Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Every day, the company I work for edges closer and closer to its final resting place in the dot com graveyard. Tomorrow is moving day, when we give up part of our office space to save on the rent. There’s a certain attitude of despair percolating up through the eyes wide shut denial now. The issue of paying the rent has far too much resonance, I’d say. It’s a wonder we lasted this long. Nobody’s buying and nobody’s hiring.

As I was looking up dot com graveyard sites, I stumbled across this recent insult to bloggers everywhere. It’s on a slimy marketing site, but still, the attitude is awfully snarky. Maybe they feel threatened by ad-free, grassroots content.

Anything’s possible.

I’m not actually from Boston; I just live here. I’m from Lizzie Borden territory, and on my way back from Southeastern Massachusetts today I stopped by the Lizzie Borden B&B and Museum for the half-hour tour.

It was a little pricey, but I found out a few things I’d either forgotten or never known. Does everyone know the words to Lizzie Borden took an axe? I always think of it as a local crime, but it was the crime of its century, and the sort of people who appreciate axe murderers come from all over the world to spend a night in the house, possibly in the very room, where Lizzie allegedly solved her inheritance problems.

Her father was a real piece of work, and though no one deserves ten whacks to the head with a axe, he came close. His wife, Lizzie’s stepmother, got eighteen, more passionate, whacks - or perhaps she had a softer head. So the children’s poem suffers from significant whack-inflation.

You’ll never find yourself in Fall River unless you’re on your way to Cape Cod on I-195, in which case it’s highly unlikely you’ll be there at a time the house is open (11:00am - 2:30pm daily in the summer, similar hours on weekends in spring and fall), or be willing to spot $7.50 a head for this glimpse into local history. The house is right across from the bus terminal, not that they mention that on the B&B flyer.

As you may or may not recall, I live in an 80-year-old apartment building in Boston. To date, the main danger of living here was the bad wiring - phone lines that go snap-crackle-pop when the temperature changes rapidly, and ungrounded electrical wiring that can’t handle large appliances (like, say, air conditioners).

This morning, however, a new danger of old architecture appeared. I was awoken at the unnatural hour of 6 a.m. by the sound of someone banging on a door and conducting his half of your typical domestic dispute through it. If it had been 6 p.m., I would have gone out there or called the police, but when it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday and you’re not really awake in the first place, you assume the end of the noise is the end of the problem and go back to sleep.

The police, when they arrived an hour and a half later, waking me up again with the door buzzer, were shocked, shocked I tell you, that no one had gotten involved when this woman’s boyfriend wrecked their apartment and she screamed for help and ran off to them. What terrible neighbors we all must be, to ignore screaming and breaking things.

I figure nobody called because nobody heard it. My apartment is right across the hall and I heard no screaming for help, no breaking things. Once the argument left the hallway, it became inaudible. Even in the hallway stage, it’s doubtful anyone off the floor would have heard enough to wake them. While it’s a bit disturbing to find out for sure that I could scream for help in my apartment and everyone would sleep right through it, I could have guessed that part. What’s worse is that the police would blame my neighbors for being asleep.

The old woman next door turns her television way up, and though you can hear it from the hall, you can’t hear it from inside another apartment. You can hear music through open windows in the summer, but not from the apartment right next to you. The guy upstairs used to drop something heavy (barbells?) on the floor every now and then - that’s all I ever heard of him. You have to actually shake the building to be noticed, and even then people will probably assume it’s the elevator door banging (another 1922 original, like the wiring), which is the only thing besides the fire alarm that’s audible in most parts of the building. It’s a pretty solid building - that always seemed like a plus before.

I was home last night, too, and I completely missed Part I of this domestic dispute, after which the woman apparently decided to barricade herself inside their apartment without a phone - when the guy had the keys to the place anyway. (It’s not entirely clear when the boyfriend destroyed the cell phone, and considering the state of the phone lines, I can’t blame them too much for not getting real telephone service connected.) But can I recommend not doing that in a building where no one can hear you scream?

Or am I supposed to feel guilty for having a telephone, being asleep at six a.m., and not moving in with an idiot?

A story of life in the real world

I ran into someone on the way to the bus stop this morning. Let’s call her Dr. Deb, because that was her name. We sat together on the bus and chatted about our weekends. Dr. Deb and her boyfriend had gone on a Quest for Piglets in western Massachusetts. (I’m not making this up - he’s into pigs.) It seems there were no piglets, because the pigs still don’t know what season it is. If it’s spring, what happened to winter?

Dr. Deb also mentioned that she’d read 120 pages of a Catherine Asaro novel I’d lent her, and I told her I’d just reread The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Did Dr. Deb react by saying, “You only mention that in order to prove that you’re better than everyone else on the bus”? No, dear reader, she didn’t. She said, “What does ‘bicameral’ mean?” You see, Dr. Deb is my friend. She knows that if I bring something up, it’s because I find it an interesting topic of conversation. My friends give me the benefit of the doubt.

So I told her, “two-chambered.” Did she accuse me of hobbling the English language with my etymological definitions of words? No. Strangely enough, Dr. Deb was interested in discussing left and right hemispheres, not in psychoanalyzing me. The thirty other people on the bus were not my friends, yet none of them started their own conversations about how full of myself I must be to talk about other people’s brains that way. Bostonians have other things on their minds at 8:30 in the morning. Some of them were even reading thick books, but that’s considered normal here. I saw someone reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind on the T a few weeks back - that’s probably what got me thinking about it again after nine years. But back to today:

It is highly unlikely that some random med student on his way to Longwood overheard Dr. Deb and felt that her words oppressed him in his day-to-day use of his left hemisphere - but of course, anything’s possible. If he did, I hope he was relieved when she got off the bus. I stayed on to the T stop at the end of the line, and when I got on the subway, funny, but the other passengers failed to crowd around me. I was just another commuter headed inbound.

But then, I never claimed to be anything else.

You go to bed late, so you get up late, you eat breakfast late, and you get to work late. It’s already gorgeous out at ten when you get there, so by two, you decide an outdoor lunch is in order. You take a stroll around the block, noticing that it’s rather too warm to count as gorgeous, and you end up where the secretary predicted you would - on the green in front of the local library.

By now you want out of the sun, but the green is mysteriously bereft of shade. There are trees, yes, but they don’t seem to be casting any shadows. You wander a bit, investigating the situation (it’s a big green, and a big library - freshly renovated, the secretary said), until you find a tree of your own. The shade of its branches is better than nothing.

Yes, the shade of its bare branches - the trees on the green are in bud, and the fancy ones in flower, but it’s eighty-five degrees out in the bright sunshine and there are no leaves.

You think of the heat, still on in your apartment, because the landlord is legally obliged to provide it for another month yet. It was never really winter and now it’s suddenly high summer. It hardly snowed and now it’s not raining. You can’t remember the last time it rained. You think of the reservoir on the other side of the state, of the water that flows downhill a hundred miles to your faucet. When you get back from lunch, the secretary says we’ve ruined the earth.

Yes, folks, it’s tax day in Massachusetts. Yesterday was a state holiday - Patriot’s Day, on which we commemorate Paul Revere’s 26-mile run from Hopkinton to Copley Square, at the end of which he shouted “The British are coming!” and fell dead on the steps of the Public Library. Or something like that.

In any event, the post offices and regional IRS offices were closed, so the deadline to file was postponed until today. I wasted my holiday filling out US C-EZ schedules and calculating how much I’d paid in rent this year - though it was, of course, far more than the maximum Mass. state deduction for rent. That’s the price of living it up in the capital. There was one exciting moment where I read the wrong line from the 1040 into a worksheet, and thought I’d gotten an extra $300 refund. No such luck.

I spent the rest of the holiday finishing Buffy Anne, Supergirl, my latest, not particularly successful, Buffy filk, and arguing with zenites about smut. I’m afraid to go back to my inbox, actually - I don’t really understand why people who are so sure I’m wrong are so upset by the evidently wrong things I said. Go figure…

I’ve been waiting for my new, high-priced Massachusetts license ever since the RMV rant four weeks ago. Today I called the RMV and found out what the problem was. First, let’s recap: I went to the RMV in Boston, twice, and filled out all the paperwork, which prominently featured my address in Boston. I proved I was a Massachusetts resident by showing the bills I got at that very same address in Boston. I handed in my Connecticut license, demonstrating that my previous residence was in, duh, Connecticut (where licenses are a heck of a lot cheaper, by the way).

Despite these obvious clues that, hey, maybe this girl lives in Boston, my license has been mailed to a town in Western Massachusetts, about as far from Boston as you can get without donning flannel and living off venison and berries.

Why? Well, ten years ago I was in college in that town and I got a learner’s permit, on which I drove around one parking lot in a truck in first gear, once. Twice, tops. I never even got the license, and I’ve lived in three other states since then. Still, the RMV never forgets.

Today I went to the RMV (also known as the DMV). Twice.

The first time they turned me away because I hadn’t brought my social security card. The RMV website went into excruciating detail (in a huge PDF) about what sorts of documents to bring to verify your residence in Massachusetts, your signature, your birthdate, your star sign…but it didn’t mention that the governor has demanded you show up with your social security card in hand.

For the Aussies in the audience, a social security card is a little scrap of paper with your social security number printed on it by a dot matrix printer with an old ribbon. You can still see the perforations, not to mention my signature from when I was nine years old - like that verifies anything.

Come to think of it, when the woman at the front desk was blaming my wasted trip on our lovely governor (the first governor ever to give birth in office), I believe she mentioned that Governor Swift had made the new rule on September 11th. So now I don’t even get to gripe about how they promised us that social security numbers would never be used for identification purposes. Sigh.

Well, I got back at the RMV - I cheated on the eye exam. Yes, put on that yellow shirt and you too can pass the Kobiyashi Maru… I didn’t break the rules, I did an end-run around them. The story goes a little like this:

Back when I was a young, innocent driver in Rhode Island, they had an eye chart on the wall and you read it, and if you could see, you got a license. But it’s not so simple in the big states.

When I moved to Connecticut, everything was high-tech - they have a fancy hologram thing on the license to keep minors from forging Connecticut licenses. There’s a funky eye test that looks like an overgrown View-Master. One eye gets one picture, and the other eye gets another. Of course, I didn’t know this walking into the CT DMV in Wethersfield for the first time. It wasn’t until the guy asked me twice to read the rest of the line of letters that I figured it out. So I peeked out of my backup eye and read the rest of the line.

I’ve been living in Boston for over two years, but it is only now that my CT license is expiring. When I got (back) to the Boston RMV, I was prepared. They had the same View-Masters, and I did the same thing. Score one against the RMV. Now if they’d only charge $15 like in Rhode Island instead of $70…

This probably doesn’t make any sense to you unless you’re as old as I am and you have a lazy eye that wasn’t brought up properly in your childhood, so is still lazy. It’s a zen eye - it sees all, but is usually unaffected by it (unless I make an effort to focus on what it sees, because I want a driver’s license so I can buy Guinness).

Don’t worry, I don’t drive - the streets of Boston are still safe for pedestrians.

Lego update: A zendomite (reminds me of corbomite) pointed me to the blog where I found the Lego links: common street trash.

And sold! to the gentleman from the South Shore. Yes, folks, it looks like I’m about to be a full-fledged wage-slave. I’ve never had a real job before - I’ve always been self-employed or temporarily employed or employed part-time or paid to go to school (all of those being scams on the employer’s or contractor’s or university’s end to avoid the expense of benefits, not to mention a market-level salary). Don’t get me started on wage-slavery, though - the bitter maggot saga would pale by comparison.

So I was faced with the unfamiliar task of writing an acceptance letter. I found some helpful advice at WriteExpress. Anyway, that’s why I’ve been blogging so much - I have the week off before I start work.

Speaking of letters, I got a pleasant little note from the Postmaster General of the United States this weekend, warning me about anthrax without once using the word anthrax. It’s already been targeted by comedians and wags for the immortal line, “Don’t shake it, bump it, or sniff it.” Oh, and I’m on high alert (again? still?) for goodness-knows-what impending terrorist attack, and my poor mayor has been wrangling with the Coast Guard and the federal government over the right of large, potentially explosive natural-gas tankers to pass through Boston Harbor. Much as I’d like to side with the mayor, it is practically winter already, and many Bostonians use natural gas for heat.

Maybe they can burn stacks of pleasant little postcards from the Postmaster General instead.