A Walk in the Cemetery

Who wouldn't want to celebrate their anniversary in a graveyard? Stephen and I took a walk around Mt. Auburn cemetery for ours this year. This was one of the items on my list of things to do after handing in my thesis. I had heard that it's picturesque and that many famous people are buried there (I've since learned that Buckminster Fuller is among them--I wish I'd sought out his headstone), but had never visited before.

It's amazing to me that this peaceful oasis exists in the midst of a (relatively) bustling city. The cemetery was so quiet and lush that it was startling to hear traffic whizzing by when we walked near the fence on Mt. Auburn Street.

We walked up Washington Tower and admired the view of Boston's skyline from the top, with the Charles River below. Boston is not a tall city; the John Hancock Tower, that blue one on the left, is the tallest building in all of New England, but just the 46th tallest in the US, and 162nd in the world. Yet it towers over the rest of the city, except for the Prudential Center, the grayish one on the right, which is about 40 feet shorter. I like the relative shortness of the city, though. It feels manageable to me, as someone with small-town roots. I wouldn't want to be surrounded by skyscrapers.

From the top of the tower, we spied what looked like a cathedral nearby, so we climbed down and went searching for it. It turned out to be a chapel near the entrance gate--somehow I'd missed it on the way in. The architecture was very grand for such a small building, like it was built at half of its intended size.

Since we were nearby, we stopped at Sofra for lunch. I had the bread hummus again, and managed to get a picture this time.

For dessert, I had a morning bun with orange blossom glaze, which was not at all what I was expecting it to be. I thought it would be muffin-like, but instead it was a syrupy clump of small pieces of sweet pastry, somewhat akin to monkey bread.

And delicious.

Where Have I Been?

I had good intentions of posting about Turkey as soon as we returned to the States, but then the reality of trying to finish up grad school hit and I basically sat here, at my desk, drinking strong black tea and staring at my computer screen, for the seven-week dash to the finish line. This culminated in a four-day flurry of activity at the beginning of May, when I ran two of our biggest events of the year at work, presented the results of my Masters project, and handed in a 45-page group paper for another class. Then I had a week to transform the 21-page draft of my thesis into an 88-page final product, which I turned in on Monday. I've spent so much time sitting at this desk over the past weeks, often in the wee hours of the morning, typing and shuffling papers and making checklists. That's Iggy on the right--he loves to be in the middle of whatever is going on around the apartment, even if that means squeezing himself into a slightly-too-small corner of the desk and knocking all of my papers on the floor. I actually like the company, except when he starts attacking the mouse. When I get bored, I put paper clips on the edge of the desk for him to bat around.

So I handed in my thesis on Monday, turned in the final report to my "client" on Thursday, and now I'm done with school. When Stephen and I went out Pizzeria Posto to celebrate my last day of class, he kept saying, "You have your life back!" (We were also celebrating a milestone for him--after three years working as a student teacher, intern teacher, assistant teacher, and a program assistant, he found out two weeks ago that he finally got his dream job, a full-time position teaching a combined 1st/2nd grade class in a progressive public school, which he'll start in September.) I have a huge list of things that I want to do now that my evenings and weekends are unspoken for--all of which I'd like to tell you about, but Iggy just jumped on the desk and fell asleep with his head on my arm, so I'm typing one-handed, and it's taking forever. So I'll have to get back to you. I am determined to get those Turkey pictures posted.

Istanbul, Not Constantinople

It was 50 degrees out on Saturday, so Stephen and I took a walk through Huron Village to Sofra for an afternoon snack. We split a pot of cocoa rose tea, Stephen got lamb shawarma, and I ordered the Syrian-style bread hummus, which was not at all what I was expecting--sort of a deconstructed hummus, maybe. It consisted of chunks of fresh bread, olive oil, marinated chick peas, green onions, yogurt, and paprika, I think, served warm in a tiny casserole dish. Even though it was completely new to me, it smelled incredibly homey and familiar in some way, and I pretty much licked the dish clean.

We've had Middle Eastern food at Sofra a few times before, but this time we called it "research" because we're about to leave on a trip to Turkey with Stephen's family. The planning has been very sudden--I still can't believe we're going. I've only been out of the US three times in my life, and two of those trips were to Canada, so this is hard for me to wrap my head around. I've had the They Might Be Giants cover of "Istanbul, Not Constantinople" stuck in my head all week.

On our way home from the bakery on Saturday, we cut through the Radcliffe Quadrangle at Harvard and found these crocuses--first flowers of spring. Later we saw snowdrops in someone's front garden, too. Between the warm temperatures and Daylight Savings Time beginning, winter will soon be a distant memory. I know it happens every year, but it still feels like a miracle every time.

Foremothers

Happy (almost) International Women's Day! Last year, I coordinated a big IWD event for a committee I was serving on, but we're not doing anything for it this year, so instead I plan to celebrate on Monday with some homemade carrot cake whoopie pies at our weekly staff meeting (which, come to think of it, will be attended by seven women and one feminist man, so that seems appropriate).

These (unfortunately blurry) images are from a photo that we got at a second-hand store when we went to Midnight Madness with my brother back in December. It's the Medford, Massachusetts High School senior class of 1923. I love the personalities captured in each of their faces.

Aren't they stylish? They look much cooler to me than contemporary high school seniors. Will anyone say that about my senior portrait when eighty-seven years have passed?

The End is Not Yet in Sight

My yoga class was packed last night. We kept shifting our mats around to make room for latecomers. There must have been 40+ people squeezed into that little studio. The teacher was confused and asked if there was some kind of event going on that she wasn’t aware of. Someone called out, “No, we’re just stressed!” Ha. That’s certainly why I was there. The semester is in full swing now, and the amount of work standing between me and Commencement Day on May 23 is enormous. Meanwhile, we're launching several new projects at work, and watching the Olympics every night has not helped me to relax. I hold my breath each time we turn on the TV, hoping I’m not about to see some career-ending fall on the halfpipe or crash on the ice.There’s so much potential for devastating injury (not to mention heartbreak/crushed dreams) in these events. I don’t remember the Summer Olympics being so hard to watch. Are the winter games more dangerous, or am I just on edge? These kinds of things don’t seem to happen in swimming. (Actually, the high dive makes me a little nervous.)

I don’t like to use the word “stress” because I feel that its constant repetition (stress stress STRESS!) both adds to the collective burden of anxiety and somehow implies that it’s normal to feel this way, that everyone is always overworked and undernourished. There's a series of ads on the T right now for some kind of one-minute dinner product, and the copy says things like, "This rice is in an even bigger hurry than you are!" There are even streaks drawn behind the box of rice to show that it's rushing around. Bleh. But there's no denying that I do feel some stress right now. Going to yoga this week helped. And I (accidentally) slept for ten and a half hours on Wednesday night, which felt great.  

A bright spot in all of this has been the weather this past week. Yes, we lost power on Thursday night, and the streets were flooded for days. But we've hardly had any snow (just a flurry here and there, nothing that stuck), and the sun came out on Friday morning, giving me hope that spring may indeed come again. I can’t wait. Last spring, I wrote down the flowers I saw each month so that I would know what to look for this year. In March, there were snow drops, then crocuses and pansies, followed in April by irises, forsythia, hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, and magnolias. Hard to believe that’s right around the corner, isn’t it?

Green Car

These license plates are what remains of our car. It was in an accident in January and we just heard from the insurance company that it's a total loss. Luckily, everyone involved is totally fine.

At some point in my life (not very long ago), this would have seemed like a huge calamity: the police report, the insurance claim, the wondering if it could be fixed and how much it would cost to do so, etc. I would have dwelt on it and fretted and regretted and all that. It was still surprising and sad and scary, but it happened so soon after the earthquake in Haiti that losing a car just didn't seem like such a big deal in comparison. It was a good and safe and reliable car that carried me and my family to many places in its 12 years, and I appreciated that. It had over 227,000 miles on it, and I was looking forward to the day when it met the quarter-million mile mark. But everyone is still here, my future is still here, very little has changed except that there's no green car parked outside our apartment building any more--and that seems like a pretty lucky outcome, considering. 

Thank you, little green car.

The Life Aquatic

I've never been a strong swimmer. My dad taught me the basics when I was little, but I didn't take formal lessons. I knew just enough to get through the swim test in college. When I worked as a camp counselor one summer after graduating, I sat day after day by the pool and noticed this group of older women (some of them 80+) swimming laps as though it were nothing. I had this idea that if I could just get my form down, swimming was a skill that I could use for my whole life. But it's hard to figure out how to get better on your own; it's not like weight-lifting, where you can check your form in the mirror.

When I started physical therapy for knee pain last fall, the orthopedist told me to take a break from high-impact exercise for a while, so I decided to focus on swimming instead. I signed up for a six-week course at a pool in Harvard Square. The first few classes were very elementary, but I wanted to review the essentials before getting into more complex stuff. Also, I'd never done the crawl before, so the breathing pattern and arm movements were new territory for me.

When that course ended in November, I signed up for the Level II class, and then progressed to Level III this month. At this point, we spend most of the sessions swimming laps, alternating between the crawl and the backstroke. We're also working on treading water (which I still find exhausting) and learning flip turns to make the transition between laps smoother.

I think this will be the last class I take for now. I've learned everything I came to learn, and now I just need practice to build up endurance--especially mental endurance. I think the biggest impediment to progress right now is convincing myself that I'm not going to drown between breaths, that I have enough air to make it through three more strokes. It's weird how the animal brain can kick in when you're under water. Doing deep breathing exercises in yoga class has helped me learn to calm my brain a little when swimming, but it's still a struggle. I do love it, though. Especially at this time of year, when it's bitterly cold out, it's nice to go to a heated pool and splash around under the skylights for a while.