Shorthand for Nothing

Summer always reminds me that I prefer the winter. Of course, I prefer the springtime and the autumn even more, each for its own reasons, but I never feel as if I get used to the heat so much as I feel that it just goes away eventually. The humidity over here does not make things easier.

That said, this summer continues the long tradition of Seattle being afflicted with freakish weather while I am away. Heatocalypse ‘09! Who knew? You see, I bear a good weather curse. Everywhere I go the weather is tamer than usual, nicer than usual, not as bad as expected. Meanwhile, wherever I used to be is plagued with storms and death from the skies. I am being spared the possibility of a freakish death in the weather, no doubt for some other grim fate.

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One of the things I really miss about the weather in Seattle is that it was generally pretty consistent. If it was raining, it would rain all day, or all week, or whatever. Even when the weather changed, it changed gradually. You could see the clouds sweeping in, and it started raining lightly before it got steady. When the rain was intermittent it was constantly intermittent. It meant the weather was unlikely to surprise you, but it also meant that once you’d found something you liked, it stuck around.

In Boston, there are a lot more storms, and they last a lot less time. Just tonight there was a pretty nasty thunderstorm that lasted all of fifteen minutes. It came up suddenly, heralded by a bit of lightning and a sudden downpour, and suddenly the wind was blowing and the temperature dropped and it was suitably awesome. Then, just as suddenly, the rain let up and the lightning stopped and the wind died down and the temperature came back up. That’s not weather. That’s a random interlude to the hot and the muggy.

I’m sure it would be nice if I were feeling hindered by the storms, but when it’s not in the way I always feel like it’s over too quickly.

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Recently I’ve felt compelled to write about this evening several months ago. It was the end of a fairly disastrous evening, which found me and a friend waiting for a green line train that was simply not coming, watching a small group of girls who were also apparently coming from a party, or a bar, babysitting their very drunk friend. “The train isn’t coming,” I said. We were considering getting a cab, and had started walking back towards Boston, when I got a phone call.

It was from my friend Chris, which is somewhat unusual: we seldom have any reason to call each other now that we’re on opposite ends of the country. I answered and asked what was going on. It took a while to figure this out: he was calling on behalf of Seth, who was locked out of the house I wasn’t at, and who doesn’t have a phone. He’d connected to our wireless and sat in the backyard.

The exchange that followed was nothing short of awkward, and the fact that this conversation was even happening was useless to an unimaginable degree. “I’m in Allston,” I had to explain. “Look, can you find out when the last inbound train leaves? Just ask Seth, he’ll understand.” We’d barely missed the last one, it turns out. “I don’t know what to say. We’re sort of stranded. I guess if he’s willing to pay for a cab?”

All of this, of course, was filtered through an operator who didn’t quite understand what was going on, so nobody really knew. Eventually we took a cab back home, paying twenty or thirty dollars worth of carfare for an evening that was ultimately wasted. Somehow it seemed to all work out to a net change of nothing at all. Gain nothing, lose nothing.

This, by the way, is why people should have cell phones. They are helpful.

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Safely in Seattle. It was a longer day than I’d planned (a flight got bumped earlier due to weather that didn’t happen in Chicago), but it was successful all around. I finished reading Neverwhere, landed a few minutes early, and jumped on a Metro bus up to SoDo, where I saw a vaguely familiar landmark and decided I’d walk into town. I wandered my way to the Hurricane Cafe for a bowl of chili, and finally took the 26 back to Cydonia, which will serve as my base of operations in the meanwhile.

The flight to Seattle featured the most beautiful sunset over the mountains I have ever seen, which came right after I started feeling incredibly restless and worrying about everything and nothing. It was calming. Oh, and apparently it’s my birthday tomorrow. You should do something about that.

(Meanwhile: over 200 unread items on Google Reader.)

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Today I’m flying to Seattle for a week for my birthday (which is the 15th). I have been gone since September, and I’ve definitely missed it. It’s the first city I really consider my home, and in many ways it still is. It’s where I get my identity. I’m looking forward to spending my birthday in my old haunts, drinking coffee in a city where coffee is a lifestyle, acting like I’ve been here the whole time.

I’m not regretting moving to Boston by any stretch of the imagination. The people here are wonderful, and I feel like if there is a place I will do well, it’s here. But it’s not home. I still feel like I’m visiting. I’m learning the tangle of streets and the public transit systems fairly well, I know the lingo, but, as a man on the streets of Seattle once told me, this place is like Mecca. It’s a city of travelers. Brilliant people, people with bright futures–but a home to none of them. We aren’t from this city.

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The New Year is one of the few holidays I really enjoy simply on its own merits. Something about it connects with me–I’ve written about it at length in the past and have no intention of repeating all of that here. But it is a fine time for reflection. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: 2008 in review.

I started 2008 in Seattle, working the New Year’s Eve shift at an Italian restaurant. I was looking forward to a number of things–my birthday, landmark concerts later in the year–but I was starting to sense that my time in the Emerald City was running to its close. I’d lost focus, if I ever had it to begin with. It’s still the first city I can really call home, but something was missing.

The election injected some spirit into me. I hadn’t seen so many people in my demographic get excited about politics ever. John Kerry was a lackluster candidate, and we were too young to really care about or even really understand the 2000 election. Barack Obama was exciting. I started following the primaries, reading political blogs, visiting polling sites, talking about political news–and I had always been the apolitical “eh, I will start voting when they give me a candidate I like” type.

As summer came, a friend of mine moved from Ellensburg to Boston. I became increasingly aimless. Then he suggested I should move also, and the more I thought about it the less reason I could think of to stay. I’d even written a story about it–someone moving off to Boston and flying back for a visit. I’d move and try to find work. It would be a change of scenery. It would get me on track, though as always I never really made plans.

We flew east in my dad’s small plane. He dropped me off with my half sister and her family in New Hampshire, who drove me down to Boston and left me at my new house. I spent some time settling in, exploring, getting used to the area. Then, some time towards the beginning of October, things got weird. It is hard to really describe why it was weird, but the crowd I started hanging out with was filled with awesome people, who are fully in support of awesome things of any variety. Crazy ideas became more than ideas–they became possible. They became a reality.

As much as I missed Seattle, I knew the people here were a unique combination, and I was fortunate indeed to have found them.

I was also closer to my half-sister, who I never saw much when I was living in Washington. I spent Thanksgiving with her family, and met her half-brother for the first time. I really feel that my life has generally expanded. It’s been an interesting experiment, and I’m not going to hesitate to say it’s been a successful one, in ways I couldn’t have imagined before.

Finally, a look into what 2009 will hold. I am not generally given to making resolutions about self-improvement. Nothing about my health or being more confident or anything like that. But I do like projects. In the year of 2008, I tried to write a poem every day–this got derailed after a month, due largely to my contracting deathplagues in early February. (By the way, if you want to read them, I do not mind emailing them to people. Help me pick out the good ones!)

This year I am going to give myself a slightly easier project. I intend to write a blog post every day. 2009 will be the year of the blog. I will frequently do so on Dreamers Often Lie, and I will do so on here. You can obviously expect less politics. And when I finally put my website online, I’ll do a lot of my writing on there. I’ve got plans for the new year, and they are, as is appropriate, secret plans.

These are the plans that aren’t secret. I’m visiting Seattle again this month. I’m applying to transfer to colleges and finish up my bachelor’s in polisci. I’m still looking for work. I’m excited for 2009. I have focus, direction, and motivation. This will be my year.

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