5:30am in Boston

The tuxes-/fireworks-/Zombies (the band, not the internet cliché)-themed New Year’s party we’ve been planning and anticipating is most likely not going to entirely succeed. There will probably be some guests, and some booze, but the tuxes and the fireworks are looking less likely every day.

The weather in Boston and Chicago is dreadful. Friday afternoon I opted to break the bank on an Amtrak ticket to New York instead of taking a bus. It took three and a half hours. It was like magic. A bus that departed New York at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, on the other hand, arrived in Boston at 7:30. We crawled behind two snow plows for what felt like two hours of that trip. Fortunately I had been tipped off to Bolt Bus, whose buses have two rows of seats removed, giving every row an extra four or so inches of leg room, which sounds trivial but is in fact not trivial at all.

Logan Airport was madness at 6am on Monday. I boarded my plane fifteen minutes before takeoff. JetBlue is not all it’s cracked up to be. There really isn’t any noticeable additional legroom. The snack selection isn’t as exciting as you might expect. And the TVs embedded in the headrests of every seat is an awful idea. Even if yours is off, your eyes are irresistibly drawn to every other screen in front of you, all of which are on. This of course requires that all the shades be pulled down to reduce glare. It’s a depressing sight that’s ripe for a photo in Adbusters.

If nothing else, staying with my folks in Chicago over the holidays slows things down for me and offers me some faint clarity and perspective that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I’m looking forward to next year. I do feel a little smarter. I think I even have a better idea of what I want, and maybe even the motivation to do something about it.

Anyway. It’s nice to know that there’s a whole weekend between this trip and beginning work again.

I was watching a speech recently in which the author of Stumbling Upon Happiness was describing the phenomenon of preferring the outcome of an irreversible choice after the decision more than before it — describing this phenomenon as being intuitive. Am I alone or don’t a lot of people work precisely the opposite way? When I choose something irreversibly, it becomes worse in my eyes than its alternatives. Maybe just a symptom of chronic pessimism, or as I prefer to call it, hard-boiled realism.

Anyway, every minute that passes since I sent in that résumé is more excruciating and remorseful than the last. Sad to say if I get the job, it’ll be the first one that “counts,” the first one where I’m doing something at least peripherally related to something I actually like for the sake of liking it, like–liking it.

So I guess this is another diary-like post. I wish it were like 1999 and none of my friends were too proud to have a LiveJournal. There are some strangers’ blogs I read who have little close-knit LJ communities like that, where they just talk about shit and post pictures and then comment on each other’s posts with inside jokes and stuff. That sounds cool. In the meantime I feel bad for people who found this place Googling for Firefox tips or something then subscribed to it thinking it’s a tech blog. Sorry, this isn’t a tech blog. I don’t know what it is.

Sunday marks two years since I first listened to Ys. It’s not my favorite album or anything but it does represent the beginning of fall for me, and I meant to wait until the anniversary date to start listening to it again, but my memory failed me and I started yesterday. The details of my life.

Then again I feel like that’s what kind of happens when you get old. It’s troubling. In college things are always in flux, there’s exams and schedules and projects and decisions and deadlines. After that, if you have a steady job and live in the same place for a significant length of time, you’re just an adult consuming media. I’m naturally nostalgic, but at the same time I don’t like the idea that I’m listening to the same album on precisely the same street at precisely the same time that I was 720 days ago. Or, rather, that I haven’t changed since then. Even my creative outlets are routine and predictable.

I’ve been living in this city for almost three consecutive years, I think the longest I’ve lived in any one place in my adult life. I’ve moved from Illinois to Massachusetts to Ohio and back to Massachusetts again. I feel like I need to squeeze in one more major change before I hit 30, which will happen in just over two years.

I remember reading a long time ago about Andy Warhol saying he likes being in a rut. It’s little consolation.

Friday: 36°

• 7:00pm: McDonald’s: double hamburger
• 8:00pm: sleet
• 9:00pm: Smuttynose IPA
• 11:30pm: Sounds Lounge: Sierra Nevada, Hoegaarden
• 1:30am: Koronet Pizza

Saturday: 39°

• 9:30am: Vitamin Water: grape
• 10:30am: McDonald’s: hotcakes, sausage biscuit, hashbrown, orange juice, coffee
• 2:00pm: Brooklyn Museum: Ron Mueck
• 5:00pm: Other Music: White Flight, Shugo Tokumaru, Songs: Ohia, The Battles, The Wire’s Joanna Newsom cover
• 6:00pm: The Red Lion: Guinness, Sierra Nevada, coffee, Magic Hat
• 2:00am: Pommes Frites

Sunday: 35°

• 1:30pm: McDonald’s: double hamburger, fries, Coke
• 2:00pm: Vitamin Water: Kelly Clarkson-brand kiwi-strawberry
• 7:00pm: Snickers

“Too Much McDonald’s”