Musings on Boston

In my absence from writing, due to a variety of factors (cross country road trip, Step 2 studying, sub-internship, moving apartments), there came up a few things about Boston in the news that I felt warranted my blog's attention.

1) GQ Magazine named Boston the country's worst dressed city. It comes as no surprise to Lawrence and me- for years now we've been remarking on just how poorly dressed people our age are here. Red Sox hoodies are just not acceptable attire for a night on the town. (Now the other issue is of course that "a night on the town" consists of going to a sports bar, i.e. paying for expensive drinks so one can watch television with other frumpy bar customers. I can't even begin to address that here.)

2) The University of Michigan researchers have found Boston to be the meanest city in America. In a survey conducted by these researchers measuring the "character strengths" of individuals living in cities across America, including "strengths of the heart" (i.e. kindness), Boston came in dead last. Again, no surprise to Lawrence and me. In the 6 years we've now lived here, never have we felt at home. We're consistently attacked (verbally) for being New Yorkers, yelled at by pedestrians crossing the street when they don't have right of way at lights, and told we "speak good English".

3) Tow train intended to pick up broken down redline train breaks down in the process of towing. I've blogged about the T here being inconsistent, unreliable, and inconvenient before, but this one takes the cake. During a July heat wave, the tow train that was supposed to tow a broken redline train between Porter and Harvard Squares during the morning rush hour commute broke down in the process of towing the train. As a result, after hours of waiting, a little less than 500 sweaty commuters had to walk through the redline tunnels to find an alternate route to work. I was on my sub-I that month at MGH for which I relied on the redline to commute. I guess this was the one time that having to catch an awfully early 6:20AM train to get to the sub-I by 7AM actually worked in my favor.

Ahh Boston. At least this city's quirkiness (to put it nicely) is amusing and easily feeds the fire of longing for our home cities that we non-natives often fan.