music: Norah Jones- Come Away With Me
Another late night. It’s like that when I have no obligations at 9 AM. Soon enough I’ll be on a regimented schedule, so while I have this sort of freedom to stay up until 4:00 AM without consequence I’ll do it and love it. It seems that I drift towards the wee hours; given the choice, I’d rather be up late into the night than up early in the morning. Occupational choices might force me into a sleep schedule that runs counter to my natural clock, but I’ll deal with that as it comes up.
For the past two nights I’ve done some bike riding through Boston between the hours of 2:00 and 3:00 AM. It’s a wonderful time to be pedaling through the city. The streets are free of cars so I can dip in and out of my lane and take up the width of the street. Biking through Harvard Square at 3:00 AM is a worthy experience. For a location so bustling and hectic during the day, it’s eerily quiet. All that is heard are scattered homeless shuffling in their cardboard, distant cars out on Mass Ave, and the sprinklers that are wasting perfectly good drinking water on Harvard’s patchy-at-best lawns. The University itself is ancient and solemn at three in the morning, much more so than it could ever be during the day with all the tourists and shiny security cars. I really love rolling through with nobody else around, taking in the black iron gates and the red buildings built thick with history. Biking at three in the morning also makes me half-believe that I’m not so unlike Kaneda cruising through Neo Tokyo. Or better yet, S.T. biking through Boston.
Much of the evening was spent with Tim, Peet, and Volker. It was good to just be around them. Comfortable. Familiar. More and more, I fear, our interactions will be augmented by our new living arrangements. It makes me sad, because we all do get on very well and after having lived together for so many months have sort of taken it for granted. Now that I’m living in an apartment with relative strangers, now that there are four milk jugs in the fridge and closed bedroom doors, I can appreciate the home environment that we had with Chowdahaus and the Refugee Camp next door.
But since I spent so much time with my friends tonight, little headway was made towards locking down certain nagging items that really need to be checked off the list before I start up with school. Yes, i’m doing the preliminaries: gathering my pre-summer reading materials, collecting phone numbers to call regarding parking spaces, thinking about scheduling at TB test, thinking about what constitutes a high school teacher’s wardrobe. Lots of gathering, collecting, and thinking. Not much to show for my time, though. I know it will get done, but the list on my dry-erase is a hulking mass of building anxiety, staring back at me and growing heavier by the hour.
It’s tough, balancing this freedom that I surely won’t see much of in the coming year with the obligations that are beginning to pile up. There are some big decisions to make in all domains of my life here in Boston, and it’s best to have some solid groundwork laid before I start up with school. For my own sanity, but more importantly to ensure the best possible environment in which to teach and study, an environment in which everything is pretty much taken care of except for my school work. It’s time to get into that state of mind. It’s time to tie up all those loose ends. Rolling leisurely through Boston is all good and fine, but I have to be mindful about my direction.
Posted by davidtaus at June 12, 2003 04:09 AM | TrackBack