I discovered on last weekend’s trip that Amor de Dias is the most perfect train music ever. It’s Lupe from Pipas (a band I lovelovelove) and Alasdair from The Clientele (a band I’m kind of meh about). They are poptastic: quiet and dreamy and just perfect for watching the scenery slip by and relaxing your brain and feeling a little sad about Baltimore but also a little happy about the little bit of snow and the waning afternoon light. Go to their website and listen to Late Mornings right now! (Esp. the ‘oooohs’ that start around 0:57 — so dreamy.)

Today is the first day of the semester. It’s been a long month full of deadlines and much, much busier than a January *should* be, I think. Of course there are always deadlines but I think the busiest bit is past, which seems funny to say on the first day of the semester. But I’m optimistic, and thinking of that train ride makes me evermoreso.

When we first moved to New York we lived in Little Italy, what I guess the realtors now call Nolita. The apartment was kind of weird (2 bedrooms each had 1 glass wall!) but the neighborhood was fantastic: funky shops and buildings and really walkable and not too far from where we needed to be (and very near a good selection of subways too).

I don’t know why I started thinking about this the other day, but I had the most bizarre nostalgia flashback about the neighborhood. There was an Italian bakery on the next block south of our apartment. Not a fancy bakery but the working kind — they baked kaiser rolls and hoagie sub sandwich rolls and those sorts of things.

Now it feels like a dream, because how could it possibly be real? But sometimes we would be out late, too late, being our just-out-of-college selves at a concert or bar or whatever. The bakery would be baking, and the smell was amazing, you could smell it all the way up the block. And if we walked down to the bakery they’d sell us a warm roll fresh out of the oven for something ridiculous like a quarter.

Just so you know, a freshly-baked roll is about the most delicious thing you can eat at 2 or 3am.

Edited on 1/27/12 to add: I wasn’t lying to myself after all! Jonathan found a photo of the bakery on the interwebz. Except that he remembers it as loaves of bread rather than individual rolls.

Yes, there are other people, egads! But there’s something kind of comforting about the we’re all in this togetherness of a train, as opposed to the hurtling by at high speeds in our own personal metal coffinness of cars.

(Though like a good 49% [or is it 51%?] introvert I am wearing my headphones but not listening to anything because I don’t want anyone to talk to me.)

I can see you suckas on the NJ Turnpike right now! Ha! You are not typing on a computer, you are paying attention to the road! And hoping there’s not any early rush hour traffic in Philadelphia! (And if you were me as a passenger, you’d be feeling barfy and carsick probably right now, too.)

I do wish that the tray tables were a bit lower, though. Or that my laptop didn’t run as hot as it does. Makes for toasty knees.

Dear Amtrak, please don’t go bankrupt. Please figure out a way to score a huge investment of funds so you can build more track and speedier trains and make it so I never ever have to drive or fly anywhere east of the Mississippi ever again.
Yr pal,
Maura

(The Y is also kind of close to my work, though it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to figure out a way to bend the space-time continuum and take advantage of that.)

Exercise for heart rate + sweat’s sake remains extremely dull to me, but I’ve definitely gained some weight since I quit our former gym when I started working full time again so it’s become a necessary evil. For the rest of the day I’m still in the feel-like-dying startup phase but hope to crossover into the feel-pretty-good settled in phase soon. I’d forgotten how much hungrier I get when I exercise — so far I tend to just want to eat and collapse after getting home, which is hardly a productivity booster.

Today it was lunchtime when we finished and we were all starving and the new Brooklyn Shake Shack is located perilously close to the subway stop we had to go to, so despite all best efforts we were sucked in by its tasty tractor beam, thus undoing all the good we’d done at the gym. Next time we’ll invest in burger blinders.

In the morning I stepped onto the platform just as a train was coming in, which is lovely. But then I walked onto the train right after two very tall men who walked onto the train and just stood by the door, all but blocking additional entry (I squeaked by with an excuse me and minimal touching, go me!). Now I’m as big a fan as any of the standing in the doorway subway strategy, esp. on shorter trips — it fits with my whole standing desk ethos. But people, if you want to stand by the door you should be the *last* person to get on the train, otherwise you’re just blockage.

This evening I got down to the platform only to hear the dreaded message “because of a stalled train at …” I waited 15 minutes and by the time the train came the platform and subway cars were packed. After waiting patiently for the car to disgorge its passengers I hopped on the train and tried to eke out a bit of personal space. I ended up getting a seat next to a rude person, yay! The kind of person who has a seat next to the door and a free seat next to themself and doesn’t scootch over to make it easier for someone to sit in the available seat, which means that everyone just sort of stands around and looks at the seat until someone finally climbs over and through everyone’s legs and backpacks to sit in the seat, thereby giving everyone a bit more room. You’re welcome.

And the final blow: when the subway pulled into my station I nearly didn’t make it off the train in time because someone was holding onto the horizontal bar over my head and would not let go as I struggled to move past him and under his arm. The train was stopped! No bracing with grab bars required! Sigh.

At least today didn’t feature my #1 top rude subway behavior: standing in front of the turnstiles while digging through a bag or pockets to pull out a Metrocard while others pile up in a line behind you, Metrocards at the ready. Seriously, please stop it.

The summer that record was released Jonathan was living with a college friend of ours and the college friend’s high school friend in DC. I spent part of that summer at field school in northern Spain and part at home in Delaware. It was hot, and my old car would overheat if I ran the a/c so I drove from Delaware to DC with the windows open. It was even hotter in DC and I don’t remember there being any a/c in the house where they were all staying, either.

I remember trying to convince our college friend to give the Breeders a listen. He was a big Pixies fan but kept saying, “no, I can’t listen to that, I don’t like Throwing Muses.” (I know, how unpossible is that?!) I eventually forgave him for not liking Throwing Muses, and I think he eventually listened to the Breeders, but maybe not until their next record.

I’m trying not to make many resolutions this year. They are always the same, anyway (read, write, exercise, meditate), and I always have mixed success in keeping them. So this year I will just make one: I’m going to try to get enough sleep so I can wear my contact lenses regularly again. Modest, right? Perhaps deceptively so. But it’s a goal, and a good one.

The movies! We don’t see many movies in the theater these days though suddenly there are tons to see, many of them kid-friendly: the Muppets and there’s a Studio Ghibli retrospective coming up at the IFC soon, to name a few. The possibility of seeing so many Miyazaki movies on the big screen makes me giddy, though I think we’ll restrict ourselves to 2 or 3.

Today, however, we saw Hugo, the movie based on the the Caldecott-winning book from a few years ago called The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It was fantastic — beautifully filmed and fairly true to the story. Which is good cos it’s a great story: a mystery about an orphaned boy, an automaton, and the (real) history of filmmaker Georges Méliès. The book caused a bit of a stir when it won the Caldecott because that’s an award for picture books, and while it is a story told in words and drawings it clocks (ha!) in at 500+ pages. But I think the award was well-deserved.

The movie had lots of snow which made us feel cold, and steam and secret passageways which made us feel warm. Hugo is a clockworker and machines, gears, clocks, and mechanical things figure prominently. There were lovely fantastic touches, too — it had the feel of a Stephen Millhauser children’s movie, in many ways, which I guess it sort of is: magical realism for kids. Go see it if you can — I highly recommend it.

I wanted to put two jars from our fridge side-by-side and take a picture. Both jars are glass with brass-colored lids. Both jars (used to) contain golden brown thick liquids. One was small, maybe originally a maraschino cherry jar? The other, medium-sized, and used to hold peanut butter.

The liquids looked fairly identical, and therein lay the puzzle: which was caramel sauce, and which was turkey gravy? Choose wrong, and you’ll be sorry…

(Really, it would have been better as a photo. Too bad someone was hungry for gravy today! On the other hand, I think caramel sauce would be pretty gross on leftover turkey.)

I’m not a dummy. I know that college is expensive. Heck, isn’t everything expensive? And I know that CUNY is far, far less expensive than many most other colleges and universities. And I know that the colleges need the money from this tuition increase, which they’ve been promised to get. (As opposed to the last time tuition went up and the state used the extra funds to make up budget shortfalls in other areas. Stay classy, NY!)

While there are lots of genuinely bad things that happened in the past, things we should learn from and try never to repeat, sometimes history outshines today. CUNY once had free tuition for all students. Again, not a dummy: I know it was a different world then. And I know that there are plenty of good and deserving services and programs to spend city, state, and federal money on now.

But I also know (because I used these stats in 2 conference presentations this semester) that in 2010, 38% of CUNY undergrads lived in households earning less than $20K annually (source: http://owl.cuny.edu:7778/portal/page/portal/oira/OIRA_HOME/ug_student_profile_f10.pdf). Thirty-eight percent! And I also know that a college education for everyone can’t possibly be a bad thing.

So I am sad about the tuition increase at CUNY. Because even if it’s inevitable or the only feasible way to move forward, it’s not the right way.