Night Lights

I saw Janeane Garofalo at the Orpheum theater Friday night with Aral, Tasha, and Tasha’s roommate Eliza. Janeane was awesome, everything I wanted her to be in person. And it turns out that when she finished her college degree in 1986, she lived in an apartment in Allston too. The Orpheum theater is gorgeous, with heavy crown mouldings and layers of cracked paint in Victorian colors.

The past week has been filled with wonderful nights, I can’t explain why. It’s odd; my professional life is complete crap right now, but on a personal level, things couldn’t be better.

The 14th James took me out to Chinatown, a part of downtown Boston I hadn’t wandered around before. After we ate a lovely dinner he showed me the Chinatown Gate, a beautiful white archway guarded by dragon dog things with gilt writing on the top of it. James told me the figures meant “Welcome to Chinatown”. It was neat, to see how all these immigrants from one place had retained some of their cultural identity by claiming one section of the city. I thought about what would happen if a bunch of my people moved up to Boston and tried to claim a section of their own. A picture of a Southerner Gate rose up in my mind, a gate made not of nice clean white sculpture but welded together pieces of chicken wire, shotguns, and parts off classic Chevvies and Fords. Instead of two elegant and stately dragons, the Southern gate would have two mean-ass junkyard dogs tied to each side of it, and the sign above the top would read: Southern Settlement. Keep the Hell Out.

It was the nicest Valentine’s Day I’d had in some time. I had a pastry thing with lotus filling. I don’t possess the vocabulary to describe what it was like. It was a pastry made to taste like a flower – I thought elves ate flowers, when I was little.

The city has been extraordinarily kind to me lately in regards to the weather. The temperatures have almost been identical to those in Atlanta lately, and the nights are just fabulous. One night last week I went to FAO Schwartz after work to get my sister Abigail her 9th birthday present, and I couldn’t believe how beautiful Boston was. After I left one of the coolest toy stores on the planet, I walked down Newbury Street all the way from Copley Square to Kenmore Square. They have lights up in the trees all the way down Newbury Street and the sidewalks are at least 8 feet wide, and filled at night with people who don’t even notice how beautiful everything is.

Newbury Street is a shopping district filled with disgustingly expensive stuff, but I love to walk down it because it’s great people watching. There are people so rich on Newbury Street that they put babies – babies who spit up on and grow out of clothes faster than you can blink – in designer outfits in excess of $200. I’m not making that up. I’ve seen them! And right next to these designer babies as they walk down the street are beggars and yelling drunks and restaurants where people dine al fresco on warm evenings eating Indian food and Italian food and drinking every kind of beer in the world. There are gutter punks outside of J. P. Licks and a guy who makes up a song using the bounce of change in his donation cup as a downbeat to try to get people to give him enough to eat. There’s an entire store filled with nothing but containers for stuff, in case you have too much stuff and so have to buy yet another thing to keep your things contained. Newbury Street is fabulous and insane, and when I walk down it at night I can’t imagine moving away from Boston yet. I love it here.

But the cost of it all is killing me.

This next week is my last week at Dunkin’ Donuts. I got another job shelving at the Allston Public Library, because I was tired of Dunkin’ Donuts after just a few weeks. No one has called me back about the position I interviewed at Harvard for. The public library will pay me less than DD, but shelving is soothing and rhythmic work, and at least I’ll be in a library. They don’t know there that I’ve all ready got my degree from Simmons. I told them I graduate in May, which in a way is true – I walk the stage then, “graduating”. I knew that if I told them I had all ready finished my studies, they wouldn’t hire me. I’m overqualified. But I’ve got to make my bills and if I stayed at DD, I’m convinced I’d become diabetic.

I received a package from my Aunt and Uncle in Atlanta this week, and inside was a CD player for my living room (YEA!) and the employment section of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution with the words HINT HINT written at the top. It made me so happy – not just because someone in my family finally sent me a graduation present, but because my Aunt and Uncle made me feel wanted. They honestly want me to move back, to stay with them, to be part of the family. That means more to me than I can say, and it puts a powerful pull on me to leave the city of my dreams.

If you stand on the overpass behind my neighborhood – the one on the way to the Allston Public Library – you can look out not only over the collection of rental homes and grocery stores that make up my home but you can also see out over the whole Boston skyline, with the Prudential Building and the Hancock and that third new spiky round top building standing against the sky. You can see the interstate and BU and the Doubletree hotel that’s next to the river. It all lights up at night like it's Christmas every day. And you can feel the hum under your feet from all the cars full of people running into and out of the city. Mostly I try not to look at the people who are leaving, because I’m worried I might soon be one of them.