American that if we watch enough other people better their lives, it will trickle down to ours and we will never even have to leave the couch. When I get home, there is a vital pleasure in bedding back down on my couch with a glass of water and some pasta or fish or soup or veggies I’ve just prepared, a new and promising recipe I’ve just tried, turning on Pandora and eating everything from fine white plates with dedicated silverware.
There is not much plastic in my home, and I hate eating with it. Everything is decanted onto nice plates (even Chipotle!) I couldn’t get through The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but what I took away from that book, and from my own struggles with food, is that it must be grounded in pleasure, in communication, in emotion and in healing. Feeding is not enough because existence is not enough – your food, like your daily life, should nourish.
This is an argument for a different day, though, and right now I am ordering flapjacks. They come, along with my scrambled eggs (almost assuredly from a carton) and my potato pancakes (the less said about these reconstituted potato chips, garnished pathetically with a meager twist of thick sour cream sealed in paper, the better). They are delivered by a cute waiter, who teases me about my vegetarianism (I fail to flirt back; I have my sensors firmly set to off with family), and I start thinking about how it feels to be working class in the District.
This is probably a sign of my own inner snobbery, but no matter what job I was doing, I’ve never fundamentally felt working class as such. I’ve felt more like a dilettante, moonlighting as a restaurant hostess or a call center employee but always looking onward, upward, ahead. I always found myself surrounded by a peculiar feeling of pretense and a slight shame, as if even by being there and doing a job that I didn’t need to pay my bills, I was spitting in the face of someone who might need the money to care for a sick child or make ends meet on a mortgage whose future is in doubt.
Now, though, I live on my own. My salary is paying all of my bills, and enabling me to save (a little bit). My rent is over 60% of my monthly income; living alone is an extravagance at the best of times, and in a city like Boston, it is always my biggest indulgence. Although not flat busted, I am frequently broke, and I joke that the percentage of living expenses puts me below the poverty line with a funny feeling that’s half self-mocking and half a wry admitting of the truth. But for those whose primary jobs are the sort of positions that people (me too?) look down on, I always wonder how they feel about things: their lives, their futures, their prospects, dreams and plans.
I go back and forth as to whether or not this is condescending. After all, our society is much more oriented towards curiosity about the rich. No one will ever successfully market a show entitled Lifestyles of the Lower Middle Class and Nondescript. But at the same time, it’s easy to be fascinated with rich people, especially the sort who splash up on those shows. The extravagance, the luxury, the expense, and most of all the waste: it’s interesting, or at least it makes for good thirty minute exposés.
What I find more fascinating, absolutely compelling, is the idea of living with dignity when titles or money or prestige doesn’t make it easy for you to swan through life never having to trudge through snow (a subject that is sore on my mind of late). I guess I’ve always been curious about the things that don’t get studied, that don’t get seen. While other people stare at male peacocks, I am mesmerized by the million different subtleties in the females’ quiet shades of brown. It is breathtaking, and it is ignored, and it is beautiful in a way that feels richer, deeper, more subtle and honest, inscrutable and true.
So I stare at my waiter. I wonder what he’s doing for the inauguration. I wonder if he’s happy, if he’s sad. I wonder about his accent, and I want to point out that even though my sister’s fiancée is attempting to stiff him on the tip and that makes our entire group seem over-privileged and entitled, we are closer than we seem. We are all immigrants, or first generation Americans. We are all striving, rising upwards or drifting sideways but moving, being ruminated upon by the great thoughtful cow that is our country now. We are working through the stomachs; we are being tried by tiny everyday fires. We are compelled to believe that we will reach the other side washed clean.
i can't be cold anymore
When the bus pulled up to the corner of 11th and G, I was already calling my sister to find out where she was. I had told her our estimated time of arrival (12:15), so when we pulled in at 12:20 I was already dourly calculating the fact that no one in my family bothers to be on time to pick other people up when they are traveling except for me. I’m spoiled, I suppose; between Couchsurfers and friends, there is someone to meet me at the end of a journey about 70% of the time. And I appreciate it: the smiling face, the way that you can reorient yourself to your new environs by the reassuring compass of someone else’s surety in their city.
This is why, when my sister said “We’re ten minutes away – you’ll be fine,” I was sincerely unamused. It was midnight on one of the coldest nights of the year.
I found myself huddling in the revolving doors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library. (DC is a city of remembrances; in some ways this inaugural is only notable because of the sheer numbers of people who recognize its weight and heft and are here to stitch a piece of this quilt of history.) I hate revolving doors – ever since an incident in seventh grade when I went on a swim team trip to Atlanta and cracked my ribs in the revolving door of the newly constructed Olympic swimming pool, they have been revealed to me as the unforgiving instruments of danger and cruelty that they are.
These were particularly cruel because they weren’t going anywhere; the library had been closed for hours, and the best the large V of the doors was doing for me was providing a shelter for me – and the wind – to get cozy and become better acquainted. While I was getting felt up by the bitter cold, I was also getting increasingly wrathful.
Who the fuck does she think she is to decide that I’ll be fine waiting out in the cold because she can’t be bothered to get off her ass and come get me on time? I stamped my foot. My hereditary lack of timeliness is something shared by all of my family members, and seems to stem from a mistaken belief that nothing will ever happen until it’s already happening: the beginning of a party, the arrival of a loved one, the departure of a plane. No matter how far away you are from someone who is supposed to picking you up, neither my sister nor either of my parents can ever be bothered to leave wherever they are until you’ve already arrived.
Re-living all those years of being the last kid to get picked up from daycare was bad enough, but I was also freezing. My sister knows all about the problems I’ve been having with seasonal depressions. She knows about my persistent anemia and the biological difficulty I have generating my own warmth (to wit: I can’t do it. My poor functioning blood cells are seriously overloaded, schlepping all the iron and hemoglobin they can, and they do it slowly. When cut I bleed slowly, and the blood is almost always heavy, under-oxygenated and an ominous looking garnet. My body works, after a fashion, but it’s the fashion of a German housewife. It’s efficient, but not fast or flashy, and it doesn’t have time for spare frills such as excess heating).
She knew how much I needed this weekend to be an escape from everything that was troubling me in Boston, and, most unforgivably: she knew what time she needed to leave her house to pick me up when I arrived. She knew all of this, and she ignored it. Impotent tears of rage began streaming down my face. Horrified, I tried to make them stop. No dice. Twenty minutes after I got off the bus, my sister finally bothered to make an appearance, at which point I tumbled into the car with the full nervous collapse I’d begun on a downtown street corner of a strange town in media res.
Back at the house, after tea and a good cry and apologies (which secretly I found completely inadequate, but I was too much of a mess to yell the way I would have hoped: probably a good thing, as it gave the weekend the chance to start on a slightly better foot than it would otherwise have gotten), I contemplated myself. I was in DC.
The city is saturated with legend and time, and yet every time I get here I can’t shake the sense that its inhabitants affords themselves a sense of gravitas and importance that they’ve lost, devolving into bad haircuts, staid ugly pantsuits, platitudes mouthed that they no longer believe and an endless stifling of the fact that everyone here has risen to power by wielding either money or their own desperate need to be loved – or, failing that, remembered.
Our capital is accommodating in that sense. There is more than enough history for everyone’s follies, foibles, and feats of greatness to be remembered, and everyone who lives here is a custodian of some part of that history, dusting it for their mantels, pulling it out for tea with visiting poor relations from less enlightened corners of the globe. I feel that it’s a fundamentally unhealthy place. If New York is thin, sprinkled with celebrities, models, and the botoxed old ladies who strive to emulate them, Washington is corpulent and marbled, full of wattles, receding hairlines, poor table manners and infarctions waiting to erupt, possibly while on top of a prostitute from the wrong side of the tracks (Baltimore plays this willing role).
But even the grizzled, sweaty, crude and cynical heart of Washington is stirring this weekend. I’m fascinated by the prospect of a president who delights in both words and movement, playing with both of them for satisfaction and pleasure rather than because making speeches and not being obese are two things presidents are supposed to do to keep their power, consolidate it, and pass it on when they go like an ever more battered, ever less desirable baton. It occurs to me that Barack Obama himself is both extremely embodied and highly intellectual; when it comes to finding role models, I could certainly do worse. I’m excited to see what the weekend will bring me, how it will feel, what I’ll hear and see. I go to sleep weary and ragged, but hopeful. This is the start of the reason why all of us came.
This is why, when my sister said “We’re ten minutes away – you’ll be fine,” I was sincerely unamused. It was midnight on one of the coldest nights of the year.
I found myself huddling in the revolving doors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library. (DC is a city of remembrances; in some ways this inaugural is only notable because of the sheer numbers of people who recognize its weight and heft and are here to stitch a piece of this quilt of history.) I hate revolving doors – ever since an incident in seventh grade when I went on a swim team trip to Atlanta and cracked my ribs in the revolving door of the newly constructed Olympic swimming pool, they have been revealed to me as the unforgiving instruments of danger and cruelty that they are.
These were particularly cruel because they weren’t going anywhere; the library had been closed for hours, and the best the large V of the doors was doing for me was providing a shelter for me – and the wind – to get cozy and become better acquainted. While I was getting felt up by the bitter cold, I was also getting increasingly wrathful.
Who the fuck does she think she is to decide that I’ll be fine waiting out in the cold because she can’t be bothered to get off her ass and come get me on time? I stamped my foot. My hereditary lack of timeliness is something shared by all of my family members, and seems to stem from a mistaken belief that nothing will ever happen until it’s already happening: the beginning of a party, the arrival of a loved one, the departure of a plane. No matter how far away you are from someone who is supposed to picking you up, neither my sister nor either of my parents can ever be bothered to leave wherever they are until you’ve already arrived.
Re-living all those years of being the last kid to get picked up from daycare was bad enough, but I was also freezing. My sister knows all about the problems I’ve been having with seasonal depressions. She knows about my persistent anemia and the biological difficulty I have generating my own warmth (to wit: I can’t do it. My poor functioning blood cells are seriously overloaded, schlepping all the iron and hemoglobin they can, and they do it slowly. When cut I bleed slowly, and the blood is almost always heavy, under-oxygenated and an ominous looking garnet. My body works, after a fashion, but it’s the fashion of a German housewife. It’s efficient, but not fast or flashy, and it doesn’t have time for spare frills such as excess heating).
She knew how much I needed this weekend to be an escape from everything that was troubling me in Boston, and, most unforgivably: she knew what time she needed to leave her house to pick me up when I arrived. She knew all of this, and she ignored it. Impotent tears of rage began streaming down my face. Horrified, I tried to make them stop. No dice. Twenty minutes after I got off the bus, my sister finally bothered to make an appearance, at which point I tumbled into the car with the full nervous collapse I’d begun on a downtown street corner of a strange town in media res.
Back at the house, after tea and a good cry and apologies (which secretly I found completely inadequate, but I was too much of a mess to yell the way I would have hoped: probably a good thing, as it gave the weekend the chance to start on a slightly better foot than it would otherwise have gotten), I contemplated myself. I was in DC.
The city is saturated with legend and time, and yet every time I get here I can’t shake the sense that its inhabitants affords themselves a sense of gravitas and importance that they’ve lost, devolving into bad haircuts, staid ugly pantsuits, platitudes mouthed that they no longer believe and an endless stifling of the fact that everyone here has risen to power by wielding either money or their own desperate need to be loved – or, failing that, remembered.
Our capital is accommodating in that sense. There is more than enough history for everyone’s follies, foibles, and feats of greatness to be remembered, and everyone who lives here is a custodian of some part of that history, dusting it for their mantels, pulling it out for tea with visiting poor relations from less enlightened corners of the globe. I feel that it’s a fundamentally unhealthy place. If New York is thin, sprinkled with celebrities, models, and the botoxed old ladies who strive to emulate them, Washington is corpulent and marbled, full of wattles, receding hairlines, poor table manners and infarctions waiting to erupt, possibly while on top of a prostitute from the wrong side of the tracks (Baltimore plays this willing role).
But even the grizzled, sweaty, crude and cynical heart of Washington is stirring this weekend. I’m fascinated by the prospect of a president who delights in both words and movement, playing with both of them for satisfaction and pleasure rather than because making speeches and not being obese are two things presidents are supposed to do to keep their power, consolidate it, and pass it on when they go like an ever more battered, ever less desirable baton. It occurs to me that Barack Obama himself is both extremely embodied and highly intellectual; when it comes to finding role models, I could certainly do worse. I’m excited to see what the weekend will bring me, how it will feel, what I’ll hear and see. I go to sleep weary and ragged, but hopeful. This is the start of the reason why all of us came.
16.1.09
taking its wear
This time when I got on the bus, I was one of the last people on. I didn’t get to really pick my seat, which is how I ended up in front of a line of four first year lawyers at a firm. Their conversation reminds me of the people my sister went to high school with. Her private prep school was filled with the sort of people whose money makes them interesting to others, and especially to each other, so they’ve never had to come to terms with the fact that they are entirely stultifying. My seatmate, though, is an improvement.
I sat down and he seemed gruff, rude, slightly put upon – in short, the average New Yorker. But as the bus drove deeper into night, and people started to bed down, a little miracle happened.
Having lived alone again for a little while, and slept alone for even longer than that, I forgot the funny tenderness that happens when other people fall asleep close to you. The tensions that their faces let go of, the abandon with which their muscles twitch and settle, the warmth and peace they radiate, the inadvertent but fundamental desire we all have to protect each other’s slumber. The wheels of Mr. Taylor’s bus are going round and round, drawing us closer and closer to a city whose heart is set to grow two sizes on Tuesday, and I find myself consumed with the understanding that, just for a little while, just while we are all together, we will all be keeping each other safe.
I sat down and he seemed gruff, rude, slightly put upon – in short, the average New Yorker. But as the bus drove deeper into night, and people started to bed down, a little miracle happened.
Having lived alone again for a little while, and slept alone for even longer than that, I forgot the funny tenderness that happens when other people fall asleep close to you. The tensions that their faces let go of, the abandon with which their muscles twitch and settle, the warmth and peace they radiate, the inadvertent but fundamental desire we all have to protect each other’s slumber. The wheels of Mr. Taylor’s bus are going round and round, drawing us closer and closer to a city whose heart is set to grow two sizes on Tuesday, and I find myself consumed with the understanding that, just for a little while, just while we are all together, we will all be keeping each other safe.
I hate New York
My thirty-nine minutes in the city went just the way they always do: angry recriminations, missing the necessary train, subway ticket machines not taking my debit cards, being surrounded by a depressing underworld of grime, coming out of the subway and immediately getting lost, and the inevitable meltdown on a street corner, roaring “I hate New York! I hate this fucking city!!!!!!” at anyone or anything who will listen, and care, and think of a way to get me out.
Nine times out of ten, that person is my lovely friend Daniel, who gets all excited to see me and makes all kinds of plans and then is always on the receiving end of my livid telephone invective. Daniel, I’ve apologized and I’m always apologizing for this, but I hate that I do this and I’m going to apologize again. While your city returns me to a primal state in which I am the embodiment of anger (and then I always end up crying a little bit – every time!), seeing you for three minutes as we hustled to the Bolt bus was one of the higher points of my trip.
Now I am on the bus and Mr. Taylor, our new angry bus driver, is much more fun than the last one. Excerpt.
Nine times out of ten, that person is my lovely friend Daniel, who gets all excited to see me and makes all kinds of plans and then is always on the receiving end of my livid telephone invective. Daniel, I’ve apologized and I’m always apologizing for this, but I hate that I do this and I’m going to apologize again. While your city returns me to a primal state in which I am the embodiment of anger (and then I always end up crying a little bit – every time!), seeing you for three minutes as we hustled to the Bolt bus was one of the higher points of my trip.
Now I am on the bus and Mr. Taylor, our new angry bus driver, is much more fun than the last one. Excerpt.
Ladies and Gentlemen: there is no smoking and no alcoholic beverages on the Bolt bus. If you’ve already had you a little nip of something, just take you a nap and go to sleep so you don’t disturb nobody.But after all that gruffness, he let a girl on the bus as we were coming around the corner to leave New York; she ran up waving her ticket, terrified she was going to lose her place on the chariot of fire and lightning bearing us all out of that festering hell, the city that never sleeps. He opened the doors. That was my first experience this weekend with grace.
Also, there are two trashcans on the bus: one in the front, one in the back. The last crowd of folks on the bus, maybe they didn’t understand English so good. There is now Chex Mix on the bus, and I’m quite sure that there are passengers sitting in it. Think of the people after you. Clean up your trash.
And one other thing: I will be stopping once, at the Maryland house, for 20 minutes. You need to get back on this bus in 20 minutes, or you will be chasing me down 95 to board.
bolt bus confidential
Oh my. So I’ve spent the trip down creeping on Craigslist and planning exciting outings with Daniel Mulé upon my arrival in New York – which is getting pushed back by the minute because our conductor (or, as I like to think of him, the PTSDriver) took a “shortcut” and is now well on his way to possible vehicular manslaughter at every corner. Some notable outbursts include:
- The time he rolled through the crosswalk like a ton of bricks while running a red light. A pedestrian attempted to exercise her right of way. He screeched past her with the observation “You must have an ass made of rubber!”
- We attempt to make a left turn from the center lane. A car in the left lane gets visibly irate.
PTSDriver: Too bad; I get to go first. I’m bigger!
Female passenger in front of bus (clearly tipsy and therefore unheeding of our danger): Yes you are!
PTSDriver: That’s what she said.
For distraction from his raginess, I can always indulge myself in my seatmate. When I sat down next to him, he was already half asleep, and I congratulated myself on having picked someone who would be quiet and unassuming (after my trip to Vermont, when I found myself trapped next to an old lady who went on for an hour and a half about how horrible George Bush was and how Barack was going to save the whales and change the world, I have given up on bus chatting).
Unfortunately, he got a phone call two hours into the trip, and this was when the quality of my life went quickly downhill. He is a redheaded Canadian dentistry student at Harvard who is clearly as fascinated with his own life as I am disinterested to hear about Canadian dentristry boards and undergraduates and facial surgery – in detail – the horror! Sadly, his fascination with the world seems to extend to me as well, as he is avidly reading everything on my computer screen over my shoulder between bouts of eating unfortunately pungent food and surreptitiously picking his nose.
(Do you really believe that no one notices these things? I would appreciate a public service announcement pointing out that the nose, floating orphaned as it is in the middle of the face, is not a place you end up in by accident. You book the flight, pack your carryon, and, either furtively or brazenly, end up in your nose.)
In between my dreams of a private car service to deliver me from the more irritating pieces of public transportation, I am looking out on the streets of New York and daring to hope that maybe this time will be different. Maybe I won’t end up rage filled, cold and sorrowful just like every other time I’ve visited (even that time I came in August! I was all geared up to brave the legendary, un-air-conditioned heat of Manhattan in the summertime, and then it was raining and 50 degrees for the entire week. My summer dresses and flip flops were only not laughable because I was so determined to conjure up sunshine with the power of positive thinking, but all that hope I poured into the city eventually crystallized into the fundamental elements of the diamond nugget of hate for New York that I’ve nurtured ever since). Maybe I will meet up with Daniel, and we will have a lovely cup of something warm, and the city will reveal its inner loveliness to me after all.
- The time he rolled through the crosswalk like a ton of bricks while running a red light. A pedestrian attempted to exercise her right of way. He screeched past her with the observation “You must have an ass made of rubber!”
- We attempt to make a left turn from the center lane. A car in the left lane gets visibly irate.
PTSDriver: Too bad; I get to go first. I’m bigger!
Female passenger in front of bus (clearly tipsy and therefore unheeding of our danger): Yes you are!
PTSDriver: That’s what she said.
For distraction from his raginess, I can always indulge myself in my seatmate. When I sat down next to him, he was already half asleep, and I congratulated myself on having picked someone who would be quiet and unassuming (after my trip to Vermont, when I found myself trapped next to an old lady who went on for an hour and a half about how horrible George Bush was and how Barack was going to save the whales and change the world, I have given up on bus chatting).
Unfortunately, he got a phone call two hours into the trip, and this was when the quality of my life went quickly downhill. He is a redheaded Canadian dentistry student at Harvard who is clearly as fascinated with his own life as I am disinterested to hear about Canadian dentristry boards and undergraduates and facial surgery – in detail – the horror! Sadly, his fascination with the world seems to extend to me as well, as he is avidly reading everything on my computer screen over my shoulder between bouts of eating unfortunately pungent food and surreptitiously picking his nose.
(Do you really believe that no one notices these things? I would appreciate a public service announcement pointing out that the nose, floating orphaned as it is in the middle of the face, is not a place you end up in by accident. You book the flight, pack your carryon, and, either furtively or brazenly, end up in your nose.)
In between my dreams of a private car service to deliver me from the more irritating pieces of public transportation, I am looking out on the streets of New York and daring to hope that maybe this time will be different. Maybe I won’t end up rage filled, cold and sorrowful just like every other time I’ve visited (even that time I came in August! I was all geared up to brave the legendary, un-air-conditioned heat of Manhattan in the summertime, and then it was raining and 50 degrees for the entire week. My summer dresses and flip flops were only not laughable because I was so determined to conjure up sunshine with the power of positive thinking, but all that hope I poured into the city eventually crystallized into the fundamental elements of the diamond nugget of hate for New York that I’ve nurtured ever since). Maybe I will meet up with Daniel, and we will have a lovely cup of something warm, and the city will reveal its inner loveliness to me after all.
obama weekend!
Today was my boss Jack’s first day back from vacation. (So of course I was 45 minutes late to work instead of my usual 15 – it’s cause I’m classy.) I alternately love and am extremely harassed by the days when he’s just gotten back after a long absence. Things get done when Jack is around; orders get placed, meetings are had, professors who have been dodging us for weeks suddenly misplace their resistance to returning emails and the floodgates of interview and revision information open once again.
On the other hand: after two weeks of listlessly surfing the internet all day, I now have four hours to remind my boss how useful and productive I am before hopping on a bus and making history. Three and a quarter hours, actually – my usual brand of punctuality is not serving me particularly well today.
I spent most of the day running around like a chicken with its head cut off, breaking to eat a fifteen minute lunch, then lining everything up, putting on my cold weather armor, leaving the building before running back to cram an oversized set of headphones into my purse in anticipation of the Pandora on the Bolt bus’ internetwork, and hopping on the Red Line to South Station.
When I arrive in line for my first bus, to New York, a slim, angry man who emanates militaristic psychosis starts yelling about how people waiting for the 3 o’clock bus need to step back! Step back! This is the line for the 2:30 bus only! Not being particularly drawn to rage, I step aside and avert my eyes – bad move, as this gives him the opportunity to give me the full up and down not once, but twice (peripheral vision is both a blessing and a curse – people are frequently disgusting in the margins when they think they can’t be seen), then step up and start trying to flirt. After an awkward, why are you touching me? And now? And have you noticed that your hand is still on my arm? exchange, I board the bus, dismayed to find that he is in fact my driver, and then we’re off.
I’m happy to be leaving Boston. It was a little sad to pack up my apartment this morning; I always miss it when I have to go away. I feel like it’s a person I’m neglecting ; after all, I greet it every evening when I come home from work. (“Hello, apartment!” I’m lucky my nearer neighbors are not unduly prone to passing judgment, or they’d have had me committed around November.) But the weather, and the routine, and the sense of motion rather than movement in my life – flailing, to be precise – mean that getting on this bus and going to An Event is breathing a little bit of wind back into my sails. As the bus gathers speed and heads south on 93, it feels slightly valedictory, but also like a tentative beginning.
On the other hand: after two weeks of listlessly surfing the internet all day, I now have four hours to remind my boss how useful and productive I am before hopping on a bus and making history. Three and a quarter hours, actually – my usual brand of punctuality is not serving me particularly well today.
I spent most of the day running around like a chicken with its head cut off, breaking to eat a fifteen minute lunch, then lining everything up, putting on my cold weather armor, leaving the building before running back to cram an oversized set of headphones into my purse in anticipation of the Pandora on the Bolt bus’ internetwork, and hopping on the Red Line to South Station.
When I arrive in line for my first bus, to New York, a slim, angry man who emanates militaristic psychosis starts yelling about how people waiting for the 3 o’clock bus need to step back! Step back! This is the line for the 2:30 bus only! Not being particularly drawn to rage, I step aside and avert my eyes – bad move, as this gives him the opportunity to give me the full up and down not once, but twice (peripheral vision is both a blessing and a curse – people are frequently disgusting in the margins when they think they can’t be seen), then step up and start trying to flirt. After an awkward, why are you touching me? And now? And have you noticed that your hand is still on my arm? exchange, I board the bus, dismayed to find that he is in fact my driver, and then we’re off.
I’m happy to be leaving Boston. It was a little sad to pack up my apartment this morning; I always miss it when I have to go away. I feel like it’s a person I’m neglecting ; after all, I greet it every evening when I come home from work. (“Hello, apartment!” I’m lucky my nearer neighbors are not unduly prone to passing judgment, or they’d have had me committed around November.) But the weather, and the routine, and the sense of motion rather than movement in my life – flailing, to be precise – mean that getting on this bus and going to An Event is breathing a little bit of wind back into my sails. As the bus gathers speed and heads south on 93, it feels slightly valedictory, but also like a tentative beginning.
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