Fine to See You

Last weekend, M. and I flew up to Boston to visit Jess and Thom, who lived at the end of a long three-part T ride through the chill Boston night on top of a hill in Somerville. Their little four-room (1 bed, 1 bath) apartment is tucked away on the first floor of an old New England house at the end of a narrow hallway with a wooden floor and faded, but not peeling, paint. There was not a single fluorescent light fixture in the building. The toilet seat did not stay up at all. The apartment was decorated with yellowed paper lanterns, postcards, and framed posters that Jess took from the thrift store where she works half of the time, when she's not at the foster children's home. The radiators whistled through the night like distant gales.

Once there, we immediately dug in, hunkered down, and indulged in massive amounts of blissful nothing. We sat on the floor and listened to Jess and Thom's 15 Joan Baez records, or one or two of them, anyway. Then M. and I played some Mountain Goats and Guided by Voices off of my iPod, because these are the bands we share with our loved ones. We ordered two Indian "dinner for one" takeouts for the four of us--one for Jess and Thom, one for M. and me--and had a candlelit (in letter if not spirit) dinner at home. The second night Jess and Thom made a minimal celiac meal and refused to let M. or I help. While sitting around the dinner table, we thought up ways in which one of us did not fit in with the other three (Jess had never been rejected from Harvard; M. was not wearing the sweater-over-collared-shirt combo; Thom did not go to Johns Hopkins; I was not white, etc.). We cooked scrambled eggs and drank Guinness and coffee in equal quantities. We bought socks. I am not even kidding.

It was the best weekend ever. For 48 hours time stopped, and the four of us sidestepped history. "Let's get a place next door and be neighbors," M. murmured at night as we snuggled on a futon that just barely bore the weight of us and three layers of the coziest blankets. It seemed like a good idea.

We did manage to leave the house and explore the Cambridge-Boston area on Saturday. We saw the graves of Paul Revere and various relatives of Ben Franklin. Thom, with the history degree, spun obscure Bostonian tangents like so many balls of unraveling kitten-yarn. Just about everyone wore peacoats. We saw some people ice skating (and some others failing at such) in a tiny rink in the Commons. People seemed to crowd together to alleviate the cold, or maybe it was just because the streets were so narrow and it was the weekend. We visited Thom's office, where his boss who was working a weekend shift greeted us without shoes. We went candlepin bowling, at which it turns out I suck even more than at normal bowling, with a friend of Jess' that she met in France, and the twin sister of a girl who went to college with us. We met up with Jess' former roommate Rachel and her current roommate, and had coffee and pastries a few blocks from the bay.

Such were my first impressions of Boston: the relative cleanliness; the piercing winter daylight on the surface of the Charles; the non-Euclidian, labyrinthine streets (H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" makes perfect sense to me now); the solid public transport; the coffee joints (actually just a Dunkin' Donuts) in the subway stations encouraging toasty and caffeinated commutes; the half-bald-but-still-attempting-mullet busker kitted out with a looper, an M-Audio keyboard, and dual Marshall all-tube JCM900 combos. That was what I went to see and what I needed to know, really; not any specific location or landmark, but rather the general atmosphere of the place, the smell of the air, the feel of the wind, the sound of people passing through. It wasn't exactly what I had expected, but it was fantastic, easily at least tying Chicago for my favorite city in the US that I've been to. (Current ranking: 1. Chicago 1. Boston 3. San Francisco 4. NYC. Baltimore is excluded because that's where I am right now.) It was less cosmopolitan than I'd expected, and more quaint, in a very good way. An European city in America? Perhaps. Call it as you will.

The downside is that I'm now even more convinced that this is what I want to spend my time on. And just as grad school applications are due, too. I read an article in the JHU Arts & Sciences magazine-newsletter today about a particularly overachieving, though admirable, undergrad, and thought of how I won't ever be anything like him, and probably never could have. About the only things I really care about anymore are cooking healthy meals and being good to my girlfriend. I wish I could become a professional homebody. Achievements, discoveries, these are enticing things for sure, but seem so vaporous compared with the smile of someone you know is smiling because you are in their life. And so much more immediately gratifying than the tight-lipped nods from faceless authority figures people spend entire careers prostrating themselves to please. Excuse me if I sound dizzied. I could try to make my professional dent in the world, as so many people I went to school with are currently struggling, and will struggle for years to come, to do, or I could use that energy to ensure to the best of my ability happiness for a conclave of a few (four, say), and I'm not entirely convinced the latter is the lesser.

Maybe, as I said to N., today, it is simply because nous sommes des amants rejetés de l'intellect. (Or, assuming I got it right: "we are the spurned lovers of intellect," which I thought would sound less daft in French, or maybe it doesn't.) "I guess that's exactly it," he said.