Things To Do In Boston When You’re Dumb
Beantown I’ve been to a few times; of all the places I’m visiting, it’s the most familiar, since I went to school in Worcester and got out here occasionally.
So the fact that I’ve basically pissed away the day here isn’t a complete tragedy.
The day so far:
1. Sleep in. This was a good idea.
2. Bum around at friend’s place for a while. This is not a great use of my time, but it’s comforting to get in some pantless internettery of the sort I get at home on a daily basis. Finish off the rugelach I bought at Russ & Daughters (and shared with friends during Rockbanding last night), catch up with Metafilter, write some email, etc.
3. Decide, in my relative ignorance of Boston’s bus system and on the advice of the MBTA, to buy a Charlie card at the Tedeschi’s down the road. Get distracted by sudden desire for food (note: rugelach not a full breakfast), duck into Dunkin Donuts for breakfast sandwich thing, break a large bill into ones so I can by my reckoning safely go straight for the bus and skip the stop at Tedeschi’s.
4. Catch a 32 to Forest Hills. Discover that trying to pay in cash is enough to make the very helpful bus driver foist a Charlie card and a quick tutorial on me. That was pretty cool. Portland has not yet moved to a card-based system for our (otherwise excellent) public transit system, so it’s interesting to see in action.
5. Transfer to an Orange Line, ride into Downtown Crossing.
6. Catch some guy playing artfully wanky piezo-electric covers of classic rock songs, clap politely and then flee Downtown Crossing at a fast walk in search of something other than twangy Beatles instrumental covers.
7. Stop in at South Station for some nostalgia. I commuted from Worcester to Providence for a summer dotcom job in 2000, a hellish indirect route through Boston that took about 3.5 hours each way end to end. My memories of Boston are accordingly powerfully associated with the commuter rail/bus passage through South Station. Happy to note that they’ve updated the readerboard to LED. Less happy to note that the bathrooms are still kind of terrifying. One of the stalls looked like an installation piece in toilet-paper-mache and feces.
8. Wander up the road, observing local jaywalking habits. Portland is pretty chill, traffic-wise, so I’m always a little on edge trying to figure the jay/car dynamic in other cities. Boston seems pretty manageable, though many people seem desperate to start crossing exactly five seconds before the walk sign comes on, even if there’s traffic coming that they then get in a staring match with.
9. Decide to get something to drink and google up some interesting local lunch. Pop into a Brueggels or something like that, discover that laptop’s trackpad is acting up in a really badly unusable way. Freak out on twitter and email, get a couple of suggestions, decide after having too think about it far too long that maybe I should go buy an external mouse.
10. Painfully google up a Radio Shack on Summer and Kingston, buy a Logitech optical mouse from a very distracted dude trying to help his trainee coworker sell a guy a mobile phone.
11. Cross the street to a Quiznos because I still haven’t eaten lunch and it’s turning into an eat-or-die situation, especially with the is-my-laptop-fucked panic attack doing tricks to my stomach. Get a sandwich, park at a table by the window, unbox mouse, open up laptop, and discover that the trackpad is now just peachy keen.
12. Eat goddam sandwich, write up twelve-point list about how I wasted the day.
Hopefully this is the dumbest part of the whole trip.
Getting dinner with my brother in an hour or two, and then meetup, though. Day is looking up.
