Boston in the early summer absolutely drowns in lilacs. It's lousy with them, the whole Watertown-Cambridge area in which I spend 99% of my leisure time smelling exactly like it's been dipped into perfume. The amazing and truly magical part of it all is that at this point in the year it can be impossible to actually see the blooms, since they're mostly dead and fading. Walking down the street, especially Brattle in Cambridge or, surprisingly, the Watertown walking trail (which runs parallel to Arsenal St for a substantial distance), is like swimming in it.
Is this what I've been missing for the last few years? Is this what I gave up when I started driving to work almost three years ago now? Shame on me. Walking today I got to see historic homes for more than fifteen seconds a piece; saw a wild rabbit, eyes wide and nervous, eating weeds in a front yard; and realized that one house not far away has some bronze sculptures in the front yard that remind me eerily of the Korean War Memorial in D.C.
Did I realize at one point that the defining scent of a Boston summer was lilac? Was it a realization that I'd had before? Have there always been so many people out with pets and kids and significant others and friends on the weekends? (Has it always been so awkward watching a Bostonian try to talk to a stranger? Yes.)
I spent last summer holed up in my apartment trying to get my mind back in order. The summer before that I was halfway between driving everywhere and walking everywhere. (The post below, from my first - abortive - attempt to share my specific kind of joie de vivre with the world, suggests that I felt pretty much the same way about walking then as I do now.) I've missed this.
I feel alive when I walk places, alive in a way that few other things match. (Horseback riding, sailing...) Headphones in one ear to help keep a certain sense of continuity when cars pass or other unnatural noise starts getting in the way, a sense of direction, and the time to not care how long it takes me to get there - these are the ingredients for a good afternoon, for me.
I can't imagine a world in which Boston on Memorial Day doesn't smell like lilacs. Right now I'm sticky with sweat, and the sunburn on my back is juuuust starting to itch. I have a slight headache because my eyes are light-sensitive. All I want is to take a shower and drink ice tea in the dark... and I feel fantastic. Today was definitely a good day, and here's hoping it's one of many this summer.
5.29.2011
6.14.2009
Today, it being a Sunday and my unfortunate last day of freedom before my two gloriously empty weeks of vacation end and I return once again to a world of striving for perfection and finding, after a 50-60 hr week, that it's just as far away as ever, I did what I usually do at least one day of every weekend - woke up at 8am, fed the newly acquired cat, pretended that my computer was a portal into a world far more interesting than mine, and then followed the cat's advice and went back to sleep.
When you're in your early 20s, dreading the return to a job you hate, there's not a lot else to do on a Sunday morning.
When I woke up again at an hour at which I could not condone the return to sleep, I decided to engage in phase two of the ideal at-home-weekend - get up, throw on the cleanest shirt you don't hate, remind yourself that laundry doesn't do itself, distract the cat, and leave.
I try to tell myself there's a motivated individual inside waiting to get out, the way overweight people talk about there being a size 2 woman inside, but in reality on the inside I'm tired, lazy, frustrated, and much better at dispensing sarcasm than filling out grad school applications. My own recession horror story involves a job which pays the bills but includes a boss that drives me crazy and a migration from 90 hour weeks to 60 hour weeks, including one terribly painful month in which I got a total of one day off, to the eventual realization that no matter how hard or long I worked my boss would not approve of the job I was doing because I lacked certain skills required to meet his expectations, and finally to a vow to not work more than 50 hours a week, so help me God.
In the last nine months I've gone from cheerful, free-spirited, loving life and books and baking wheat bread with flour on my nose and taking pictures of my beautiful city while walking home from work to quiet, cranky, driving everywhere, never having time to cook, and gaining 50 lbs from stress-eating. You may think I'm exaggerating, but my scale disagrees. And I hate that. I hate all of it. I joked, when I first took the job (one which I can still, sometimes, convince myself I could love) that I was selling my soul, but this is not what I was expecting.
Back to today, when I left it was to head, semi-directly, to my favorite bookstore, to my favorite section in which to spend a Sunday (teen fiction) to pull a few novels of the variety that incite my curiosity but rarely inspire me to pull out my credit card, and to sit down in my preferred out-of-the-way-but-not-actually-in-the-children's-section corner (it's the weekend, so it can get pretty loud back there, and besides I need to make some effort to maintain my dignity) and began to read.
Inspiration comes from the strangest places, and somewhere in a book called The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks I found mine again. (If you are not the type to be put off by the intended audience of a book, you should try this - I read from the teen section because the majority of the books there are light, fluffy, and fun, the literary equivalent of a lemon meringue pie that's mostly meringue, but some of the books there are wonderfully enthralling, and this was one.)
For years I've debated starting a blog but have always been put off because I can't think of anything about which I think I could write on a regular basis, but today... something began to germinate in my mind on a completely different topic, but with enough force to put me off the idea of grabbing a different book and reading it at a table while enjoying a late lunch of tuna and potato chip salad and instead motivated me to finish my sandwich quickly, procure a notebook (can you believe that Moleskine notebooks have a page saying "In case of loss, return to: ___ As a reward: $___"? I can and I love it) and move to my favorite tea shop, which is one at which $2.09 will buy you endless tea on tap and a seat for as long as you want it, to begin to write.
I figure most people well off enough to have them live primarily on the weekends. It becomes somewhat more so when all you really have time for on weekdays is coming home, checking your personal email and RSS feed, and going to sleep. Especially after months of having been denied weekends at all. My last job, though... (different job, same company). It was boring, but I didn't allow that to consume me. I went places after work, laughed and joked and cooked myself dinner after walking home and put my computer in the kitchen and danced with a wire-whisk microphone (okay, sometimes it was a spaghetti spoon) while ostensibly cleaning.
I worked 40 hours a week, and my life felt like one long weekend.
This blog is about my quest to get that back.
To spend more time worrying about getting to the farmer's market than trying to be perfect at a job that's so unrewarding that it's been known to make me cry, but which I can't leave because I don't have anything else. To try my hardest every day until it's my predetermined time to go home, and to be happy that that's enough, that my best can and should be sufficient. To find a job that helps the emptiness go away.
More importantly, to laugh more. To never be too tired to dance in white socks on a dirty kitchen floor while making dinner from scratch, not a box. To remember that I'm young, fairly healthy, and am so in love with life that it hurts sometimes. To walk everywhere even if it does take 10 times as long. To learn to make cheese from scratch. To return to a way and a speed of living where clean laundry is a right, not a luxury. To live in a way that shows the things I value, and to remember that having a lifetime of weekends ahead of me is no reason to squander the ones I have now, and that there's no reason to save all my living for Saturday and Sunday when there are 5 other days to love as well.
This blog is about remembering how to be happy.
When you're in your early 20s, dreading the return to a job you hate, there's not a lot else to do on a Sunday morning.
When I woke up again at an hour at which I could not condone the return to sleep, I decided to engage in phase two of the ideal at-home-weekend - get up, throw on the cleanest shirt you don't hate, remind yourself that laundry doesn't do itself, distract the cat, and leave.
I try to tell myself there's a motivated individual inside waiting to get out, the way overweight people talk about there being a size 2 woman inside, but in reality on the inside I'm tired, lazy, frustrated, and much better at dispensing sarcasm than filling out grad school applications. My own recession horror story involves a job which pays the bills but includes a boss that drives me crazy and a migration from 90 hour weeks to 60 hour weeks, including one terribly painful month in which I got a total of one day off, to the eventual realization that no matter how hard or long I worked my boss would not approve of the job I was doing because I lacked certain skills required to meet his expectations, and finally to a vow to not work more than 50 hours a week, so help me God.
In the last nine months I've gone from cheerful, free-spirited, loving life and books and baking wheat bread with flour on my nose and taking pictures of my beautiful city while walking home from work to quiet, cranky, driving everywhere, never having time to cook, and gaining 50 lbs from stress-eating. You may think I'm exaggerating, but my scale disagrees. And I hate that. I hate all of it. I joked, when I first took the job (one which I can still, sometimes, convince myself I could love) that I was selling my soul, but this is not what I was expecting.
Back to today, when I left it was to head, semi-directly, to my favorite bookstore, to my favorite section in which to spend a Sunday (teen fiction) to pull a few novels of the variety that incite my curiosity but rarely inspire me to pull out my credit card, and to sit down in my preferred out-of-the-way-but-not-actually-in-the-children's-section corner (it's the weekend, so it can get pretty loud back there, and besides I need to make some effort to maintain my dignity) and began to read.
Inspiration comes from the strangest places, and somewhere in a book called The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks I found mine again. (If you are not the type to be put off by the intended audience of a book, you should try this - I read from the teen section because the majority of the books there are light, fluffy, and fun, the literary equivalent of a lemon meringue pie that's mostly meringue, but some of the books there are wonderfully enthralling, and this was one.)
For years I've debated starting a blog but have always been put off because I can't think of anything about which I think I could write on a regular basis, but today... something began to germinate in my mind on a completely different topic, but with enough force to put me off the idea of grabbing a different book and reading it at a table while enjoying a late lunch of tuna and potato chip salad and instead motivated me to finish my sandwich quickly, procure a notebook (can you believe that Moleskine notebooks have a page saying "In case of loss, return to: ___ As a reward: $___"? I can and I love it) and move to my favorite tea shop, which is one at which $2.09 will buy you endless tea on tap and a seat for as long as you want it, to begin to write.
I figure most people well off enough to have them live primarily on the weekends. It becomes somewhat more so when all you really have time for on weekdays is coming home, checking your personal email and RSS feed, and going to sleep. Especially after months of having been denied weekends at all. My last job, though... (different job, same company). It was boring, but I didn't allow that to consume me. I went places after work, laughed and joked and cooked myself dinner after walking home and put my computer in the kitchen and danced with a wire-whisk microphone (okay, sometimes it was a spaghetti spoon) while ostensibly cleaning.
I worked 40 hours a week, and my life felt like one long weekend.
This blog is about my quest to get that back.
To spend more time worrying about getting to the farmer's market than trying to be perfect at a job that's so unrewarding that it's been known to make me cry, but which I can't leave because I don't have anything else. To try my hardest every day until it's my predetermined time to go home, and to be happy that that's enough, that my best can and should be sufficient. To find a job that helps the emptiness go away.
More importantly, to laugh more. To never be too tired to dance in white socks on a dirty kitchen floor while making dinner from scratch, not a box. To remember that I'm young, fairly healthy, and am so in love with life that it hurts sometimes. To walk everywhere even if it does take 10 times as long. To learn to make cheese from scratch. To return to a way and a speed of living where clean laundry is a right, not a luxury. To live in a way that shows the things I value, and to remember that having a lifetime of weekends ahead of me is no reason to squander the ones I have now, and that there's no reason to save all my living for Saturday and Sunday when there are 5 other days to love as well.
This blog is about remembering how to be happy.
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