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Happy Reverse-The-Curse-iversary, friends!

20 years ago tonight, I made sure to miss the requisite two innings of the final game of the 2004 World Series by going out to dinner with friends to celebrate mrieser's birthday (at Dali, stuffing ourselves on queso rebozado con miel and albondigas de cordero and gambas con ajo). When it was all over, the Sox had neatly swept the Cards under the ruddy glow of a total lunar eclipse, and amid the utter chaos in the streets of metro Boston, I stared up at the moon and smiled peacefully, overwhelmed by all the changes in my life in the preceding weeks, but once again believing that change could bring good things, too, if I just had faith. And patience.

(The part where, uh, memerath and Mel called me from Davis Square to try to get me to come out to the bar to celebrate and I turned them down for alternative activities (🔒), well, chalk it up to twentysomething shenanigans. Oh, younger self. :) )

(Original post.)

Blah blah blah unprecedented, I'm coping with this latest political upheaval with jokes the way I usually do. One of the memes going around basically looks like:

Ryan: Holy shit
Ryan: Biden out
Kenneth: WHAT
Willa: as gay???😱😱

Me to hyounpark: "Oh, please, he's gotta be *bi*, it's literally in his name, badumtish!"

So of course I repost this to my Instagram story. And I like putting music on my stories because I usually add commentary when I'm sharing someone else's post, and I tend to add too much commentary for anyone to read in the default five-second display. But adding music to a story extends the display to 15 seconds.

Which means that in hunting for an appropriate bisexual-themed song to include, I have just discovered the existence of Linnea's Garden, and their delightful song Chaotic Bisexual Summer.



And it will be stuck in my head for the rest of the year. Camberville locals, they're Boston-based, and playing concerts over the next few weeks at State Park and the Middle East :)

Huh, I guess I am not very good at posting on Leap Day, historically - despite having shared my life with people online for close to three decades now, I only have one Facebook memory on a Leap Day (and not even by me at that, tagged by bitty), and zero public social media or blog posts on a Leap Day AFAICT. (Twitter and Instagram do not make it easy to navigate your archives.) So to make up for that, here's my history of Leap Days as far back as I have any kind of records and/or memories that have persisted to the present day. It will surprise nobody that what I ate made it into the record at least half the time 😁

( memory hole )

2004: It was a Sunday, and I was both performing at Carnegie Hall and meeting noghri's mother for the first time (🔒). (Both our families were meeting because my parents flew out to see me perform! In case anyone wondered why I was an utter harried mess at the time?) There was dim sum and The Lion King on Broadway as well! And then post-concert chocolate cake with mamdvany and elemmire7 and fractalspackle :)

( okay more memory hole )

So I guess that makes today my 12th Leap Day and my first fully-pandemic Leap Day, as 2020 was basically just before it all went to hell. Nothing special planned; need to do a bunch of laundry and write a newsletter and get ready for Saturday's songwriting retreat. I feel like I should hunt down some Quantum Leap and watch a good episode or something.

Any of you all doing anything special today? Have any traditions you observe for Leap Day?

Boston is well-known for its large student population. I think the latest numbers have 350,000 students living in the metro Boston area, with something like 150,000 students living in the city of Boston proper (which only has a population of about 650,000 people total). Boston University alone has 35,000 students, many of whom live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

Moving Day is September 1, when A. Lot. of these apartments turn over their leases. It's a great time to go get Free Stuff, Especially Furniture, if you're one of the lucky ones sticking around for another year; this is how it got the name Allston Christmas. I took advantage of it during my early-twenty-something years living nearby in the Fenway, hauling coffee tables and end tables and folding bookcases home on the T and then up to my third-floor walkup. (Never upholstered stuff, though, no matter what!)

Discovering that SOMEBODY IS MAKING A ROMCOM MOVIE ABOUT ALLSTON CHRISTMAS?! Utterly, utterly delights me. :D (And the Allston Christmas Story IndieGoGo is still open for another couple of days.)

"“An Allston Christmas Story” is a love letter to our city, written with the trappings of a campy Hallmark movie and traces of the supernatural. Three intertwined stories follow our Bostonians as they navigate the mean streets of Allston and their own relationships. Join us on this journey about love, heartbreak, loss, friendship, cursed furniture, and making it to the basement show on time!"

What belongs on a Boston bucket list? Like, despite having lived here for nearly two decades, I have still never walked the Freedom Trail, even though living in Boston is what’s turned me into a walker, and a biker. But I’ve walked out to Castle Island, around Jamaica Pond, through the Middlesex Fells and the Blue Hills, down Comm Ave and up the Greenway, Mass Ave nearly end to end, through the Harvard campus more times than I can count (though I can still get lost at MIT), from downtown to Fenway Park on multiple game nights where I didn't feel like cramming myself into the sardine can known as the Green Line. I’ve navigated Somerville by specific Bathtub Marys, and greater Boston by specific Dunks. I've biked on Storrow Drive and out to Bedford on the Minuteman and pretty much most places in between; kayaked along the Charles, and swum in Walden Pond and the Mystic Lakes and the Res; ice skated on Frog Pond and under the lights of Kendall Square. And, well, fallen on my ass multiple times because black ice and long New England winters. Heh.

( a love letter to Boston because I'm a creature of nostalgia )

I've made my home in triple-decker Victorians, Federalist brick and brownstone, the top floor of a Queen Anne where H and I learned to dub birds "those CHIRP CHIRP MOTHERFUCKERS" because they would wake us up at 3 am in the summer, a duplex close enough to the Minuteman I could constantly watch our neighbors stream by on bikes, even on the couch of the Cambridgeport Commune for a couple of months. And now, after two decades in Boston, two dozen years in New England, and too many cubic yards of snow shoveled, our time here is drawing to a close; in August, we are moving to the Bay Area.



We'll still be (long) walking distance to the train; I'll still bike to local farmers' markets. I'll add more swimming to the mix; H will add more hills to his half-marathon training, but still be able to run on a bike path near our new place. I already have a spreadsheet entitled "Bay Area Farmers Markets and Independent Bookstores," and we have a plan to identify the best pizza places nearby so we can find our go-to as quickly as possible. We will miss all you locals dearly, but we will be back. Just not in, say, January. ;)

Bay Area friends, I'm sure I'll have questions for you about the practicalities of this new life we're trying out. For now, I'm looking forward to seeing more of you all starting in August!

And yep, we're driving across. 90 most of the way, then detouring a bit to avoid the worst heat of Nevada in summer the best we can. (Neither of us are Burning Man candidates, I'm afraid. :) ) Highlights we hope to hit: Cedar Point, the Dane County Farmers' Market, Yellowstone; other things TBD, hopefully many of them kitschy, delicious, and/or beautiful. Any recs from those of you who've done this before? We'll have most of two weeks to do this.

Tall, taller, tower.

post-tags: instagram, crosspost Chiaroscuro.

Ducked out in their Easter and Marathon finery.

This has been the strangest week ever.

4/15: Holy crap, apparently bombs went off at the Marathon finish line? "Mass casualty event"?! (Right now getting most of my info from UHub. Nothing on boston.com yet.)

Have heard from friends who'd gone down to watch that they're okay. Parker was there; is okay, but is in lockdown with the rest of the sports press right now.

4/16: I first heard about it because friends who were there posted to Facebook, and then I looked over at Twitter and my feeds went from "Yay Ethiopians!" and "I just had the grossest lunch ever" and "So, who else is falling asleep at their desk?" to "Holy crap, explosions!" and "I'm okay!" and "Bostonians, please check in!" in the space of about 10 minutes. I was incredibly grateful yesterday for people adopting these "always connected" technologies and using them to share that they were okay - only a decade ago, when things like this happened, we had to write up check-in tools ourselves; today, they're well-established.

You can't possibly secure a marathon course the same way you secure a sporting event at a stadium. The whole point is that it's a community event, especially in Boston - you can decide to wander down to the finish line at any point, walk away to get lunch after seeing the winners, come back to cheer on the charity racers, watch from your office building and get so caught up in the excitement that you decide to skip out of work for half an hour to join the festivities. And the crowd size and density. Especially at the finish line, sidewalks packed full of specators between buildings and fences, very little room to move quickly and freely. Really easy to drive up the casualty numbers - two small bombs in that densely populated of a space sent almost 200 (per the Times) people to the hospital.

4/18: The "blame all brown Americans" bullshit continues. Just like the aftermath of 9/11. Learning from history, not us.

4/19, 7:39 am: Staying home. Staying safe. Baking cookies. Maybe getting some sleep at some point, because obviously didn't get much last night. Glad Watertown peeps are checking in confirming they're keeping their asses at home, too.

I think the "shit is REAL"-est part to me is hearing that Harvard has closed, because they NEVER close. They've even shut down the taxis and Hubway, in addition to THE ENTIRE MBTFREAKINGA, Amtrak, the airport and a no-fly zone, it wouldn't surprise me if they blocked off private cars driving down there.

9:25 pm: I am so grateful for all of our protectors, but I'm especially in admiration right now of the negotiator who convinced the guy to give himself up consciously. That takes mad skills.

4/21: hyounpark is pretty unambiguously Korean-looking, and there were definitely points throughout this week when crazies were about a step away from linking East Asian appearance with "tairism," thanks a lot Kim Jong Un and the American media for overhype and buying into it. :P And I'm ambiguous-looking enough for us both to be worried about me as well. And an Indian-American friend of mine was at Sonsie on Newbury last night and got yelled at by a worker there to "go back to his country." HE WAS BORN IN CLEVELAND, YOU DIPSHIT. Besides which, coverage of the victims has focused on the Boston-born, while people stumble to pronounce Lu Lingzi. (Lu Lingzi: 38,700 results. Krystle Campbell, 68,900 results. Martin Richard, 115,000 results.)

But yeah, we did not feel the desire to go out Friday night to join in the celebrations, partly because old and lazy, partly because depending on whether or not we had white-appearing "chaperones" possibility of racist stupidity, especially given all the alcohol involved in any likely place of celebration.

I really, really need to get my DAR card, because rubbing it in the faces of all these racist assholes and the system that supports them? Sheer beauty, even if futile-feeling.

happy birthday, kelbelle and bubba!

i like this feeling i have of living in a neighborhood ever since i moved back to somerville. i guess that's not precisely the right word that i'm looking for, since it's a very different feel from when i lived in the fenway, which was quite a character. there, you had the awesome little restaurants on peterborough, a little bigbox mall close by with a movie theatre and an awesome art supply store, fenway park with all the cheers and jeers inherent to living four blocks away from america's most revered ballpark, and walking distance to back bay which meant many evenings rather than deal with fenway traffic on the bus or an overheated D train, i'd simply walk home from there.

it's not that i don't have amenities nearby in camberville - porter square a ten minute walk away, harvard square under twenty, all the restaurants of mass ave close by, the fifteen (fifteen!) independent bookstores within spitting distance, a supermarket three doors down, a pie shop four doors down, and kitty corner from some of the best deli sammiches and burgers in the area. but yesterday afternoon, i walked down to jen civ's for a barbecue. melissaagray walked; douglaslain walked; fes42 and stranger78 walked. (well, okay, from harvard square; i can't blame them for not wanting to walk from watertown!) and noghri commented to me, "i didn't realize how close everyone is once i hop on my bike." later that evening, hyounpark and i went down to the ljless jimmy's and ended up in a long game of puerto rico; it was almost 1 am when we left! but it was warm enough that i thought about walking home, though the timing just wasn't right.

it's a pretty miraculous concept to one who grew up where her nearest friends were at least a fifteen minute drive away. honestly, i think that was one of the things i loved best about boarding school and then college - people were suddenly so easily accessible.

i'm glad we have TV night every couple of weeks. we're geeks, so we trend towards things like mythbusters and good eats, though studio 60 is sure to feature prominently come next fall. but it's also an easy time for us to meander in and hang out with each other; catch up on each others' lives.

separately, both noghri and jimmy commented to me that not enough game nights happen, and i miss them too. so there should be one soonish, i say. locals, do you enjoy games like settlers, carcassonne, and puerto rico? are you a card shark in poker, or do you kick peoples' asses in cribbage or canasta? or are you more apples to apples? i know a fair number of you go to trivia nights at the local bars; would you be interested in a game night?