Back in April I went out for dinner on a Saturday night with four Cambridge Rindge and Latin graduates, a native of Arlington, and one other transplant, originally from West Virginia. This was the day after the Marathon Manhunt, the cap-off to a five days of shock-trauma and declarations of civic pride and solidarity, and we were all spent some ( Read more... )

That thing where you make a point of considering the nice things that happened to help yourself avoid dwelling on the not-nice things that happened. Today was kind of a fucking slog and a lot of it made me pretty angry and I barely had time to pee all day let alone feed myself and, wait, I'm doing that other thing. I should stop that.

• I did a thing ( Read more... )

Sometime after 9/11, months or years I don't remember, I realized that I had changed a little. I can't say for certain that I changed because of 9/11, or that I changed around that time, and it became a useful peg in retrospect, but it probably doesn't matter. 9/11 happened when I was in my very early twenties, not long out of college, a soft, pink ( Read more... )

The nice lady at the bus station told me I can pick up the overnight bus to Guatemala City in Flores instead of Santa Elena. This means that instead of bumming around a shitty bus terminal for five hours with the kind of people who bum around bus starions, I'm watching the sun set from a terrace bar with a glass of house-made limoncello. This has ( Read more... )

The last message from each of my IM correspondents this afternoon when I shut off the work VPN and called it a day, in chronological order:
"hahahahaha"
" : ) "
"ok thanks."
"awesome"
"screw process"

The general positivity and final note of defiance is auspicious, I think.

I got back from India six days ago, and all I want to do right now is buy a plane ticket to Chicago. This makes sense, really, just listen ( Read more... )

It's been two weeks since I first read it, and this article is still bugging me. It's maybe more that the headline is bugging me, because it does the classic headline thing of misrepresenting the article's contents and (bonus!) posing a question that is not really answered in the article.

Women can't do pull-ups? Maybe a wee bit too much ( Read more... )

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I spent most of the last week hanging around a town in China called Yangshuo. My hotel was about 5 km outside of town proper, in a village called Chao Long, and a freshly paved road connected the two by winding between towering karsts, lotus ponds and roadside rice fields. I rented a bicycle for the week to ride back and forth along that road, from ( Read more... )

...what sort of login information we track for user authentical...
...I'm going to look like your short butch Marine escort.
What the hell language is this person speaking?
The visa application for [Ayun] traveling to China, order number ######, is prepared for submission.
[A misdirected cell phone photograph of a stranger's electric bill.]
S-- will ( Read more... )