Sleeping on planes

I don't know when this started happening, but I almost always drift off to sleep when my airplane taxis for takeoff.

This used to happen with trains; I always thought it was because back in high school, I commuted into Chicago for youth symphony rehearsals and the combination of short weekend sleep and a commute that ended downtown trained me to have a Pavlovian response, but now for whatever reason, it's that last moment before we're airborne.

Even when I'm not tired, once the plane goes into its final turn and accelerates down the runway, I get drowsy, and if I'm in the window seat, I cock my head into the wall and let sleep overtake me until, usually, the ding announcing we've hit cruising altitude.

I don't think it's entirely about this, but there's something about that transition from ground to sky, feeling that sudden lift, that seems linked to that moment of letting go, releasing into a comfortable sort of fogginess.

I think of all this today because I took my last flight before my return to the states today, a hop from Milan to Oradea, Romania. From here on it's busses and trains until the trip ends, but this one flight had the exact same effect as usual. I'd been stressing mildly about this leg of the trip - I usually have my half-dozen "polite tourist who's trying" phrases (hello, excuse me, thank you, please, do you speak English, sorry) in place, but hadn't gotten them ironed out in time for this one. My connections for the next week or so are on Eastern European busses, which tend not to be listed online, or if they are there's conflicting info. I know I can make things work - thousands of American tourists have done the same before me, and I did my research before I cobbled these days together - but it's basically a solid week of "Well, I'll figure it out when I get there."

Still. There was something a bit relieving about that physical habit returning at the moment of takeoff, watching the landscape of Lombardy recede as my eyelids sank, and feeling that same sense of release, of trust, of knowing that the plane's never rattled apart in the air before, so it probably won't now. (And even if it does: what are you gonna do about it, chumpo? Worry?)

So here I am, in Oradea, about to take a few far-too-fast days to explore Romania and Serbia before meeting my friend Kate for a few days in the coastal Balkans. I feel lucky. I feel underprepared. I feel peaceful. I feel curious. And I'm excited to see what I find.

Many catch-up posts on Italy yet to come: more on Florence, more on Cinque Terre, more on Milan, which I loved to a thoroughly surprising degree. And maybe by 2020 I'll have caught up to myself? Til then: keep being kind to yourselves, keep breathing and releasing, and keep exploooooring!

Pisa, Lucca, Volterra: whirlwind weekendery!

I celebrated getting a few job applications out and hitting first-draft revisions on a pair of articles by cutting out of Florence for a quick weekend. Originally I had planned to do an overnight in Lucca (with a brief stop in Pisa for the obligatory Field of Miracles stuff) but then I figured out that Volterra would be a reasonable detour on this route, and I'm glad I went. It's a pretty magical li'l hill town, and one whose culture feels... transitional right now, so I'm glad I got to see it while it still had that balance of daily life and tourist influx, before it becomes what San Gimignano has by now become. After the jump: my whiplash-inducing tear around Tuscany!

Voltera and the surrounding Tuscan countryside at dawn! It's true what they say: Tuscany is just a bunch of dirt with stuff growing on it.

First, the usual video, cutting all three spots together sporadically:

Volterra
Volterra has the guide book reputation of being a sleepy hidden gem among Tuscany's hill towns. And I'll say that, in comparison to San Gimignano (which I visited last summer) that is true. Where S.G.'s every inch is taken over by some tourist enterprise or another, Volterra has numerous areas that feel workaday and un-thronged. That said, it's at least starting to get busloads of day trippers around midday, and the main stretch is certainly looking to make connections with tourists. That's not altogether a bad thing; it gives you enough infrastructure to fill a day if you get tired of sticking your head into artisanal workshops, and it's not that hard to go up a road and perch on a stoop and watch the world go by. But it feels like a city whose character is changing, an inevitable effect of somebody like Rick Steves annointing it and sending travelers there. Nice to see it before it gets too overrun to maintain its character!

Art by the town church, sandwiched next to the town hall that blocked the church's access to the main square. RENAISSANCE ERA ITALIAN POLITICAL MANEUVERING WOOOO pretty trees woo too

I definitely recommend Annie Adair's walking tour of town - she's a smart, charismatic, thoughtful and assured guide with wide ranging knowledge (she's absolutely read her Richard Beacham!) that puts the town's Etruscan history in context. The only qualm I had: tours are a great way to meet fellow travelers, and I always think it's nice when they can be informed conversations, with participants asking questions and engaging in the tour. But I'm not super wild about the kind of person (which we had a few of on this tour) who goes on a tour and more or less lectures the guide/fellow tourists. Fella! It's vacation! You are allowed to relax and listen!

Great Roman theatre, where I learned that (this is so cool) they're thinking they have to reevaluate Volterran history, because the fact that the theatre was more or less abandoned after an earthquake (you can see here that they started turning it into a bath complex) meant the community didn't have much money, and thus was in decline. Just a few years ago, though, they found the remains of an ampitheater - where more of the spectacle (think gladiators/animals) entertainments took place that Roman imperial citizens loved way more than the weird Greek import of "theatre." So, now that they've found this ampitheater, a lot of assumptions about the culture's timelines have to be totally rewritten, and I think that is a rad thing about history THE END.

My room here was insanely comfortable, in a private home but with hotel-level amenities and an adorable yard/shared kitchen, one of the best nights' sleep I've had in my time abroad this summer. This would turn out to be very good, as (spoiler alert) Lucca was... more challenging in this regard. But that room was a nice microcosm for the town as a whole: windy and remote, it was a great retreat from many things, especially after 4 PM when the day trippers left and the town became an idyllic wandering ground. Breathing, peace, meditation. Good times.

The Balze! Cliffs that are frustratingly hard to capture via photograph but that give you a great sense of the sheer climb to Volterra that made it such a stronghold. This is a fun little hourlong trek out of town - best done, I think, at dawn.

Pisa

The Photobombin' Tower of Pisa

I did a quick one-hour walk through town before heading to the Field of Miracles (the Duomo, the Leaning Tower, and the Baptistry). It's a cool university town with a fun energy to it, even at 8 AM or so, and until you get onto the arteries that take you right to the Tower, it's not as thronged with cheap tourist crap as you'd think! The Field of Miracles, meanwhile, really does live up to its reputation: striking, lush, and packed with people from early morning on. I didn't climb the tower (seeing it from the ground seemed more the point) and ultimately made a quick shift to Lucca, which I really wanted to explore.

Also in Pisa: a mural from Keith Haring from a year before he died from AIDS. Beautiful, energetic, joyful, and across the street from a happenin' student-heavy caffe. NEAT, gang.

Lucca

Lucca's central feature is its wall, rebuilt after the advent of canon and gunpowder, when they realized you could blow a hole in the old city walls. The top of the city wall is now a city park, broad boulevards where people bike and walk at all hours, and it is extremely excellent up there.

Ah, Lucca. It was high on my list when I planned this leg of the summer, as I'd heard it was great food, great atmosphere, and great people-watching/energy. In some ways it lived up to all of that! And in some ways I did it a disservice by only being there for about 24 hours. This feels like a city that would benefit greatly from a settling-in trip like I tend to enjoy, and in fact if doing a longer trip to Tuscany with more day-trips into the countryside (wine tastings, olive oil factory visits, things like that) it might be a great home base. I had a delicious lunch, a friendly conversation with a couple of local college students on a break from their music program, and had fun wandering the town. The evening and the early morning were delightful, with beautiful piazzas full of people and a gentle breeze. I found a piazza in the evening full of beautiful people in their twenties and thirties, and joined them for an evening of craft beer. These were the good times. The roughest patches were midday, when the temperatures breached 80 (in May! I'm not ready for that!) and night, when I re-learned the reality of Italian mosquitoes.

The room was pretty gorgeous, though once the mosquitoes arrived it rapidly felt like a set for an Italian adaptation of Barton Fink.

I'd passed out in my room early, only to wake up around 1 AM as the neighbors turned on their TV full-volume; this meant I was awake enough to register the (approximately) seven million mosquitoes that were attacking me in my bed. For the next four hours, I would stay on alert, attempt to kill one (final tally: 5 killed), and settle back into bed, juuuust about to fall asleep when another mosquito would buzz my ears and set me off again. And thus passed the last five hours of the night.

Unbelievably charming citywide canals! Also extremely likely safe harbor for the demon mosquitoes who I will spend the rest of my life hunting relentlessly.

I mean, look: I have enough perspective to know that Lucca was grand, and that mosquitoes and heat can happen anywhere. I know that it usually takes 2-3 days to know a place well enough to start finding your routines and get off the cattle-path track that has you bumping into tour group after tour group. And that's why I'd like to get back at some point, because I think I just sort of missed it a bit. Next time, perhaps!

One thing you have to say (it is a legal requirement) is that any town with a tower that has an oak tree growing out of it has got some seriously good stuff going ON, so get with the PROGRAM.

All in all, though? This was a great sojourn (Volterra especially being something that fed my heart in a big way), and let me return somewhat refreshed and with a good perspective on what I love about Florence. More on that... soon!

Useful: Florence, Volume 1

It occurs to me that as much as this space is mostly used as a forum for me to sketch out my thoughts and experiences from day to day/week to week (a "live journal," if you will), it might be helpful to actually log the occasional post of information that would be of general use to a person planning their own trips? So with that in mind, I'm inaugurating a feature I like to call "what if this blog was of any any use whatsoever to other people once in a while?" Starting here, starting now: Florence! In this fist post, I'll cover some general lifestyle thoughts as well as sightseeing tips. A future installment will tackle specific recommendations for food and shops... and I guess anything else that comes to mind? Now: to the knowledge!

Come, sit by me on this bench, and allow me to share my wisdom and A B S O R B  Y O U  I N T O  T H E  T R E E S

A quick caveat: everyone's got their own style of travel. Mine tends toward cultural immersion; I've got an interest in history, some interest in art (though my tastes run more modern), but I usually think my trips are most successful when I've gotten a sense of how life might be lived in another context, exploring the day-to-day of different cultures. That colors a lot of my advice: I'd rather build a couple of deliberate, non-rushed stops into my day than whirlwind-blitz a city to say that I have "done" Rome, for instance. Other people are different! Know your flavor! Listen to Rick Steves's interview with Arthur Frommer about the guy who wrote Frommer's first guide to Mexico! Which I'll write about some other time! That said... here's some brain-piles.

Day After Day: Building Your Time

Navigatin' the city with locals, or with hordes of tourists: the choice is yours!

Routines: It's always ideal to spend a week in any city of substance (Paris, Florence, Rome, Vienna, Copenhagen, Berlin, etc etc), to beat jetlag and not feel rushed, but also to give you time to find routines. This is key in Italy. In Florence, you'll follow a pretty typical Italian schedule: start your day at the nearest caffe or pasticceria for a cappuchino and a cornetto (a croissant-adjacent pastry), sfoglio (turnover, basically) or bomboloni (donuts). In, out, and on with your day. At lunch, take it at the relaxed pace the Italians do - most shops and some sites will be closed between 12 and 3 anyhow, so take your time, and if you finish early, find a caffe with some atmosphere to enjoy a coffee while you read, plan, or just unwind before the afternoon. Dinner is late, around 8 at the earliest if you want to be in the local swing of things. Take a long passeggiata (stroll) through the town. These are the hours that Florence really feels magical, especially if you tuck into the outer neighborhoods.

Calendarage: Sundays and Mondays are big days for closures - museums and shops alike. On Sundays, though, you can almost always find multiple festivals or markets in the major square (Santo Spirito and Santa Croce usually have great artisanal markets of some stripe). Monday is a good day, if you're here for a spell, to get out into the countryside for a relaxed taste of Tuscany.

Crowd Control: The same as most places; hit the big sites early or late in the day. The next section has more specific advice, but if you can line up any major sights before 10 AM or after 4 PM, you'll miss a lot of the massive group tours or day trippers. Instead, spend those midday hours exploring the city's workshops (more on that in the next post), looking for street art, or settling into a table at a caffe... the city is like most places here (Venice included!) in that you can almost always find quiet or at least non-touristy corners if you poke just a few blocks out from the crowds. It's small. You won't get lost forever. Explore.

Find your way: Florence has two numbering systems, one for residences and one for businesses. That's why you'll see a number sequence of 56 - 54 - 12 - 50. This may also be why Google sometimes has no clue where something's meant to be. Again: explore, wander. If you know you want to visit a place, jot down the street name and number, and then stroll.

Museum Workarounds

Planning in advance can get you some moments in relative seclusion with this fella. That's some real magic, I think...

The Rundown: Florence's Big Three are the Duomo, the Accademia, and the Uffizi. The Duomo is iconic, stunning from the outside and swell views from up top. It's free, but crowded at midday. The Accademia is the home of Michaelangelo's David, with replicas near the Uffizi and up at Piazzale Michaelangelo to the south of the city. The original does have an aura that elevates it above its copies; I was skeptical, but am glad I went (see below). The Uffizi is a Renaissance treasure trove, and your feelings about that period's art will dictate how the museum works for you. Specific tips below...

Uffizi evening hours: I'm not a museum-hound; it takes a special space (usually modern, given my tastes) like the Louisiana in Copenhagen or the Pompidou in Paris to absorb and delight me. But this is the treasure trove of Florence, and outside of the Vatican museum it's probably Italy's greatest collection. (I prefer the Vatican.) But it's also crowded and has the over-stuffed-with-masterpieces problem of the Musee d'Orsay. My take: book in advance for an entry late in the day. If you're there between June and October, go on Tuesday around 6 PM; the museum is open til 10, which wasn't listed in guidebooks as of last year, and it'll have normal-museum crowds. N.B.: Book early for this; as high season rolls in, entire days become unavailable to reserve in advance. This is one of the few things that's worth planning out in advance, I think.

First Sunday of the Month: All state museums are free this day, and some which usually close on Sundays open for it. The flipside: it's insanely crowded, with locals and tourists alike, looking to save a buck. My recommendation: If you're here, especially if you arrived on a Saturday and are up early Sunday after resetting your jetlag clock, get to the Accademia (home of Michaelangelo's David) by around 7. You'll stand in line, but likely at the front, for about an hour. Bring coffee and a book, or chat with your neighbors if they're friendly and pleasant. When the doors open, if you're in that first wave, you can sweep to the left as you enter the museum, and to your right will be David, ideally situated and pretty much just yours and a dozen or so others' until the rest of the line make their way in and find their way to the statue. I like this approach because the Accademia doesn't have a lot of note beyond the David; it's not my top pick of how to spend your money (even your museum money) in Florence, but it's kind of perfect for this day. Get in early, take a moment to be genuinely awed by the David, and then head to the Bargello (excellent sculpture-centric museum), which will be pretty sleepy despite the free entry. After that, maybe head to the Boboli Gardens outside the Pitti Palace. You'll avoid the mayhem of the Uffizi and later-day Accademia, and get a nice blend of museum time and gorgeous nature.

To be continued...
Honestly, while Florence has massive holdings for its period (and huge historic significance as the birthplace of the Renaissance), to me its charm - the reason I wanted to come back this summer and the reason I've been happy here - is its outside-the-tourist-zone artisanal workshops, the relaxed pace of life and the deliberate cultivation of good things. While it's probably nonsense to come here and skip the museums, the next installment here (coming sometime next week) will tackle food, shopping, and day-filling meanderings that make the city special - and to some extent I really do feel that you could do a week here without setting foot in a museum and have a pretty glorious time of it. Stay tuned I guess if this is even remotely interesting to you??

Florentine fragments, Vol I

Last summer, I had just under a week in Florence, shared for a bit with my friend Jenna. I wrote at the time that I loved it but didn't quite get a handle on it - it was a bit overwhelming and a bit... tough to get into the fabric of the city compared to some of my other stops. That's what brought me back this summer - the notion that a full month, having already done a good bit of the Touristy Bit, would give me an ideal place to work while trying to sink into local culture the way I like to do while I travel. And hey, swell: looks like that's how it's working out! After the jump, fragments and thoughts on the first half of my time here.

Florence from... either Piazzale Michaelangelo or Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte. Florence: It's Very Nice™

The idea of this summer has been "get work done while enjoying the culture," with three long stays meant to be productive changes of pace from life back home. So far, it's feeling bang-on. Here, I've made a habit of starting the day with pen-and-paper drafting work, moving to one of two libraries after breakfast to work for the morning, breaking for lunch, and finishing the day with whatever electronic work/correspondence needs doing before dinner and the passeggiata. It's been ideal: multiple walks over the course of the day, and changing environments framing a steady rhythm of work. It's as productive as I've felt in quite a while. And more than that, it has me feeling like I'm getting the city this time around.

My home piazza, a bit east of Sant'Ambrogio, out of the tourist center and packed with locals but only a 15 minute walk to the heart of things. It's nifty! I recommend it!

Last summer two art history grads at Teatro del Sale tole me that Florence is a small enough town that if you're here long enough, you get to know a lot of people. I'm finding this true this time, even not having been here that long. Staying out of the main tourist areas has helped, as I think has establishing routines. Once people see you a few times, their tourist guard seems to drop a bit and you get to have real conversations. Below, a smattering of random happenings from the past week and a half. Some are encounters, some are just images. All of them make me very happy to be here.

Olive trees on a hike in the countryside! Contrary to what you have heard, Tuscany is not "a post-industrial wasteland" where "bog and muck and rust are the primary colors" and "the air is thick with pollution." In fact, it's quite pretty!

Saw two teenaged sisters on their way down from the church above Michaelangelo plaza with their family, one hopping down in a red dress and white jumper, making bird noises and laughing. The other, in black, hair back and tight, smoking, all grim business.

I mean, San Miniato is absolutely a solid church for a goth teen to hang out at. Not pictured here, but definitely photographed: about a half-dozen of the creepiest/most morbid tombstones I have seen in my life. Culture!

An elderly couple at the architectural site in Fiesole who joined my roster of Life Relationship Goals - he  lovingly agreed to follow her lead on several dead-end efforts to get out of the site, and just as they were about out of it, he announced that he wanted to sit down to conceptualize what it might have been like to watch a performance in the Roman ampitheater. They were both patient, funny, bantery, and entirely at ease in the world as they explored.

Fiesole's architectural site - arches, towers, baths, theatres, the whole nine yards

My first night here, I ordered gelato from Il Procopio gelateria and almost cried it was so good. Remembered my friend Joanie telling me, on my first trip to Italy, to plan to eat gelato every day. Haven't done that this time (a month is a long time!) but I am doing What I Can.

Evenings here are sometimes very nice to look at

Bought zucchini (in full flower!) from a merchant at the Sant'Ambrogio market; later that afternoon, I was in my neighborhood grocery store when a woman energetically accosted me and said "You buy Zucchine!" and it took me a moment to realize it was the woman who'd sold to me that morning, seemingly delighted to run into me again in her own neighborhood.

One of Blub's many pieces of street art ("Art floats" being the name of the series, I'm told). Great culture of street artists here, and a local gallery has a piece I want badly that's a Blub portrait of the city's most famous street artist Clet. Cool.

Had coffee with my AirBnB host, who turns out to be a theatre professor, chatting about Italian and American politics and culture, the age of decadence that she feels we're in, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and, surprisingly, my advisor, who she turned out to know well, having planned conferences with him over the years! We've since enjoyed a texting correspondence as she takes a working holiday to Spain.

A bit of gloom on a walk through the Bibieni gardens, which were a glorious surprise, Versailles-or-Schönbrunn-esque in their sprawling grandeur.

More stories in the offing - it's been nice to wander, strike up conversations, make new connections, and to do all of this while still making progress on my jobs-and-writing fronts. Keeping a full investment in the world around me and getting work done: who knew it would be as swell as this!

The Unplug... and How to Get It

Hey. Hello. I missed you! Let's talk... about... well, eventually Florence, and many more things but right now let's just talk about i n t e r n e t. A navelgaze, so after the jump we go!

Florence: A NICE PLACE, if you can even believe such a wildly accusatory statement. More on this... in the future!

First things first: the internet is great! It's this magical thing whereby I can be on the other side of an ocean and still know how my friends' days are going, apply to jobs from thousands of miles away, pull up music if I've got a song stuck in my head, or figure out where on earth I am and how to get home from wherever that is.

But it is also a trap, or it can be. This weekend I decided to purposefully unplug, to de-tech myself (well, almost) and take two or three days with just google maps (when absolutely necessary) and my Nook (gots to read!). (Oh, and my dumb camera, because I find I still like tinkering with that.) So no Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, but also no browser, email, texting, nothin'. Just being in the world.

It was a pretty great exercise! For one thing, it helped reset my tempo. I hadn't realized how much my phone especially had trained me for that weird 21st-century pace of "OK but NOW what it's been literally SECONDS since the last bit of stimulation." And it was really nice to step away from that, just as it was really nice to step away from posting things, or seeing who had interacted with posts, and so on. (All things that I didn't used to wrassle with, weirdly, as active as I've always been online - it's only in the past few years that I've learned to take value from that stuff, about which, if I may wax poetic: BARF.)

So yes, head-clearing, life-tempo resetting, world-awakening-to, all those things which are grand. But the other thing that was interesting, as time went by, was the realization that I'd been using all the noise of the internet (RSS feeds, Pocket reader, podcasts, Twinstabook [sorry, I'm trying to have this removed], my regular sites) as a kind of belay cable to pull me up short from dwelling too much with my thoughts. Again: not something I used to do, but a habit that accumulated over time, specifically during my depressive period a couple years back.

What I wasn't expecting was that, while there definitely were some little wafts of sadness/stress/grumbling rattling around in those moments when I'd usually have gone to distract myself via bitmoji/giffing/emojiing, it mostly felt great not to have that escape valve. I have always liked having time to wander around my thoughts and feelings in quiet moments, turns out, and while there are little bumps to get over - kind of like getting back in the water after a long time away, that brief moment of "oh wait how's this go again?" - it feels really good to be taking that time and re-learning the part of me that loves quiet, that can take an afternoon of reading and puttering and have that be that.

In any case, it's a luxury that I let myself take for having finished my latest chapter and arrived in Florence, and it's one that I can't indulge in most days as dissertation and job hunt continue, but I'm going to be tweaking some personal habits. Instagram will probably stick around, because I'm finding photography a really fun way of keeping an active eye in the world, but I'm hoping to ease back in other social media areas, and to really keep my computer/phone use purposeful. Turning off all my notifications (text/email/everything) really helped me realize how much they'd made me feel kinda jittery, a slave to the tempo of technology, and I want to get back to that place of choosing when I dip in, and being careful that that decision isn't just "I'm feeling antsy and would like a distraction."

And really, there could hardly be a better place to work this all out. Italian culture is so social (more on that soon), so out-of-doors, and so face-to-face (at least as I'm experiencing it) that it tremendously rewards tucking things away and staying in the moment. And as I settle into Florence, I'm finding it to forget even about the maps, and just to let sense memory take hold and just be in the world, simple, alive, and fresh. Feels good.

Up next: more on Florence! Take two, and all the sweeter for being the second time around...

Bostonia

This is an odd grab-bag of a post, as is probably fitting of any kind of reckoning with my time in Boston. But now that I'm settled into Florence (tucked into a beautiful li'l attic flat that'll be my home for most of the month, stocked up from two excellent markets a block or so away, and one long, "wait what's over HERE" walk under my belt) I figured it'd be good to have a round-up of some stripe or another, before moving on to whatever the summer's going to be in this space. (Prediction: insufferable and inarticulate??)

Anyway, after the jump: Boston!

Famed Bostonian GEORGE WASHINGTON! While taking this photo, I was making some dumb joke about "who could THAT be," thinking it was obviously Paul Revere. This should teach us to never assume I know anything about anything (except for purposes of employment as an educator ok shh everybody go back to bed)

Obligatory video, though this is very much "my last weeks in Boston" more than it is "a representation of the city in its full glory," which is also why it has some bits of Indiana in it. Hey get your own blog why don't you.

As I've said before, I'm really glad I had one more year in Boston. It would have been easy to walk away, to do that "erase the past and ignore life's complications" thing that can make life simpler. But you know, life ain't no kind of life unless you wrassle with the whole whale, and this year was really great at reaffirming that choice.

Copley Square/library on Marathon weekend! Was this the first year I was here during the marathon? HINT: IT DEFFO WAS, I HAVE BEEN A FELLOW WITH BIG PLANS THAT INVOLVE NOT BEING AROUND WHEN THAT HAPPENS

Because of course my earlier time in Boston was colored, for good and for ill, by a lot of things that aren't Boston. After my first semester, which I spent pretty actively taking advantage of a new city (visiting the world-class BSO, enjoying the Museum of Fine Arts for the first time, walking the Freedom Trail, all o' that) I spent a lot of the next three years with one foot out of the water, between a long-distance relationship, early-marriage nesting, a pretty narrow social life, divorce reckoning and recovering, and the stress of grad school. It's uhhhh a lot. So in some ways this year felt like my first full year hanging with the city on its/my own terms, and that was just grand.

Davis Square after a torrential downpour. Yes: my addiction to photographing blue skies is undiminished!

I already blabbed about JP; for the rest of the city, what I'll say is that it is, as my friend Josh put it recently, a "lovely town" - lovely in a way that New York isn't, between its picturesque river and scattered green spaces, and a town in... well, a bunch of ways. It's small, for one - you can walk from my apartment in JP all the way through downtown up to Medford in just a few hours, clearing most of the immediate metro area in just about the same time it would take you to walk Chicago's north side. It's also got a town's sense of folklore - people who know people, stories going back generations, all that. This cuts both ways: it's charming beyond belief in a lot of ways, but this is also why the city seems to have repeatedly shrugged and said "I dunno, the cows used to walk that way in the 1790s, you wanna build a road different?"

Another historical oddity is The Long-Legged Baseballman Playing With Kids At Fenway, here about to catch a strike from the Extremely Young Baseballchild. Fun fact that made me fall in love with this man: he carries a grabber, which he used to THROW AWAY LITTER THAT PEOPLE WERE DROPPING. There are some things that I love more than life itself.

I used to say that Boston was an inverse Chicago: the latter is an amazing world-class city surrounded by hours of... a lot of bland nothingness, to reductively generalize, and the former is a kinda crummy city surrounded by an overload of amazingness. That's still sort of true! One of my favorite things about Boston is its proximity to Portland (aka "the happy place"), but it's just flat magical that you can drive 2-3 hours from Boston and be in mountains, at the ocean, almost to New York, in the forest, wherever. New England is pretty stunning, and someday I want to take the kind of trip I always wanted to take from Boston but never could, camping and driving and small-town-poking-arounding across the whole shebang.

The ducks of Boston Common! Apparently they are dressed up for all major occasions/holidays?? I THINK THAT IS A NICE THING?

In any case, the city is, indeed, charming, and if you're lucky enough to have the cash to live near where you work or play, I can see why you'd fall in love with it. Its transit system is too broken for me to ever really love it, but this year really connected me with people that made it a place I'm going to miss. Starting to date again (which always helps keep exploring), making new friends outside my department and school, logging some meaningful time with old friends, and getting to host visitors, along with the relief that comes with settling into dissertation land after you've detoxed from comps/orals/prospectus all aligned to help me find new favorites, and to lace the city through with some grand memories atop all the hard and ugly ones. This, I think, is the best reason not to walk away or quit in a moment like I had last year (as I had assumed I would!) - the long horizon starts to balance the scales, joy nibbles in around the edges, and soon your many lives are cohabitating, the good with the bad, all teaching you how complex and irreducible all things are, and reminding you of hope and possibility.

Some incredibly friendly confines you got here, fellas.

So much, then, for that. More posts to come on whatever strikes my fancy on this next transitional chapter (errr all chapters are transitional I guess?), but not for a minute or two. First, it's time to take a much-desired break from technology, three days straight with only my Nook and a downloaded google map of Florence to keep me company. I am prepared for much joy and rejuvenation to come from this, so get ready for some seriously zen posts next week*!!!

IT, AS THE FELLOW SAYS, ME (Red-soxing on a whim in the waning days!)

* probably mostly talking about smelly airports and amazing grocery stores, this site will stop at NOTHING to bring you all the Important Information.

Strictly speaking this dog is not a public feature of Boston, but it IS one of the best photos I anticipate taking in 2017, so enjoy it while you can? THIS DOG AND HER BROTHER ALFIE ARE CRAZY BUT THEY LOVE ME AND I THEM SO I'M ALL ON BOARD FOR IT. K GOODNIGHT.