One Year Anniversary.

As of Saturday, August 18th, 2001, I have lived in the city of Boston for one year.

Yea!!! Throw a party, dance in the street half-naked! Oh…wait, I don't do that here.

What I did do was realize that I have spent the last year so relentlessly in pursuit of my goals (grad school, work) that I have neglected my social life. So on Saturday night, there really wasn't anybody around to party with. My roommate had a date, Erin and Mairi just moved away, and I had a raging head cold. So I took some Sudafed and walked down to where all the damned spend their Saturday nights: Kinko's.

Aral and I have been working on a 'zine to commemorate our first full year here in town. It's going to be fabulous, and we all ready have places to distribute it on commission. When you make 'zines, places like Kinko's become palaces of forbidden delights - oh, if only all the copies were free! If only we could afford color! If only the cute guy two copiers over would smile at me! After hanging out there for awhile I thought a good guy-fetching technique would be to work on my obviously creative and interesting 'zine in a coffeehouse. And then Ben Affleck would come in, ask me how things were going, we'd strike up a conversation, he'd help me get a book deal, and we'd have a torrid affair while co-authoring another Oscar winning screenplay. And if Ben asked me to sleep with him and Jason Lee to cement their fractured friendship, well, I'd just have to say yes, because that's how much I care*.

In Coolidge Corner where I was copying at Kinko's, the are quite a few coffee houses. The first one I looked in had five single girls, all about my age, at tables by themselves either reading or writing. I almost cracked up there on the sidewalk. Obviously, I'm not the only single girl in town who thinks she's going to find someone by looking creative and hanging out drinking coffee on a Saturday night in Boston. I decided to settle down at the next coffeehouse I looked in, because it had only two other single girls reading and writing by themselves and there was a group of guys hanging around. It took me only a few minutes after settling in with my papers and hot tea and cookies to figure out that the guys hanging out weren't interested in girls. Well, at least I got out there and looked around.

So the 'zine is going to be finished soon and I'll be all proud of it and maybe it'll broaden my social circle up here a bit. I certainly hope so, anyway. The title of our one-shot is "Legal Residents", and inside Aral and I explore all that we've observed about Boston in one year. There are a couple of comics and essays on class and sex and the weather and how Boston is different from Seattle and Nashville. There's also all sorts of hookups inside to get other really good 'zines from all over the country. So if you've never read a 'zine or just miss the early nineties when they were everywhere, send $1.00 to:

Legal Residents
65 Chester Street
Box 6
Allston, MA 02134

Hee hee. We have the same zip code as the Zoom kids on PBS.

*Some people aren't going to get this joke because they haven't seen the movie Chasing Amy. If you haven't seen Chasing Amy, I'm sorry, but you're probably not as cool as you think you are until you do. Trust Me on this, and go rent one of Elizabeth's favorite pieces of cinema. The dialog is fabulous.