it's a long way down to the place where we started from

[ursamajor]

I think I am pretty much doomed to never catch up.

It was lovely to see Boston friends, walk around Fresh Pond with bitty and noghri, sip interesting Icelandic whiskies with mrieser, eat ice cream with arfur and his Chris and crschmidt, approve wedding attire for jpallan, catch up on life with bryghtrose and fes42 and Cris and Aaron and Liane. Put 50 miles on the bike I borrowed from the Camberville E-Bike Library, appreciate that there are fewer slow zones on the Red Line than the last time. Ride with the Peabody Bike Bus Friday morning; missed Keytar Bear performing on it by a couple of weeks due to a broken amp, but it was still utterly delightful biking through the streets of North Cambridge with dozens of kids pre-K up through middle school. Do a Camberville Pastry Tour (kumquat croissant from Formaggio, lemon meringue pie from Flour, peanut butter miso cookie and ube brownie from the just-opened Verveine, bourbon chocolate pecan pie from Petsi) that included getting lost enough on my way back from Huron Village to Arlington that I ended up at Sofra for a borekfast OH SHUCKSY DARN.

Finally get some time to spend in Boston proper, broke into the old apartment bike my way down the Esplanade into my old Fenway neighborhood where half those buildings didn't exist when I lived there and people were protesting the shadow the new luxury housing towers were going to cast on the existing four story brownstone and red brick apartments. Get caught in a downpour, take refuge at the Sausage Guy stand, SINCE WHEN HAVE FENWAY FRANKS BEEN $20 JFC, that used to be a $4 dinner for me on my way home from work. And then further down the C Line into Brookline where there is now an HMart and a Maruichi and the Brookline Booksmith is twice as big as it was the last time I was inside it (and also since when did Coolidge Corner get a Taco Bell Cantina, I thought Brookline hated chains?).

And then I get back Sunday afternoon and hyounpark greets me with "I said yes to performing at the Opera House this week, but I don't know if you've been checking your email, but I think they're assuming you're performing too because that's what happens when a married couple joins a choir?" Me: "A who in the what are we doing now?"

I'd thought our season was over. But our choral director got a last-minute call for us to close out a symposium on gun violence prevention and the role the arts can play in community healing, being done in conjunction with one of the operas San Francisco Opera is doing this season (Innocence) about the aftermath of a school shooting. So I went to Boston to recover from tech week and then came back into a surprise tech week, heh. Still very glad I did it, though. Afterwards, us singing in the stairwell of the Opera House, even more ethereal and better acoustics.

In the middle of that tech week, though, we had tickets for Sarah McLachlan at the Greek, and damn, I hope I still have those kind of pipes when I'm her age. I'd been expecting she was just going to do the songs off Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, but she began with a full set before that.

Feist opened; I only really knew her most popular songs, but it also gave me a chance to go by the merch table.

Feist Setlist, 5/30/24:
1. The Redwing
2. Mushaboom
3. My Moon My Man
4. The Circle Married the Line
5. The Bad in Each Other
6. Hiding Out in the Open
7. Forever Before
8. In Lightning
9. I Feel It All
10. 1234

Sarah McLachlan Setlist 5/30/24:
1. Sweet Surrender
2. Building a Mystery
3. I Will Remember You
4. Drifting
5. Song for My Father
6. World on Fire
7. Adia
8. Beautiful Girl
9. Answer
10. Witness
11. Possession
12. Wait
13. Plenty
14. Good Enough
15. Mary
16. Elsewhere
17. Circle
18. Ice
19. Hold On
20. Ice Cream which was basically a crowd singalong
21. Fear, HOLY GODDAMN the best song of the night hands down.
22. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
23. Gravity (new material)
24. Angel, and I thought for sure this was where she was going to surprise us all with "By coming to this concert, you have agreed to adopt a shelter animal, before you leave the theatre tonight the Berkeley Humane Society will introduce you to your new pet."

Somehow, this has become the month of shows - on top of our long-extant plans for SML, we saw The Lehman Trilogy last Saturday with CJ and Elana; for our part in singing in the symposium, we have tickets to go see Innocence next week; I have tickets for Iron and Wine at the Fox at the end of the month. And then my freshman year roommate messaged me a few days ago and was like, "Do you like Vampire Weekend? I've got an extra ticket for their show at the Greek." So definitely keeping busy!