(no subject)

My bus back got in an hour ahead of schedule, and I am so grateful, even if I am too exhausted to really enjoy it. I am just begining to ctch up on emails and recaps now, as I did a lot in a couple of days and a lot percolated in my brain. Besides, I've work waiting for me, and fencing tomorrow.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say first that I didn't go to the contra dance, only the Regency tea dance, which wound up being packed. Physically, i could have done the contra without even a problem i think, but sitting on the bus after the tea-dance for hours made me glad I didn't. It's really put a strain on my meuscles I'm not looking forward to facing tomorrow.

I have, for the record, never much cared for Boston, despite having spent a lot of time there over the years because of various lovers. I always say I'm just not white enough for the town, which really is the whitest place on earth. And, this is not a feeling that's suddenly changed.

However, I really sort of had an epiphany with it when Alison and I went to Harvard Square. Shopping there was not an acquisitive experience (although I did acquire two fabulous litems for $5 each at the Urban Outfitters bargain basement), but a social one, and not just because I was wandering around with someone. It was as if it finally provided the answer to why people went on dates to Tower Records when I was in high school. People were out to meet their friends, to stroll, to shout across the street at people, to say "look what I found!", to snack, to see and be seen. And it was more frenetic than window shopping and less driven than the shopping conquests of New York. It had the rhythm you dread having to recreate on stage or in film as a director, the pacing that easily makes your sentences too long in fiction. And I fell in love with it, helped, of course, by the old and old-style buildings of Harvard and Alison directing us (at my insistence) to nearly perfect hot chocolate at Burdocks (wisks and rude patrons!). It was the sort of few hours that made me lament, as I sometimes do, being from New York, for in all my grand adventures, learning the city as concept and stepping up from one city to another is the grandest adventure of all, and one I shall never truly be able to have.

In other news, I spent an afternoon with alabastard and the horse, Gypsy (the new pictures still don't do her justice, she's a beautiful animal with a great demeanor, who is going to be an amazing mount). alabastardragon was unable to join us, but I'll look forward to meeting him by Phoenix Rising at the latest. It was all a wonderful escape from city life and perhaps primed me so well for my observations about it above (as this was all the same day and reported in entirely the wrong order since I am utterly fried).

That evening Alison and I watched Gattaca, which always makes me cry, but it was also different this time, since I now do anythign and everything. I talked about when the unmanned Titan reports came in, when I was in Australia, and how intense that was, the way it sneaked up on me. I had something deeper to say about all this, but forgot.

Also on the meeting new peopel from, I met Alison's roommate who was both funny and didn't think I was dreadful and appalling (at least not in a bad way) and was charmed by L., at least when he wasn't commenting in his particular fashion on my breeches. Men's breeches of that era are worth making fun of, it was just the praseology that was giving me hives. But then, what doesn't?

Dancing was, as I think I already mentioned, good. I've a lot to do this week, and I feel like a lot of things are sitting about patiently waiting for me to engage them with a certain level of, clear intention, for a lack of a better phrasing, and it's really just a matter of having the time and space to accomodate the consequences or the ever present possibility of looking like a fool.