Home Sweet Home

So yes. I've moved. Hey Dorchester, how you been?

I'm in a relatively good part of one of Boston's worst neighbourhoods - like, murder-capital-of-the-city worst - but because my house is on the main street it still looks a bit rough. Like, you know how on Enmore Road it's decent and fine but all the best houses are a block or two back and the main street looks rougher than the rest of the area? It's like that, but then drop Enmore Road and the surrounding nice houses into one of the better bits of, I don't know, Cabramatta. The odd gunshot in the night is the price you pay for low rent.

That having been said, my apartment is lovely. It's in a block of ground-floor shops with flats above, all of which were razed and fully renovated 4-5 years ago when the area was just starting to improve a bit. Flattie Karen and her ex-roommate were the first people to move into the flat after it was finished, and Karen's a neat-freak so it's still in great nick. And while it's a dodgy area generally, you definitely get the feeling in my part that it's coming back: there are lots of new businesses, people are friendly and chatty, that sort of thing. My street - Dorchester Ave, locally known as Dot Ave - is a main street and runs for miles in either direction, and it's funny to see how the gentrification is happening along it. You'll have two blocks that look pretty good, with awesome-looking bars and cafes and stuff, then suddenly you're in Fallujah. And then just as suddenly, it's fine again.

Gentrification in Boston is a constant, messy process: our population density is the 3rd highest in the U.S. (after NYC and San Francisco), and with the city at constant 98+% occupancy rates, landlords can charge pretty much whatever they like and they'll find someone to pay it. The cycle tends to be that a neighbourhood will go to shit and be a war zone for several years, then students will start to move in because it's cheap and usually convenient to uni and public transportation and all that; then property investors - often gay ones, here - will see the white kids arriving and start buying up and renovating the properties, thereby shoving out all the people who have lived there for years and need low-cost housing (who of course tend to be racial minorities and the elderly, because this fucking world); then businesses start popping up to support the new, (relatively) more affluent inhabitants; and then families come in and settle and by this point you're already several steps into the cycle in a new neighbourhood on the other side of the city. Basically it's what's happening in Redfern, but everywhere all the fucking time.

What makes Boston a particularly interesting case study for this is that it's geographically quite a small city, so the lines of gentrification are more clearly drawn here than anywhere else I've ever seen. For example, back when I worked at the health centre in Jamaica Plain, I would walk down Green St to get to work. Like much of Jamaica Plain, Green St is lovely - big, beautiful Victorian houses; lots of trees; cute little playground/park - but then you'd pass the train station and you were in another neighbourhood entirely, where the buildings were dark and heavy and everything looked dirty and dodgy and unwelcoming. Even the people looked different. But you could turn over one shoulder - you wouldn't even have to turn all the way around - and still see where everything was pretty and safe-looking. It was the difference of 10 steps, no more; but once you'd crossed it you were in another part of the city. It was still Jamaica Plain, but it was an entirely different Jamaica Plain. I walked it hundreds if not thousands of times, and it never ceased to amaze me.

Dot Ave is like that too, a series of wildly different neighbourhoods separated by 10-step border towns. But it's exciting, in a way. I don't know this part of the city at all, so I got exactly what I wanted in terms of being in a new place. As much as I love Jamaica Plain, and despite all of the reasons it would be a perfect place for me to live, I had to get away from the part of town I grew up in. I'm trying to delineate between my childhood and my current life in as many ways as possible, and this was an important part of that for me.

*****

To answer a question several of you have asked, a 'boxspring' or 'foundation' is what's called a bed base over there: the big, heavy, solid thing that goes under your mattress unless you have a futon or platform bed or are a uni student. For queen- and king-sized beds you can get them in a single piece or in two pieces; the two-piece kind is known as a split boxspring and is easier to maneuver through tight spaces.

Now, obviously, you would need both halves of the split boxspring for it to work: with only one, you'd have half your mattress hanging off it unsupported. Selling them as individual pieces makes about as much sense as selling left and right shoes separately. Yet this appears to be what Sears does... maybe. It's what they do online, for sure; but having spoken to a couple of clerks in stores, they all seemed to be under the impression that the two halves were sold as a single set for the same price. It's deranged, and a great example of why the company has been plummeting for the last few decades. Problem is, their prices can be awesome (I found the mattress on their website for less than 1/3 the regular price), so you make the deal with the devil. And sometimes it works out, like with my mattress; and sometimes not so much, like with my 0.5 boxspring.

*****

A professor here has changed her e-mail signature for the season to 'Happy Holiday.' Just the one, apparently. That's all you get.


XOXO