Day 87: The Cambrige Street Code

When you live in a city for a long time, certain aspects of the city become like second nature.  Little things that you barely notice on a day-to-day basis, but rules which, when "violated" (when you're traveling, in strange situations, etc.) strike you as very strange. For instance, the other day I was out late-ish at night, and was crossing a street with someone from out of town who tried to stop me as I began to cross at a red light. "Wait!" he exclaimed. "There's a cop right over there!"  I had to explain to him that in _this_ town, pedestrians are treated like gods, bicyclists are given quite the run of the street (though not as much as pedestrians), and cops can barely even get to motorized vehicles through the morass of pedestrians, cyclists, and god-knows-what-else -- maybe even roombas. At the very least, pedestrians jay-walking is not frowned upon in the slightest, and in fact, once a pedestrian is in the street, it is the motor vehicle-ist's responsibility to stay-out-the-way-b****, stay-out-the-way.

What I'd like the reader to come away with here is two-fold: (1) Cambridge and Boston have their own street codes (apparently not obvious to visitors) and (2) it is such that if you have to travel very far not on foot, you should stay-out-the-way.  I.e., Take The Damn MBTA (the "T").

Now, the T is not perfect either. For one thing it stops running about 90 minutes before bars close (terrible planning on the part of the city for the hoi polloi, but great planning if you want to increase the existence of drunk or cab drivers).  For another, there is only one route into Cambridge (well, two if you count the brief foray across the river by the green line to Lechmere, but for Pete's sake).  However, Cambridge-to-Boston's red line is pretty speedy, and it's pretty clean, stations don't smell bad, etc.  Pros outweigh cons.

I have taken to T-ing to choir practice in Back Bay on Tuesdays -- I drive from work to park at home (work is difficult, though not impossible, to get to by public transit) and then grab the red line by my house.  Soon I hope to turn this into biking, but bike is still out of commission due to broken lock (and probably air-less tires).  At any rate, once in a while you meet someone interesting on the T.  A friend once got a long-term girlfriend this way.  I've not quite had that success rate, but I did have a nice chat with a woman with a 3-ish-year-old in a stroller (she was rather precocious -- maybe she was a tiny 4-year-old).

Apart from extolling the T, I'll take this opportunity to extol Dvorak, who wrote the one piece (Stabat Mater Dolorosa) we rehearsed today.  Granted, it's an over-20-min-long piece, so it was warranted.  I realized the other day that our conductor must have a bit of a music-crush on big D because she has included something from his vast repertoire in each of our three concerts.  I don't mind :).  Following up singing about the virgin Mary watching her son dying from torture on a cross (luckily it's in Latin so typically we can ignore this), we celebrated with some beers at the 'Snake down the road.

Day 28: THE T

Aaaaand we're back to your regularly scheduled programming.  Well sort of.  Actually we are back to that programming on crack -- it's the three-day-doozy I have been dreading for sometime.  Today wasn't so bad, honestly -- at the (almost) end of the day was my first exam this week, the lab practical.  It was pretty wonky -- 24 stations with diagrams/dead animals/EKG traces/etc., with a minute and a half at each, the TA timing us and calling out "Switch!" every 90 seconds.  Sort of surreal.

Prior to that was an unfortunate delay on my flight from Chicago by 3.5 hours, nullifying the point of me getting up at 4:30 in the morning to race to the airport by L (El?).  It all ended fine, though -- which brings me the point of this post: THE T (in particular the red line) in Boston (and it's speed of transportation to/from the airport) can be phenomenal, despite what this website would have you believe and despite the fact that it closes an hour before bars.  Hop on, hop off right by my car.  Speed to work.  Work.  Cram.  Exam.  Then to MIT to work on talk.  Serious day.

Best part: sushi while finishing writing the talk.