Poetics of commuting

To get to work/school, I now walk about 15 minutes from my house to the Davis Square T stop, where I hop a red line train into the city, followed by a green line train back out to MFA. I then walk about 5 minutes on the other end out along the Fenway to Simmons. The commute unfortunately takes about an hour each way, which is not ideal. But it also adds up to about 40 minutes of walking per day, which hopefully somewhat makes up for the fact that I have yet to make it to the gym in Boston. (There is theoretically a fitness center at school, but it's somewhat inconvenient if you don't live on campus.)

In any case, the commute is interesting because there are a thousand new things to notice every day. Sometimes they're really obvious -- like the day I was bringing my mom back from the airport on the T and a couple was having a knock-down, drag-out, yelling and screaming argument at the other end of the nearly-empty subway car. Other times you catch more subtle things. Like the house on College Ave. where someone has laid out giant poetry words on the ground like refrigerator magnets.

Here's another one: The subway platform at Davis is made up of dingy red bricks. Etched into them is a faint message -- easy to miss if you're not looking for it:

At 7am watching the cars on the bridge

Everybody's going to work. Well.

Not me. I'm not

Going to work

-James Moore

When I stand amid the swarm of people milling around the platform and see this, it makes me smile.

Snow. Lots of it.

The good news is that I had the foresight to go out and buy a snow shovel a few weeks ago. (I had gotten rid of my old one from Syracuse years ago because Nashville never had enough snow to bother.)

The bad news is that I put it in the back of my pickup so that I'd have it handy when I needed to dig the truck out. Now the back of the truck is frozen shut and buried behind a 5-foot high snowpile.

If I had the shovel I could dig it out, but...

Got a day off from work on Sunday, which is a mixed blessing. The extra holiday was nice, but when I don't work I don't get paid! The workload and crazy schedule have been killing me, but we've reworked some of my hours and I think that will help. I'm hoping to do some catch up posting on this blog sometime soon, including photos of the move in and more details about what I've been up to since I arrived.