Dear elementary school teachers of Greater Cambridge:
The 71 bus at rush hour is not an appropriate place for you and twenty of your second graders (especially you, with the too much makeup and the Aquanet, you know who you are) under any circumstances, unless the apocalypse is actually nigh and we all must flee into the subway tunnels for safety, and even then I recommend that you wait until at least 9:30 to herd your gaggle onto the bus.
Confidential to the cranky businessman:
Despite the annoyance of having to wade through a sea of hobbit-sized creatures to reach the door, an imperious and pained "Hello, gotta get off, gotta get off," is both inappropriate and unnecessary as a means of excusing yourself through the giggling hoarde. "Excuse me," is a perfectly legitimate interjection, and one that even second-graders can understand. Why don't you try not treating kids like creatures of inferior intelligence?
Confidential to the driver of said 71 bus:
Hint: when a flotilla of hobbit-sized creatures invades your bus at 8:55 on a Tuesday morning, the answer is in fact not to roadrage your way down Mt. Auburn Street, speeding up unnecessarily and stopping abruptly, especially in unexpected places like the busway tunnel.
love to you all! The Upstairs Girl.
Hi there! I've been on unexpected hiatus for a while, for a bunch of reasons that aren't really that important. I've been doing some thinking about the direction I want to take this site, and trying to do more other writing - stuff way outside the boundaries of this blog - and generally running up against the demands of real life.
One of the most important things is that, over the last six months or so (or more?), a lot of the hits I've been getting are from people who are clearly looking for something else (something far less intellectual than this site, to which I will not waste time linking), so I've been thinking about whether it's time to cede my territory here and get a new URL and make some other changes to go with that. Feel free to weigh in. I'm reluctant to give up this little corner, but I don't think it really helps anyone if most of the people who find my corner are pissed off that they did. ...Seriously, my stats are depressing. I'm not going to do any math, but I estimate that maybe one out of 10 visitors is actually looking for something related to the content of the site, and the other 90% are looking for someone's youtube channel.
In the meantime, I've been reading a lot of great stuff. You should totally check out Kate Flora, who writes excellent murder mysteries - I think her best is Steal Away, which you can find under the author Katherine Clark - that you should read if grisly murders will not give you palpitations. If you are in the Minuteman Library Network, I am the asshole that has them all out and overdue; I have to enter them in LibraryThing and scan the covers before I can return them all. Sorry about that. Anyway, I just read everything she's written, and, as with Elizabeth George, I probably won't post about every one of them, but they're great. Right now I'm working on The Lobster Coast by Colin Woodard, which is a history of coastal Maine and quite interesting from a factual standpoint, though I'm not sold on Woodard's narration or his immersion of his own self in the tale he's trying to tell. I'm not convinced he's doing Mainers a lot of favors. I've also managed to drench the book twice in two days, which is a first for me. (Woke up in a puddle in a tent Sunday morning, next to said book, which was treading water; got caught in a hurricane at a ballgame last night and drenched it up again after spending an hour and a half drying it with a hairdryer Sunday night.)
I also stumbled across this, which fills me with an intense dread. I tried very hard to get through the audio, and I really did enjoy it through the beginning of the book, but then they go to sea, and my brain just shuts down in protest. I can't imagine what a modern film version will look like - and, honestly, do you eve see Ahab's wife in the book? That part makes me especially nervous.
Finally, since this is becoming a bit of a linkdump, I remind you that it is Fall Contest Time over at Tomato Nation, and that the fundraising goal this year is E! Normous! And so you should scrounge up your loose change and do as much as you can for schoolkids this fall, and win prizes and encourage perfectly insane and hilarious stunts by doing so.
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