Reacquainting Myself with Sunshine

This entry is brought to you LIVE from various locations in my neighborhood of Boston.

The air is so stuffy indoors.  Maybe it's something about out room.  It does seem to smell bad pretty much all the time.  There could be some rotting food hidden away behind the oven or under the fridge, some place or another.  Maybe it's allergies, and they make it so whenever I'm indoors for too long, I'm a little too hot and a little too cranky, and my head hurts just a little, and I can't think.

It happened once in my freshman year English classroom.  There was something rotting in the ceiling for months, and in that class I always had a headache and a fever and couldn't think.  I didn't quite know what the problem was, so I always just shut down, slept in class, or just skipped.  They (the cleaning crew, I think) finally found it, and from then on I was perfectly fine in that class.  And I thought I just hated freshman English that much.

So I haven't been getting out enough for the past few days.  And I've been on that whole weird sleeping schedule where I get up at night and stay up until around 11:00 in the morning.  When it was Monday morning, about 5:30 in the AM, I decided to get out.  I could smell the air coming in through a window that was cracked open in the common room.  It smelled warm and sweet.  So I put on a sweatshirt and jacket and took off for who knows where.

The sky was that last color you could call "deep" when I first emerged from my cave.  I could see it was much paler to my left and towards campus (the east, duh) as I walked down the street.  I walked that way, through the deserted buildings of an early morning in Spring Break.  I went up a set of stairs where I'd never been, behind the new Behrakis Hall.

There was a nice little brick walkway that was broken in one part where they were laying some pipes.  I had to jump over it.  I didn't make it all the way across, but the mud wasn't as soggy as it looked, so I was fine.  Then there was this big wall thing blocking the two story fall to the street below.  It was about two thirds my height.  I used the handrail on the stair to climb up onto it, and I sat on the edge looking out over the campus.

I guess at that point, I was trying to the see the sunrise.  I could barely see anything from that vantage.  I was looking in the right direction, but there was too much crap in the way.  All I could see was a tinge of pink above the glass dome of Ruggles Station.  I hopped down (not to the street... though that would've been leg-breakingly cool).  The next place I tried to go was into Shillman Hall, where I new I would be able to see it through the windows of a fourth story classroom.  No go - locked.

So instead, I walked around behind Ruggles Station and the parking garage, until I got to this point, looking across a street and a sizeable park on the border of Roxbury (which vaguely starts somewhere to the south and east of campus, across Columbus Ave).  There, through some trees on the horizon, I saw all the pinks and oranges I was looking to find.  It's cliché, not to mention obvious, to say "sunsets are pretty," but every once in awhile I like to go out and stare at one until the sun threatens to start blinding me, just as a reminder.

And I sat there watching this one, and writing until my hands got cold and stiff in the still chill morning breeze.  At that point, I moved again.  I walked past campus and across Huntington Avenue in the direction of Simmons and all those random colleges.  I cut off on a road that forms one of the edges of Wentworth Institute of Technology and goes towards MassArt, the art school.  I'd never been that way before.  It took me to this little circle, back again on Huntington Avenue, towards which the road had angled back.

Around the circle, which was a little sand pit surrounded by a brick walkway, were three park benches.  I'm sitting on one of them as I write this.  In the middle of the sand pit is a pole.  On the pole is one of those things that moves around and points in the direction the wind is blowing.  It was a big iron school of fish.  See, it looks like a lopsided goal post, with two big schools of fish on each post, pointing in the direction the wind is blowing.  Then there's this one anti-social fish, facing the opposite direction, into the wind.  Get it?  The funny thing is, the two schools of fish are pointing across the street to the art school, and the loner fish, he's pointing towards Wentworth, the technical school.  How ironic.

A flutter of little leaves just came down towards me.  There are absolutely no leaves in the trees overhead - only a few lonely crows as suspects.  A mystery.  But one my hands are too cold to solve.  I must go a-walking once again.

I decided to go to a bagel shop and get myself a tasty bagel sandwich.  I didn't want to whore myself at Dunkin' Donuts, though, so I walked all the way down Boylston Street to Copley Square.  I thought there was one, a Bruegger's Bagels, across the street from the public library.  There was nothing there that even looked like it ever used to be a Bruegger's Bagels.  I was confused.  There was nothing that looked new enough to me not to have been there since before I started coming to school in Boston.  I'm positive there was one, though, because I'd been to it before, and I remember liking it.

Oh well.  I just had to walk three or four blocks farther, to the Finagle A Bagel (hilarious name) right across the street from the old church with a statue of Darth Jesus in front of it and the John Hancock Tower framed behind.  I got myself a smoked turkey sandwich on a sesame seed bagel and a seat with the sun reflecting off the Hancock Tower and into my eyes.  I couldn't afford a drink with the cash I had (the bagel sandwich was little overpriced) but it came with a little cup of cantaloupe pieces, which is as good as a drink.  They say melon is pretty much water.  On the menu it was called "seasonal accompaniment."

I'm back to writing now that I've finished my sandwich and warmed up.  I've got a nice view of Copley Square out the window (wincing through the glare, anyway).  If I look off to my right, I can't quite see the Prudential Building, but I can see the Jetsons Building (no idea what the real name is) with steam coming off of its spiky-arched, flying car park roof.

I think I'm in love with the way the sun is shining in, too.  It casts long shadows over the wrapper for my bagel, covered in sesame seeds and a few scraps of unwanted lettuce.  It makes the hairs on my hands and wrists shine gold.  Everything feels so much cleaner than it does at night.  It's so different.

I wish the bookstore were open right now.  Because I want to buy something to read.  I want a Tom Robbins book or Frank Herbert's Dune, because I flipped past the crappy movie for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on TV last night, and I ended up watching the first part of the Children of Dune mini-series after that.

There are some Asian tourists sitting behind me (well, not from Asia, but Asian-Americans who were visiting Boston from some other town).  They were talking about how it was a holiday.  What holiday?  I never remember stupid holidays.  Oh wait, it's only about the biggest holiday in Boston.  Damn.  St. Patrick's Day.  I'm the worst red-head ever.  I'm not even wearing any green.  Though, there are eleven other people in the room, and only one of them, an elderly gentleman in an olive green tie, is wearing any visible green at all.  I guess it's not that big a thing when you don't have to worry about getting punched anymore.  Okay... I'm out of here.  I want to get back out into that beautiful weather.

I walked around the block and then back up Newbury Street to see when Trident opens.  While I was walking through the really fancy part of the street with all the designer hair stylists and designer clothing shops (Armani and everything), I saw this really hilarious hooker mannequin in one of the shop windows.  Most of the shops I was passing weren't opening until ten, so it wasn't looking good, but when I got to Trident, the sign said nine.  Beautiful, only a half an hour wait!

I found a little nook next to an abandoned entrance to the Hynes Convention Center subway station, and crouched there, writing and waiting.  8:42.  Sheesh.  I must look pretty goofy here, writing on this little yellow pad.  I need a haircut, I think.  Well, I don't need one.  My mother thought I needed one three months ago.  But now I think I really do need one in order not to look completely goofy.  I've practically got the '80s look going with this wacky, curly shit.

I got up and I walked around a bit, until the bookstore opened.  I spent about an hour inside, looking at books.  I read a few chapters out of a book about drumming.  I didn't buy the book, though, because it didn't have anything too revealing for me inside, just alot of basic information about drums I could probably find on the internet if I looked hard enough.  It would've been nice to have a book with all that information in one place, but I was being cheap.  I managed to convince myself not to buy any books at all.  They didn't even have a copy of Dune, and their copy of Still Life With Woodpecker, a book I read about seven years ago and really want to read again, was way too expensive.

I got home at about 11:00.  I was out for about six hours!  I was pretty tired, but I stayed up for another two or three hours listening to music and playing on the internet.  I finally went to bed at around 2:00 in the afternoon.