Tag Archives: Boston

This Is Where I Used to Live

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A few weeks ago, I moved to Davis Square, and I’m absolutely loving it. I have a great new apartment, very cool new roommates (going to see Cirque du Soleil with them next month!), an absolutely fantastic new neighborhood with everything I could want (all kinds of restaurants and stores, a movie theater, some cool bars, a cupcake place, a library, a park, everything!), and a commute to work that’s less than half what it used to be when I lived on the Green Line. My co-workers are probably very relieved that I no longer come in bitching about the T, and the move is probably going to cut down majorly on my “the-T-sucks” posts.

My lease started August 1, but my lease on my old place didn’t end until August 31. I moved into this new place on August 18, but this week is the first time in two years that I don’t officially live in my first apartment.
And this is where I talk about it a little. As much as I love my new place, that first apartment is always going to hold a special place in my heart. For one thing, it was far from the crappy first apartment that most people have. I lucked into a great place that was very reasonably priced and HUGE. And I had some terrific times there—watching movies with friends, decorating for the holidays, sitting on the balcony reading the Sunday Globe, and having some amazing late-night conversations with Christina, the best person in the world to talk to at three o’clock in the morning.
I started this blog from my old apartment. I watched the fourth season of The O.C. there. I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows there. I watched the Sox win the World Series from there. I had some great roommates there—Christina and Chris, and then Stephanie after Christina moved out. I also went through some very difficult times that were too personal to write about here, and as tough as those times were, I’m glad that while they were going on, I had a great place to come home to.
So, here are some pictures to remember my wonderful old apartment by:




In Which I Try to Convince You to Check Out Grub Street

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If you like to write and live in the Boston area, you must check out Grub Street. (After reading the title, you probably thought I’d be a little more subtle than that, right?) But one of the cardinal rules of writing is “Show, don’t tell.” Therefore, I will show you why you should check out Grub Street.

Grub Street offers many writing classes as well as weekend workshops and one-night seminars, all taught by experienced, successful writers. My thesis in college was a young adult novel and the novel I’m working on now is women’s fiction, so accordingly, the two seminars I’ve been to were on young adult lit and on chick lit (which, as I learned in the class, is now called “commercial women’s fiction”). At the chick lit one, I learned a lot about the current state of women’s fiction and got a pretty enthusiastic response when I described the premise of the novel I’m working on. At the young adult one, I got a lot of great advice from Emily Franklin, including her suggestion to become a reviewer for Teens Read Too. She also later helped me with my query letter.

But I think the easiest way to convince you to check out Grub Street is to describe the day I had last Sunday.

When I heard that Grub Street was offering an event called Muse and the Marketplace, I signed up right away. I’d have the chance to meet with an agent; attend several writing seminars with professional writers, editors, and agents; and go to a lunch with a keynote speech by one of my favorite writers in the world, Jonathan Franzen.

Muse and the Marketplace was last Sunday, and it was everything I could have hoped for. First, I met with an agent about the novel I wrote for my senior thesis. She’d read the first twenty pages, and although she expressed some concerns about it (which I agreed with), she wanted to read more, so I’ve sent her more. Fingers crossed!

Then it was time for the workshops. The first one was on children’s and young adult literature, and it was taught by…Lois Lowry. As in The Giver, Number the Stars, the Anastasia Krupnik books, etc. As in one of the greatest children’s authors of all time. It was great and she had a lot of interesting things to say, but my mind was going, “LOIS LOWRY! Ooh, that was a really good point she just made…LOIS LOWRY!…Yeah, that makes sense about children’s literature…LOIS LOWRY!…Ooh, I like that book she’s reading from…LOIS LOWRY!”

One thing she did mention was that they’re making The Giver into a movie. I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I think it would be really cool visually, with the black-and-white becoming color and all. On the other hand, though, The Giver was an amazing, very original book that’s possibly one of the most intelligent novels ever written for children, and I kind of think it might get lost in translation to the big screen. It would have to star unknown actors, too, I think.

Anyway, my next workshop was fun. It was called “Agent Idol.” The idea is, you submit the first page of something you’ve written (I submitted the novel I’m working on right now), and a woman reads it aloud to a panel of three agents, who raise their hand at the point where they’d stop reading. Once two of them raise their hands, they stop and explain what they liked and didn’t like about the piece.

They were pretty brutal with some of them, sometimes only reading a sentence. There was also one that they absolutely loved and couldn’t find anything wrong with. They were actually more positive about mine than they were about a lot of others. One agent didn’t raise her hand at all and said, “What is wrong with you people?” when the other two agents did. One said the subject matter just wasn’t her thing—fair enough. The third one thought there was a little too much description too early and had some questions about the content (both of which were actually addressed in the next paragraph), but she said that out of the ones she’d heard thus far (mine was read somewhere in the middle, before they heard the one they really loved), it was the one she would have read the most of. It was kind of a wake-up call to know exactly how quickly agents stop reading a manuscript, but I ended up coming out of it feeling encouraged.

Then was the keynote lunch with Jonathan Franzen. The lunch itself was kind of cool—I sat down next to some people and talked to them about their experiences with agents and workshops that day. But then it was time for Jonathan Franzen. He looks exactly like his picture on the book jacket. For his speech, he mainly read part of his essay “The Foreign Language,” from his book The Discomfort Zone and added some remarks at the end. Then he took questions, and I was kind of surprised by the way he answered them. He seemed to have a good sense of humor, but he also seemed a little uncomfortable, and almost…shy. That definitely wasn’t what I expected.

I should say a word about him. I’ve read three out of his five books (and I’m reading a fourth right now). I enjoyed Strong Motion. When I read The Discomfort Zone, a book of essays which my coworker Nate recently lent me, I was struck by his ability to find meaning in commonplace situations. And The Corrections is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s amazing—I’ve read it several times since February 2002, and every time, I pick up something I didn’t notice before. The characters are so real, and you sympathize with them even if you don’t really like them. It’s funny in some places but heartbreakingly sad in others. And most importantly, like all my favorite books, it touches on truths that I’ve felt but could never articulate. I didn’t pick up on this quote the first time I read it, but on a subsequent reading, it jumped out at me:

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”

I’ve never found a better way of expressing that thought, and it can apply to so many things. But my admiration of his writing has always been tempered with my disdain for his snobbery. I think he came off as a jackass in the whole Oprah incident, and while I see his point, you’d think he’d be happy about his book being exposed to a wider audience rather than being disappointed that the mainstream had tainted it. So my greatest wish, as a writer, is to have a tenth of Jonathan Franzen’s talent with none of the snobbery.

After the speech, I took my old, beat-up first edition copy of The Corrections and went to get his autograph. I got up there and realized that I had absolutely nothing interesting to say to him. I ended up stammering something like, “Um…I really liked this book!”

So. After lunch I had my third workshop, “Agents on the Hot Seat,” where you could ask a panel of agents anything. I asked how important it was to have published short stories before selling a novel. Surprisingly, they said not very, just like the agent I met with in the morning did. Every successful query letter I’ve ever read lists numerous literary magazines, and while I’ve written some short stories I’d like to get published, I don’t know if I have the patience for it when most literary magazines have less than a 1% acceptance rate. So that was good to know.

And the last workshop I went to, in the “Hour of Power” where you could pick between four options, was “Moms Who Write.” I’m obviously not a mom, but someday I might be, and I can always use time management tips. Interestingly, a lot of other people in that seminar weren’t moms, either.

So, getting to my point—I got all that in one day. For a fraction of what an MFA would cost. From Grub Street.

Therefore, if you are in the Boston area and you write, you must check them out.

Still Not Wearing the Pink Hat

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So the Red Sox have won the World Series again. Which is wonderful, and I’m very happy. But this has a different feel to it than the win in 2004 did. Not just because this time it’s been three years instead of 86. Not just because I’m not in college anymore and don’t have an entire campus full of people going crazy and sharing the moment with me. (Although we did get free booze at work to celebrate the victory—I kid you not.)

This time, it didn’t feel like an impossible dream. Even when we were down one game to three against the Indians, I found myself agreeing with Manny when he said, “Why should we worry?” This wasn’t a come-from-behind victory, even if the Indians were ahead of us in the ALCS for awhile. We led the division all season, at one point by 14 ½ games, and ended up division champions for the first time since 1995. We didn’t have to face the Yankees in the playoffs. We swept the Angels and the Rockies. There was no denying it—this time, the Sox were the favorites.

It’s a weird feeling. Our identity as fans, for so long, was based on rooting for a losing team. Even after winning in 2004, we had a so-so season followed by a really crappy one, and it wouldn’t have been a stretch to think that we were cursed all over again.

But we’re not. We’re a good baseball team with a lot of talented players, both veterans and rookies, and all signs indicate that we’re in good shape for awhile. (Or at least we will be if they re-sign Mike Lowell and don’t even think about A-Rod.)

I can only imagine the thousands of pink hat fans that this new victory has produced. It’s so strange to think that little kids today could grow up without ever having rooted for the Sox when they were a losing team. While I certainly hope we don’t go through another 86-year dry spell, I think it’ll be kind of a loss for those kids. Rooting for the Sox before 2004 taught a lot of us about patience and loyalty. Rooting for them now? Well, the kids will get to go to a lot more parades.

For Once, I’m Glad I Take the T

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Oh my God. The rest of the country must be laughing their asses off at us.

I was at work all day, though, and honestly, I was pretty oblivious to the whole thing. I found out about it around 4:00 because my mom called me, before they knew that all this was caused by a frickin cartoon.

But apparently traffic was a nightmare, even more so than usual. I think they did briefly shut down part of the Red Line, but that didn’t affect me.

A couple of weeks ago, it was a Friday and I wasn’t feeling well and just wanted to go home at the end of the day. I left work at 5:15. At quarter of six I finally got on a train. Why? Because eight trains went by before there was a B Line train. Eight.

“You should complain to the MBTA,” said my mom when I told her about it.

“Uh, that’s like complaining to Bush that you don’t like the war,” said my dad, correctly.

But today, my commute was entirely issue-free, unless you count me not getting a seat for a long time. For once, the T came through for me.

The “I” in “iPod”

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I love my iPod. I’ve had it for a little over a year, and it’s been a year of sweet bliss. Gone are the days of Discmans (Discmen?) that were awkward to hold, always needed new batteries, and were only good for one 80-minute CD. Now I hold 3,856 songs in the palm of my hand. I’ve got my ’80s playlist, my country playlist, my random rock playlist, my love songs playlist, my work playlist from when I was a lifeguard and had to make mix CDs that were both fun and appropriate to play at a family establishment. And I’ve got plenty of random shit like the Swedish Chef’s song, Lorelai’s painting song from Gilmore Girls that she sang when she was trying to convince Luke to paint the diner (“Grab your brush and grab your rollers, all you kids and all you…bowlers, we’re going painting today!”), and a voicemail my sister left me on my college phone when she was talking in a weird voice and telling me she was Regina Filangi (Phoebe’s standard fake name on Friends).

But as convenient and wonderful as my iPod is, and as great as it is for making time at the gym fly by, sometimes I wonder if the “I” doesn’t stand for “isolated.” There’s a Seinfeld episode where Elaine pretends to be deaf so that she doesn’t have to talk to a cab driver, but if that episode had been filmed ten years later, she could have just used an iPod as an excuse to be antisocial. Sometimes I think that people use this little white box so they can stay in their own little worlds and not talk to anyone. At BC, people were constantly walking around campus listening to their iPods, and so do half the people on the T.

Occasionally, I am one of those T-riders, but most of the time I opt to keep the iPod off, seeing as the noise of the train screeching around the tracks is so loud that it forces me to turn the volume up to a level that will leave me with hearing aids by the time I’m forty. The other day, though, I was listening to my music on the T. It was raining, and I was listening to the songs that will go on my yet-to-be-made “Rainy Day” playlist: Dar Williams’ “The Beauty of the Rain,” Billie Myers’ “Kiss the Rain,” James Blunt’s “Tears and Rain,” Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “November Rain,” etc. Standing right by me were two college-aged girls who were talking to each other. Because I was listening to my music, I only heard snippets of conversation. They were talking about grad programs in theology. I figured they were classmates, dorm mates, casual friends. But then, one of them got ready to get off the T, and she extended her hand to the other girl.

“I’m Allison,” she said.

“I’m Lauren,” said the other girl.

“Nice to meet you,” said Allison before she got off the train.

And I stood there, amazed. I hadn’t heard the whole thing, but from what I could tell, the two of them had had a very long, interesting conversation that had fooled me into thinking they knew each other when in fact they had just met. They were talking about the pros and cons of divinity school and how it was different if you weren’t going to get ordained and about the experience Lauren’s boyfriend had had with it. I wished I’d been able to hear all of it.

It reminded me of one time this summer, when I was waiting for the Blue Line at the Revere Beach stop. It was raining that day, too, actually, and while I didn’t have my iPod with me that day, I was reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Out of nowhere, this woman came up and started talking to me about how cold she was. “I’ve got a bottle of Captain’s in my purse,” she said. “If I had a chaser, I’d drink it. It’d warm me right up.”

I looked up. She was a bit overweight, and her front teeth were decaying. Her hair was dyed kind of brownish-reddish with a clip holding it in a ponytail. She told me later she was forty-eight, but I would have guessed she was about ten years older.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, noticing that I was reading. “I don’t want to interrupt your reading.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, closing my book.

And I talked to her until the T came to her stop. She never told me her name, but I learned all kinds of other things about her. The night before, she’d been drinking at her friend’s house and had woken up with a hangover that had made her late for her job at the jewelry store. She liked Anne Rice novels, and was currently reading The Witching Hour. She didn’t like horror films, she said, especially the ones with Freddie Kruger because her ex-husband’s name was Freddie. Since the divorce, she’d had a couple of live-in relationships, but no kids. She’d been with her current boyfriend for 11 years, but he’d recently gotten his own apartment because he said he needed his space. “I don’t care, as long as he’s not fucking around,” she said. But despite her man troubles, she considered herself a romantic at heart. Along with Anne Rice, her bookshelf was full of Harlequin romances, particularly historical ones.

She was such an interesting woman, but if I’d been listening to my iPod, I would have missed out on getting to know her.

I don’t know if Allison and Lauren will ever see each other again, but I bet they’re glad they decided to listen to each other instead of their music that day.

Post-College Nightlife

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After college, all the rules about going out change. Suddenly, half the bars you used to frequent in college are off-limits. If you went to BC, as I did, that means au revoir to Cleveland Circle, which includes Mary Ann’s, Cityside, and Roggie’s (unless you’re at Roggie’s for late night pizza, since it’s the only place in Cleveland Circle open at two in the morning). It also means no more trips to The Kells for BC nights on Wednesdays. You have to find the bars that are more “twenty-something” and less “college student.”

This was the challenge that my friends Lindsey and Erin and I faced when we decided to go out last Friday night. We reviewed our options. Where could we go that wasn’t too college and, at 10:30, wouldn’t take so long to get to from Brighton that we’d be stuck paying a fortune for a cab when it was time to leave? (Since the T stops running at 12:30, if you don’t live right in the city, you’re kind of screwed when it comes to going to bars downtown.) We eventually settled on SoHo in Brighton Center, which a lot of college students don’t know about because it’s not on the T. You have to take a cab to get there, but in our case, the ride wasn’t very far.

The rules about the guys you check out change, too. Your first question when you talk to someone isn’t “Where did you go to school?” but “Where do you live?” or “What do you do?” And it’s not so creepy to be hit on by a guy in his late 20s or early 30s anymore. We might even welcome it. But skeezy guys exist at all stages of life, as we’ve found out.

We miss the college bars, though. Once this summer, Lindsey and I went to Cityside. In about fifteen minutes, we saw our friend Ashley, an Irish guy Erin was dating at the time(whom she actually met at Cityside), and this creepy guy named Paul, who didn’t go to BC but once tried to convince Lindsey that he did and who, after getting Lindsey’s number, left her a voicemail message in which he screamed at her to “pick up [her] fucking phone!” At the time, Linds and I had just come from SoHo, and we had with us a twenty-seven-year-old guy I’d been dancing with there. He’d never been to Cityside, and he commented that it seemed like the kind of place where everyone knew each other.

And he was kind of right. What bars near colleges lack in quality, they make up for in comfortable familiarity. Mary Ann’s, for instance, is disgusting. The floors are always sticky with beer and there’s barely room in the bathroom to sit down to pee, but you know everyone there, and suddenly, they’re all your friends. The random kid in your English class whom you’ve never talked to is suddenly telling you stories about his roommates. The girl who lived on your floor freshman year whom you’ve lost touch with is hugging you and telling you that you look great.

Cheers did take place in Boston, and I think that this city, which is full of college students, really wants what the song says: a place where everybody knows your name. Now that we’ve graduated, we’ll never have that again.

But some of us still try for it. Friday night at SoHo, when Erin and I left our table to get a second round, Erin leaned in close to me. “Don’t tell Lindsey this I told you this,” she began, causing my ears to perk up, “but we…” She swallowed hard. “We went to The Kells,” she whispered, then covered her eyes in shame. “On Wednesday!”

Not Wearing the Pink Hat

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I have a confession to make. After the disastrous series with the Yankees, I considered not watching any more Sox games unless they, by some miracle, made the playoffs.

Then I read this article, which made me very sad. And I have now reconsidered. No matter how depressing watching the Sox gets, I will not be a pink hat fan. You know what I mean. Those fans who only watch the Sox games because 2004 made them trendy and Kapler and Papelbon are cute and isn’t this pink hat adorable. The “fans” who are the antithesis of what it really means to be a Sox fan.

Sox fans are their own breed. Every team has fans, but no other team has so frequently been compared to a religion. “Fenway faithful” is a commonly-heard term. “Still, we believe” became a mantra after the 2003 season. People refer to themselves as “devout” or “lapsed” Red Sox fans. My friend once wrote in her blog, “The Red Sox’ performance has been disappointing, but hardly surprising. But I still have faith. If only I could apply this faith toward religion…”

For a long time, believing in a team that hadn’t won the World Series since 1918 was a point of pride for Sox fans. Our religion dictated patience and loyalty, even in the face of infinite disappointments. We rejected the Yankees as Satan and believed wholeheartedly in the Coming of the World Series.

And then the World Series came, and there was joy throughout the land. But all strained metaphors aside, it was an incredible moment that brought together multiple generations: everyone from my ninety-year-old grandparents, who can still remember the play-by-play of the 1946 World Series, to five-year-old kids at the pool club who announce proudly that their favorite player is, “Big Papi!” When I went to the victory parade, everyone was so happy it just trumped anything negative. At least where I was standing, no one was pushy or obnoxious, just really, really happy. In a city where the Sox are such an inescapable part of local culture, where “Still We Believe” and “Why Not Us?” adorn every business marquis board, where people are pressed up against the doors of the T on game days, where the Dunkin’ Donuts has caricatures of the Sox drawn in the windows, it was a moment of unadulterated joy.

But it also kind of gave us an identity crisis. Suddenly, we weren’t rooting for a losing team anymore. We weren’t just going on blind faith; we knew we could win a championship. We were even expecting it. And although we didn’t win again in 2005, we had a good season, made the playoffs, and didn’t lose the final game to the Yankees. So no one came away with too much bitterness.

This August provided the first real challenge to our post-World Series faith. It’s hard to keep a positive attitude when we get swept in a five-game series with the Yankees. Or when it seems like every day, there’s a new injury. Or when David Ortiz has an irregular heartbeat. Or when, in the most devastating piece of recent news, Jon Lester (who’s only 6 months older than me) is diagnosed with cancer.

But you know what? The Sox aren’t’ giving up. Depsite their constant talk of “the future” and “next year,” despite their trading of a certain scary-looking pitcher to San Diego, they’re still determined to win as many games as they can for the rest of the season. Last Friday, they had a ridiculous number of players out and Lester had just been diagnosed- and they still pulled off a win. Pitchers like Kason Gabbard, Kyle Snyder, and Julian Tavarez are stepping up. New guys like Carlos Pena are hitting walkoff homers. Papelbon doesn’t have a tear, just a “transient subluxation event,” which comes from a Latin term meaning, “He’ll be back.” And Varitek and Nixon are finally back in action.

So if the Sox themselves haven’t thrown in the towel, why should we? Moments like this test our faith, and we need to rise to the challenge. I’m sorry that I ever considered doing otherwise. While I can’t afford tickets (hence the “struggling” part of “Struggling Single Twenty-Something”), I’ll be sitting in front of NESN, listening to Remy and Orsillo, throwing my hat into the air as the Sox are victorious once again.

And the hat sure as heck isn’t pink.