Mug World

Mug World is what my friend A.L. and I call coffee shops that suck. It's a hybrid of our two least favorite coffee shops' names. People of Princeton and Philadelphia, you know what I'm talking about. And people of Boston, yes, this should really be called 1369 Central Square Mug World but that was a bit unwieldy. The sentiment is there nonetheless.

However, that is not what this post is about. This post is about the terrifying realization that I have an accidental collection of novelty mugs.

It seriously really wasn't on purpose. Secretly as a Real Adult I like my dishes and my glassware to match. Please don't tell anyone. But the mug situation is bad. It borders on crazy-lady bad, because I think I might be too old for it to still be perceived as ironic. And yet, what do I do about it? That's right. I tell the whole fucking internet about it. Great job. Brava.

In order of acquisition:

1. Feminism mug (1998)

Yes, I drank out of mugs before 1998! But this is the oldest one that none of my idiot roommates broke or lost over the years. No just kidding, you guys. I love you all. Anyway, at one point roommate and dear friend A.T.M. and I had joint custody of this mug. Her awesome mom M.M. gave it to our household and eventually it ended up with me. Honestly, I can't ever remember exactly what the quotation is yammering on about or who even said it. Ask me to tell you what words are on this mug and the only one I can come up with is "Feminism." I'm such a bad feminist! Seriously, though, I don't even look at the text anymore. I just say "Today my coffee is a feminist."

2. DORCHESTAH YAAHHHHHD SALE (1999)

I got these three mugs - plus more than a dozen others - when I lived in Dorchester. Dorchester - or Dottie, as it's fondly and mysteriously called - is a really fascinating part of Boston. I'll spare you its long history because really I just want to get to the heart of the matter, Mr. Executive up there. But it's enough to say that the neighborhood we moved into was largely white, Italian-American and Irish-American working class. I hate making statements like that but shit was a little bit The Departed up in there. In fact, much of that film was filmed in my neighborhood.

We moved there in 1998 in the thick of a period of real estate market over-saturation. There were only something like fifty vacancies in the entire city when we were apartment-hunting; half of these were overpriced fancy places we couldn't afford, the other half were overpriced slummy places we could. We aggressively sought out the latter and took the first one we found where we didn't hear gunfire during the real estate tour.

I have a whole other blog post planned about this apartment and I'm getting really distracted right now and want to tell you all about the smoke-stained wood paneling instead of the mugs. Focus, A.B., focus!

During our years there, a number of the local residents grew curious about our household. These were the many well-nested neighorhooders; guys who I remember as all named Jimmy and Joey and Johnny and Othah Jimmy. They were a little hardscrabble in a good way. Often they came by wearing Red Sox sweatpants and/or Red Sox t-shirts, and always seemed to have some sort of money-making scheme cooking. In and out of trouble types who had their licenses revoked in 1985 for a DUI or something but probably no felonies (however I'd bet they owed back taxes). Friends with all the cops despite breaking a number of rules along the way. In and out of handyman jobs. The kind of fellows I'd almost trust to do home repairs, so long as they didn't involve wiring. Maybe I'd also exclude plumbing.  OK, maybe I wouldn't want them fixing stuff in my house. They were good guys, though. They are probably all still living there.

They had a lot of questions for us, and were delightfully unashamed to ask all of them. We were a big flophouse with punks and other college-age hooligans coming in and out all the time. We didn't have a television (at least one that worked), and dressed oddly and sometimes had pink hair. When they asked us if we went to college, some of us said yes and the others no. It was unclear how we all knew each other and who was a resident and who else was a long-term guest. It was painfully clear that the Dorchester Guys often had heated debates about this. I mean, they spent all day on most days sitting on the stoop across the street from our house. If I were them, I'd have conjured up a bunch of narratives, too.

I remember one day my roommate H.W. and I strolled by and waved to Joey. Five minutes later he was ringing our doorbell (which he did a lot). I answered the door and he said to me in his thick Boston accent: So, aaaaah, me and Jimmy, we wuhre wohnderin: aaaaaahhhre you guhrls bisexual? I mean, who the hell rings their neighbors' doorbell and asks that?? These guys were amazing.

OK, OK: the mugs!! It was a spring day. A Saturday. REALLY EARLY IN THE MORNING. Again, the doorbell:

Joey: Oh heeey, aaaaah, aaaaahhhrree you guuhrls awake?
Me: Not really. What's going on?
Joey: Well, me and Jimmy, wwwweeeeeh're havin' a yaaaaaahhhrd sale today, and we thought you guuuhrls would like to come by and, aaah, check out ouuuuhr waaaaahhhrrres?
Me: Um, ok. A little later? We're still sleeping over here.
Joey: Yah, ok. I heeeeaah yaaaah. But we got some real good stuff, though. Some things I think you guuuuuhrls aaaaaahhhre really gonna like. And it's gonna go fast!
Me: Ok. Later Joey. We'll come by later.

An hour goes by. Then, the doorbell.

Jimmy: So, aaaaah, I'm not sure if Joey told you guuuuhrls, but we're having a yaaaaahrd sale today.
Me: Yeah, you know? Joey stopped by already to share the good news.
Jimmy: Oh, yah? Really? He didn't tell me.
Me: Really!
Jimmy: So aaaahre you guhrls gonna come by oohr whaaaaaaat? Wicked good waaaaaahres down theeeeehre. You need things foooohr your kitchen? We got 'em. Foooohr your living ruuuum? We got 'em. For your ....
Me: We'll be down in five minutes.

So off we went, probably in our pajamas, to find a three-legged card table propped up on cinder blocks with a real potpourri of coffee mugs. Nothing but coffee mugs. And we pooled a bunch of money and bought the lot of them. In part this is because we just wanted to go back to sleep. But I'm certain it was also because we liked these guys so much, crazy personal questions and early morning doorbell ringing and all.

At one point we had something close to two dozen of these. I forget what a lot of them looked like but I know there were at least three New England Patriots cups and a #1 Golfer. Pictured above are KAHULA, Mr. Executive (my favorite), and the rainbow mug that always makes me picture the Dottie guys in their Red Sox Nation garb sipping Sanka out of what could honestly be the gayest mug ever. We lost a lot of the Dorchester Guys mugs in a house fire in 2004. And by that I mean to say that we left a lot of them in that apartment. The kitchen was just about the only room untouched by flames but the silver lining of tragedy was the opportunity to leave behind a bunch of these mugs. The pantry had gotten really out of control.

3. Vikings! (2000)

 

This one was my entirely my fault, and there isn't a really great story here. I bought this when I was in Iceland because it is a giant ass, heavy, ridiculous beast of a mug that holds about seven gallons of coffee. I know I've provided absolutely nothing for scale in these pictures, but trust me this thing would hold about three Mr. Executives' worth of joe. This was a big fucking deal at a period of my life in which I was trying to hold down two or three jobs and keep a social calendar as if I had no jobs. I was drinking an awful lot of coffee. Thor and Friends ensured that I never had to go back for a refill.

4. Scary Sports Mug (2001)

Awesome roommate D.M.B.B. gave me this after accidentally smashing one of the Dorchestah Guys mugs. I'm gonna guess that it was #1 Golfer, given the theme of this hideous and terrifying thing that for some reason I keep making a part of my morning routine. At first I thought it might have been the rooster mug that had a plume as one handle and a head as the other, but then I remembered the poster-sized apology note other roommate R.F.B.G. III left me that reads: SORRY I BROKE YOUR COCK. So it must have been #1 Golfer. In any case, I still have this grotesque nightmare-inducing coffee vessel. I like to foist this one off on houseguests who overstay their welcome.

5. Rainbows and Hearts (ca. 2004?)

At some point, people otherwise known as my friends began to think that I had all these damn mugs on purpose. And they began to gift them to me! The nerve! This chipper day filled with rainbows brought to you by my great friend R.G. The provenance would look something like this: Hallmark Holidays Drawing Board > China > Hallmark Holidays Store > God-Fearing Christian > Other God-Fearing Christian as a Holiday Gift > Goodwill > R.G. > Me. It may be scarier than that perpetually grinning, spider veined, baseball face up there. And that's really saying something.

6. Plain white teacup (2006)

This is neither novelty nor a mug. I just saw it while digging through my cabinet and am telling you a story about it.

When my friend J.B. got married, there was a table overflowing with teacups and saucers. At some point we were each instructed to take one, plus a postage-paid envelope, plus an instruction sheet. The gist of it is that when the teacup breaks - as many of them invariably do - we are to mail the pieces to J.B. to bury in his yard. And we are to write a story about how the teacup broke.

J.B. is clever and an exceptionally brilliant writer, so none of this came as a big surprise, as unusual an idea as it may be. I took one of the plainest cup and saucer sets (saucer not pictured - too high up in the cabinet to get down today for the photo shoot). I figured that a plain cup would be more easily broken, more carelessly treated by a friend or a housemate. My friend and I drove many miles to this wedding in a pickup truck and honestly I wasn't even sure it would make it home in one piece.

It's now lived in four houses with six or seven different roommates. I never tell anyone to be careful with it or wrap it as one would a delicate heirloom when packing up the kitchen. And yet it is still in one piece. I'm not impatient for it to break - its time will come. But I have a vision of myself as a frail old lady poised to drop it from a second-story balcony, desperately ready to tell its long story.

7. Alma Mater Tomaters (2006 (R) and 2007 (L)

The dumb "welcome to the rest of your life as a doctoral student" giveaway mug from when I started grad school in 2007 and the soup vat style UMass mug I got with a surcharge and my B.A. the year before. Note that despite being the size of a kiddie pool, the UMass mug can't even contain the name of the state on one side. MASSACHUSETTS. That's a long ass word.

8. Darlene (2011)

I shouldn't have, but I stole this from some poor bastard at a White Elephant Christmas Party in December. Mug acquisition had come to a grinding halt in Princeton and I was comfortable with this. I bought some matching water glasses and sets of wine glasses and tumblers. I acquired a food processor and I really thought this closed the door on juvenile kitchenware. I was clean, I thought, and then I really fell off the wagon with this one. My mind said no but my heart said yes. 

I harbored secret fantasies that someone would put me out of my misery and steal this back from me at the party. I think I had #11 and there were 25 attendees. So the chances were good. There were two (!) inflatable turkeys and a grandma floral wrought iron and ceramic table centerpiece floating about and so I felt certain someone would try to swap out some of that junk for Darlene. This mug falls into the "so bad it's good" category that often attracts a cult following. Many people eyed it but nobody went for it. In a fitting turn of events, the people who thought hardest about taking this mug instead went for the gift I'd brought. Go figure.

This might be the ugliest thing I've ever consented to drink out of. It might be the ugliest thing I've ever had in my house. The "trompe l'oeil" beer barrel base is really that shade of puke green, and the naked lady handle actually is that neon lime color. Two hideous greens that look even more hideous together. And yes, when you pick up the mug your thumb is nestled right between her highbeams. I can't believe I just said that in a public forum.

Carved into the ceramic on its base is the name DARLENE. This is hands down the best part. Is this the title or the artist? I have no idea. But I mean ... Darlene? Seriously?! DARLENE? It's just too good.

9. Fucking Giraffe Mug (2012)

I have wanted this mug since I first saw it in 2004. It belongs to my pal B.F., who was my office neighbor when I worked at UMass and the source of about a thousand and counting amazing stories of times past and present. His office is borderline Hoarders, at least in terms of ratio of stuff to square footage. Need a Burger King Whopper playset from 1980? B.F's got it. Need retired office supplies? B.F. has those, too. How about a child's drawing left behind by her mother, a professor who quit the university a decade ago? That's there, too. And don't get my started about the box of pantyhose.

I love this stuff because there is always a memory attached to it, and in turn a story attached to that memory. Before the fire and before I started moving around lots for school and work, I had a lot of things like that, too. Now my life is more frequently uprooted and my belongings streamlined. Sometimes I wish I'd been able to hold on to more stuff in the way that B.F. has.

The giraffe mug came by way of another professor who left it behind in the 1980s. B.F. drank his coffee out of it just about every day at work. I'd coveted it for a long time. It's great how it looks so sweet from afar but then when you get up close the mug narrative takes a very abrupt turn south. There is also something so late 70s about its style of line drawing and the general palette of the giraffe hide. It's like a children's story from my youth gone awry. It's the giraffe mug that inspired this blog post.

I was back in Boston last month and visited B.F. for the afternoon. I asked him if I could have the mug, certain that the answer would be no. Instead it was an affirmative, and Fucking Giraffes flew back home with me, gently wrapped in a winter scarf and stowed in my carry-on bag. But before that I had a three-hour delay at Logan Airport, and I gleefully sat in Barely Legal Seafoods drinking root beer out of Fucking Giraffes and eating overpriced clam chowdah.

The unofficial agreement B.F. and I made is that I would return the giraffes if he missed them too much. Or else send "that green ba-zooms mug" in its place. I'm so happy to do either. But in the meantime, those mugs look great together. All of them.

A for effort, F for followthrough

OMFG dudes, I totally haven't blogged in forevers.

Before I reach the dreaded 90 days of blog inactivity, I promise a hefty post. I've already got something in mind. I just haven't had time to actually write it, what with my hectic Words with Friends and sleep schedule. I mean, my full-time job and my dissertation schedule.

In the meantime, please accept my humble apologies and also these two pictures of a shitfaced Mummer with a 2 Street tattoo.

xo

Floor crêpes, and other Parisian adventures

This will be a long blog post, and it will hopefully compensate for my conspicuous blog neglect.

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I just returned from nine days in Paris - a work trip, with intermittent moments of play and discovery, and intense bouts of an abundance of companions and then none at all. It was busy and exciting, and afforded me some real space from the day-to-day here, even during the part of the trip spent with co-workers. And I would have honestly blogged about it every evening, but I had no reliable internet. So here we go - day by day - little thoughts on my surroundings. Some longer than others. Enjoy.

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NOV 4:
A slow acclimation after a long overnight flight and an early morning power nap. I speak French decently, though slowly, and I understand most of what I hear. But it's always the little differences that accumulate to a mountain of strangeness, and that leave me fumbling a little, as one does in dreams. I've been here before so I know the drill, but there is nevertheless a lot of quick on-your-feet rekindling of old knowledge, which is hard enough on its own but while jetlagged is mind-boggling. I almost forgot that the Metro doors don't open automatically. In fact, all doors are strange - giant things, often with ancient locks and latches and bizarre knobs to turn and twist and click. Grocery store options are many and all new, and oh, the produce is weighed before one pays. Coins involve a clumsy fumbling - no intuitive sense of shape and weight. A general adjustment of tempo.

In a matter of days, this will all feel resolved. But not yet. Right now I need to accept these awkwardnesses, and focus on staying awake so as to fall in step with my new time zone. And thankfully I have eleven companions here today to help me, supplying me with coffee, macarons, walking around looking at beautiful things, a good dinner, more coffee, wine, and laughter so hard it brought tears.

NOV 5:
I am staying in a darling little apartment in the 5th arrondisement. I stayed in this same apartment in 2006 when last I was in Paris, that time for almost a month. It's Paris, so most everything unsurprisingly looks just as I left it on my street, but there are strange absences. The internet cafes are gone, largely thanks to a wireless hotspot-type system provided by the French equivalent of Comcast, which of course I can't tap into. First the internet drove a lot of shops out of business - bookstores sometimes, video rental places often. But it's funny that now one form of internet seems to be bankrupting another. Last time I spent a lot of time in two internet cafes just a block apart - one, a dusty little hovel run by two very kind Indian men. The machines in there were old, but one of them had an American keyboard, which I appreciated as I paid by the hour and the French keyboards required a lot of the "searching and pecking" typing method -- very slow. The other cafe was more of the "cyber cafe" variety - geeky, sleeker, and full of awkward, bleary-eyed French boys in their mid- to late- teens smoking cigarettes and playing World of Warcraft for hours on end. This one was cheaper, and the owner sold me a phone card nothing short of magical, as it seemingly allowed me an endless number of minutes.

The last time I was in Paris I spent much of my trip with a dear friend, with whom I am not really in touch anymore for reasons unknown - but in the way that doesn't preclude me from still calling her a good friend, if that makes any sense at all. We were both in college and on very limited budgets, and did a lot of cooking at home and ate a lot of the cheap street food (a rarity in France) on the street next to ours, rue Mouffletard. My friend learned English as a teenager, and I am always in awe of her complete and rapid mastery of it - the kind of language intuition that leaves few traces of its secondary (or in her case, tertiary) order of acquisition. But there were these endearing moments of slippage - following the course of most languages, she occasionally referred to the ground or the street as the floor. In English this was always very charming to me, and so in my head I always thought of the street crêpes we'd eat on some evenings as "floor crêpes."

I had high hopes that by the time I returned to Paris, I'd have enough disposable income to eat out all the time and avoid succumbing to the temptation of the cheap floor crêpes. What a joke! I'm as broke as ever, and so it was floor crêpes for me again. I can't say that I really minded all that much, secretly, for really what's to hate about a crêpe filled with Nutella, Gran Marnier, and bananas? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

NOV 6:
Accents are a real bitch. It seems perfectly reasonable that when someone from Italy speaks English to me I know they are Italian, and that when someone from France speaks English to me I know they are French. Yet it nevertheless blows my mind that a well thought-out sentence and a half tumble out of my mouth en français at an art museum and I am immediately singled out as an English speaker. I can't conceive of how my French sounds to a native French speaker at all, and how I wish I could, because it would probably help me out a lot to know this.

I've realized that with French in particular, it's not only the accent, but also the intonation. American English, I've come to realize, is not very animated. But French is - it borders on songlike at points. Take the following sentence:

English: I would like a crepe with Nutella and bananas.
That's more or less how one would say it - just as it's typed up there. And if it were phrased as a question - Do you have a crepe with Nutella and bananas? - you might not know it in English. It's just so monotone sometimes.

In French, the whole thing cascades. And not necessarily with the flow of emphasizing the most important element as the sentence, as one does in German. But more as if it's following some sort of secret rhythm:
Je voudrais un crêpe avec Nutella et banane sounds more like:
Je voudrais un crêpe avec Nutella et banane.
I don't know how quite to type it, this crescendo. But I think it's key to my outing myself as a native English speaker over and over.

NOV 7:
My apartment overlooks a little square which is home to many cafés and where nightlife seems to converge on a regular basis. I've learned to love falling asleep to the noise of it, and skulking around among its (drunken) ranks with my iPod Touch, stealing internet from one of the cafés silly enough to make their password the name of their establishment. From my apartment I can always single out the Americans, not even by the very obvious - that they are speaking English - but by the way they laugh. It's hearty and boisterous and loud. Here the French hold back. Maybe laughter compensates for the lack of affect in our daily speech. Or maybe it's all posturing, and not genuine at all. I don't know. But it's different.

I cringe as I make sweeping generalizations like this, and I should say that I don't mean by this that the French aren't funny, because they can be absolutely hilarious. The differences are not universal, but they are significant enough to warrant mentioning and notice.

And on a side note: I am exploring strange new foods. Fig yogurt: surprisingly good! Take note.

NOV 8:
Today while walking along the Seine I saw something fantastic. An epic garbage collector drama unfolded before my very eyes!

I'll preface this by saying that I find French garbage fascinating for two reasons. One is that they do garbage pickup every day. I had a moment where I said, isn't that kind of excessive? But then my French friend pointed out that Paris smells a fuck of a lot better than American cities, and so I retracted my skepticism. The other thing is their outfits are hilarious to me - they basically look like deflated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired raver outfits - baggy and bright, green and yellow, and covered with reflective tape of all kinds.

In any event, as I was walking along the Left Bank I was keeping good pace with a garbage truck (which, because they collect trash daily, is not the smelly behemoth that it would be in the States, so I didn't really mind). I'd get ahead by about a block as they collected trash, and then they'd catch up.

At one of the Ponts the truck stopped and the man riding on the side hopped off, gathered two bags of trash, tossed one in the back of the truck - and - the driver took off without him! The collector - still carrying one bag of trash - yelled a desperate-sounding "Non! NON!" up the street and then proceeded to do this odd, slow trudge up the block dragging a bag of trash with him.

At the next corner, he tosses that bag in the back and grabbed two more. Until this point, I had assumed that the incident on the last corner had been in error, that the driver thought the thud of the bag landing in the back was the man clambering back up on the truck. But oh how wrong I was, for at this corner the driver did the same thing again! This time he was called after not with a "Non! NON!" but with a slue of other words I shall not reproduce here, and some of which I can only guess at the meaning of, but I'm sure it was absolutely foul. With one bag of trash in hand, the garbage collector started up the hill again to meet the driver.

At this intersection the driver got out. He was doubled over with laughter - what a funny prank he thought he'd pulled. But you know who had the last laugh? The collector. Because he walked right up to the driver and punched him in the face!! The outfits, I must tell you, made this scene all the funnier. I'd show you, but googling "French garbage" called up some very disturbing images.

NOV 9:
The French are boisterous drunks, especially the young men. But unlike American college-age drunks, they aren't (for the most part) out streaking or stealing street signs or acting like total fucking assholes in any number of other ways. Instead they sing. I mean, French music is ghastly, and a bunch of inebriated French men trying to make it through as much caroling as they can before they pass out or go home means that success is a tall order. And if American men were out doing the same thing - in their case, probably singing some sort of sports song - I'd be all "shut the fuck up!!!" out the window and demand quiet sleeping time. But there is something stubbornly endearing about the French dude version of this, and sometimes I can't fall asleep for laughing at them from the safe distance of my apartment.

Lately there have been a number of songs that - what with the distance, their drunkenness, and my sleepiness - I have only understood fragments of. One night there was clearly a regional battle - a faction singing some tune with a deep, gutteral, choral "Ly - yon - naiiiis" followed by some rivals belting out a song that seems to be called "Paris, c'est magique!" More enigmatic is this other song that gets sung just about every night, and that I find so hilarious I can't pay close enough attention to the words. It appears to have the word "dix-huit" in the chorus, but I'm probably actually wrong about this. I just want to hang on to the idea that the song goes something like, "Dix-huit! Dix-huit! Blah! Blah! Blah!" In fact, I've made up tons of variations on the blah blah blah part, and I like to sing the dix-huit song to myself often and with enthusiasm as I make my coffee the following morning.

NOV 10:
Today's thoughts are brief, for I am drunk and full, and I have to knock out before I become entranced by the dix-huit song. This evening brought a culinary adventure for me - a five-course, authentic French meal with all the scary components that make this lapsed vegetarian think many a time, "Are you sure you want to put this thing in your mouth?" These moments of pause were tamped down by free-flowing red wine, and then white wine, and then the promise of a renowned cheese plate and some sort of flaming dessert with rum in it, as well as by the "when in Rome" promise I made myself when I sat down at the table. Neither before nor after (and especially during) my vegetarianism was I ever an especially adventurous carnivore, and so it felt rather odd to be willingly eating tête de veau and not just pushing it around on my plate. Same goes for the paté de foie gras and the mysterious game bird that definitely wasn't a chicken. I can't say that I'd ever do it again outside of France, and truly the reason behind the consumption of such things in the first place was simply to be good company in front of some polite company. But it's nice to know that when such situations arise, I can push the bounds of what I am normally comfortable consuming and bravely try something new. Plus, I'm not gonna lie: that paté was pretty out of this world delicious.

NOV 11:
It's Armistice Day, and just about everything is closed. I ran around all day trying to cram too much in - seeing people last-minute, seeing even more art last-minute, buying presents for my cat-sitters at the few shops open today. Now this evening is reserved for packing and a last stroll up to the Seine. Packing has afforded me the time to look at the books in the apartment I'm renting - a scholar's place, full of all sorts of interesting reading material. A quick skim of titles reveals very little overlap between my library and hers. I love this; so often I get entrenched in my field of study, and spend much time with people in the same boat - and I lose sight of just how much there is out there to read, how narrow my focus is. The apartment owner has all sorts of delightful-looking things I'll never have time to read - books about May 68, medieval chansons, gender studies, poetry, and more novels than I allow myself to buy. We have two books in common: one a book on medieval art, the other, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? -- though my copy is in English, hers in French. The last time I was here there was a copy of Middlemarch lying around, which I began to re-read. That would have been a third book in common, but it wasn't here this trip.

It feels oddly like I've been here in Paris forever, and yet, that I haven't been able to do half of what I set out to. And I've traveled enough to know that time plays even more tricks on the other end of my journey, and that this time tomorrow when I am back in the States it will feel strangely like I was never here.

NOV 12:
This was supposed to be a thoughtful entry about leaving this beautiful city, written on my forty-minute train ride to the airport, at which I would have enough time to wander about and find the most hilarious thing in duty-free, which I would photograph and post right here. As you can see, there is no photograph, and no thoughtful post, and that is because the train to the airport was not running today. No announcements, no signs, nothing. I was willing to foot the bill for a cab but I knew better - they are hard to flag down and the traffic situation around the edge of the city is unbelievable. So instead I crossed my fingers, made friends with a lovely British couple and a Danish girl who were in the same predicament, and boarded a train to another destination, at which a French man promised me there would be a shuttle bus waiting to take me to the airport. That there was, and it took just about every curvy, windy, roundabout, slow country road to get there, stopping at two points for a drawbridge and a cow that would not move out of the middle of the road. I got to the ticket counter just about when my plane began boarding, and then I was that jackass running through the airport to my terminal. And so my trip ended, out of breath and sweaty and stuck with the misfortune that is airplane food and fifteen dollars in Euros that was supposed to buy me snacks from the airport terminal. Never again, I tell you. Next time, I leave 16 hours before my flight. So next time, the last blog entry will be better than this. I promise.

On my way to Trust Market, part R.I.P. America, and other coming attractions (accurate and inaccurate)

1. I just checked out from the library the autobiography of Ella Young, a slightly looney-tunes mystic / folklorist who almost got turned down at Ellis Island in the 1920s for unashamedly professing her belief in faeries and elves. Don't ask. But the subtitle to this text is: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately. This might be the most honest autobiography title ever. Way to go, hippie avant la lettre!

2. I did not go to Trust Market today because I was at the amazing Mütter Museum all day looking at albumen prints of siamese twins and Civil War surgical results and daguerreotypes of rickets and the enlarged colon of a 19th-century gentleman known as Windbag. In a museum in which photography is strictly forbidden, this is the only image I was able to make on the d.l. Yes, they are real:

3. BUT on my way home - conveniently also the route to TM - I saw this new, exciting holiday décor. And so it will serve as a stand-in for my next TM run. I was so worried it wouldn't be there next week, because it's just too good. Halloween is HUGE in this neighborhood, but I can see someone rethinking the patriotic element of this arrangement:

R.I.P. U.S.A.

4. Inspired by the process of moving into my new place, I decided to write a short little blog entry about each of the apartments I've lived in, starting with the earliest one first. But then I started mulling over whether I wanted to start with dorm rooms. Either way, that's coming up. But not tonight. It's late, and I need to sleep. Cross your fingers that thoughts of the Mütter remain active only in my waking life.

On my way to Trust Market, part the backlog

Hi Readers and Lookers,

Two weeks of pictures for you, minus the one time my boss bought me lunch. Enjoy!

**An editorial note: In my layout here, the text looks swell. On the interweb, it looks like ee cummings mauled it. I'm okay with this, but mostly because I'm too sleepy to fix the problem and this blog post is already long overdue.

 I like this building.

 Partially uprooted tree thanks to Irene.

Bricks.

                      I was walking to TM with S.H. and she saw this.
                      I still haven't googled it to see what it's all about.
                      Maybe one of you guys will.

 Trust Market hatch.

                     So, technically this isn't on the way to TM; it's on 

                     the way to another deli I was going to with 

                     awesome co-worker J.R. I liked the many layers of

                     signage. 

              

                     Snapped in about two seconds while waiting for 

                     co-worker B. "R.K.P." R. to pay for his sandwich.

                     I mean, his hoagie. 

          

Window.

Moving Right Along

Hello from my new apartment! Moving is about 95% complete at this point - just a few things left to grab and to do at the old place, and I can relinquish keys for good to the slumlord management company that runs my first Philadelphia apartment. I am very excited about this.

I owe you, dear readers, a week of On my way to Trust Markets. I have been diligently and dutifully taking these pictures, but until today I had no internets over here, which has caused quite a delay. But a nice gentleman from Comcast came to my house between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. today (read: 11:35 am) and I'm all hooked up. Internet withdrawal - begone!

There are some really awesome things about my new apartment, the most important of which is that it is all mine. No roommate/s! In all my years I've never had my own place and I think it is going to be really good. From my bathroom I can hear some traffic noise and my neighbors but in every other room in the apartment it's whisper quiet. Since in theory I'm supposed to be writing a book and a dissertation and a few talks right now, this is the greatest thing ever.

Here is something else wonderful:

Look, it's taken with my laptop iSight camera, and it's a weird picture, to be sure. BUT CHECK OUT THE TREES! From every window in my living room, bedroom, and kitchen I see a whole lot of trees. It's amazing. I know that in the winter all the leaves will be gone and I'll just see a bunch of backyards. But it's sunny and green and pretty to look at now, and the cat is super stoked to finally be able to bird watch again after four years of apartments with crappy views.

The slumlorded place I just left looks like something out of a Jacob Riis photograph. Since one of my dissertation chapters is on Riis, I didn't mind this so much. The front of the building was a looming, imposing Victorian townhouse, but the back - where my apartment was located - was a maze of fire escapes and brick, and you could probably reach into your neighbor's window from your own if you tried. Back in the air shaft - as my housemate called it - every sound reverberated and you couldn't always tell if it was sunny or overcast. You always knew if it was raining, though, because the sound of it pounding down on the metal fire escape maze was deafening.

Before that I lived in a graduate student apartment in another town. It was a ground floor apartment that happened to be right next to the bus stop for the campus shuttle. So there was always a smattering of stressed out graduate students mulling over math problems or whatever and staring into space outside, except staring into space usually meant they were staring into my bedroom and living room. Also, the path of least resistance to a cluster of other apartment buildings entailed walking between the bus stop and my window, so there was always a lot of foot traffic about a half meter from my bed. That combined with the contraband cat in a no pets apartment complex meant that the blinds were always down. It was dark and sad in there - fitting for graduate school, but not good for me or for the cat.

The new place is not perfect - it is small, and it is really going to break the bank for me. It's on one of the Grand Boulevards of Philadelphia which is much less desirable than the cute one-way street the air shaft apartment was on. But I don't even care. I'm glad to be here, and without any further ado I shall resume listening to old episodes of This American Life and unpacking.

On my way to Trust Market, part 5

Oh hi, Internet. It's Trust Market for me all week, because I'm moving on Friday and my whole kitchen is packed up. And so without further ado:

Three things

1. This delightful homebrewed Baahston-accented video is just delightful. I love that accent so much. I could watch this over and over. What is this: eeerrrrrrth fuhruit?
Maaaaaahtians

2. I've just spent the morning going through some uncatalogued photographs from the 1930s, all stacked neatly in boxes just big enough to hold them. And now my hands smell like darkroom. If you've ever worked in one, you know what I'm talking about and you probably love it. If you know what I'm talking about but haven't worked in a darkroom, you probably hate it. I find it so staggering that fixers and developers from almost a century ago can still leave their mark on me. I really love it.

3. My On my way to Trust Market from yesterday, which did not get posted as I accidentally ended up at a dinner party until late. GARGOYLE!

On my way to Trust Market, part 4

Today it was dreary and chilly and rainy. When I left work, it was so dark that the patio lights were on, something I haven't seen in ... well ... many months. I'm already feeling autumn and that's just fine by me. I like me some seasons, and when suddenly everything in sight is pumpkin-flavored.

Anyway, on my way to Trust Market it was pouring and my umbrella broke so I was unable to take a photo without putting my camera in harm's way. BUT I have a backlog of pictures from when I'd started the project but hadn't yet begun blogging the results. So here you go, a walk to Trust Market on a sunny summer's day:

Dogs. Creepy twin stuffed dogs. Staring at YOU!

Look Around You

Look Around You is some sort of brilliant British spoof on those ridiculous educational films we all had to endure in the 1970s and 1980s. Here are links to a few episodes:

Look Around You: Maths

Look Around You: Iron

Anyway, I've had the introduction to these episodes lodnged in my brain - the part in which the narrator calmly repeats "Look Around You" to the bad synthesizer soundtrack - as I spend more and more time wandering around my neighborhood. Note that this wandering is not because I did not pack a lunch, though I can promise you that there will be an On my way to Trust Market post tomorrow. Instead it has been because I am moving in a few weeks, and the real estate company who owns my current apartment has been showing it every other day, and I do not want to be present for this. Thus for an hour or so in the evening I go find something else to do.

Mind you, there is no rule that requires me to be out of the apartment when prospective tenants come by. But I feel it's best for everyone involved. When I moved to Philadelphia last year, I only had a few days to find a place, and there was just not a lot available. I took the best of what I saw, but this apartment has tons of problems. It's very poorly insulated and doesn't get enough sunlight. There are repairs that need to be done that the management company has ignored. I could go on, and I could also point out that the ads for my apartment on Craigslist list the rent as over $200.00 more than what I currently pay, which was already too much for a place that's falling apart. But anyway it's because of this that I don't want to be home when they show the place: I wouldn't have the heart to lie to prospective tenants and tell them the place is great, and I wouldn't have the nerve to be honest in front of the people who still owe me my security and refundable pet deposit. It's a real moral quandry, and so I've opted out of it every time I get a (less than 24 hours notice) message telling me when my apartment will be shown.

Many of these times I have just gone to a friend's place to hang out, or done some work in my office. Today, though, my friends in the neighborhood were not home and I really didn't want to go to work on my day off. And in observance of Labor Day, nobody was laboring and so all the coffee places were closing up when I needed a nice place to sit for an hour. So, I decided to take a walk around town, knowing that I couldn't go too far because I had things to do up the street soon after today's showing.

In large part I was enthusiastic about this wandering. My Trust Market project has made me realize how little of my neighborhood - which itself isn't terribly large - I've actually deeply explored. In particular, that little hobbit door (mentioned in my most recent post below) prompted me to look around me - I have crossed that intersection so many times and never actually managed to notice that door, which is just absurd. I want to know my neighborhood in such a profoundly deep way - the kind of familiarity that allows you to notice when someone has painted their front door a different color, the kind of looking that will end with a mental map of historical site markers, every corner deli, all the good graffiti, quirky architectural details, funny bumper stickers on cars regularly parked on certain blocks. I love Philadelphia so much, and making a point of learning it like this will help me love it all the more.

Today I discovered an Indian restaurant I didn't know about. And I also saw these two wonderful things:

1. A stair railing of decorative lyres

2. The weirdest window décor ever

I mean, what is up with that? It is not a shop window unless it's an unmarked storefront. I even walked around to the block parallel to this to make sure it wasn't a building that went through the block - it isn't. Is there some cultural reference I'm missing - is this a narrative that makes any sense to anyone? And moreover, why would you do this to your front window? And most important: how long has it been four blocks from my house?