Things I can't.

1) The Patriots. My gridiron team bombed out of the playoffs in the most... augh. It's more than a week later and I still feel like I died inside. I had to get whiskey drunk, y'all. (Actually, in a text from that night I described myself as 'whiskety drunk', which I think is probably more accurate.)


2) The weather. You lot might be besieged with floods and locusts and rains of blood or whatever, but it is fucking cold here. And that's not just my unacclimatised ass complaining: in the last 24 hours we have hit temperatures lower than Boston has seen in about a decade. Like, in the negative Fahrenheits. This morning the five-minute walk from the train to work reduced me to tears. I was wearing a big wool coat with a hood, a wool scarf, a warm sweater with a huge cowl neck, a thermal shirt, a singlet, heavy jeans, huge thick socks, sneakers, and gloves. But halfway there my legs were burning - burning - from the cold. When I went back out a few minutes later to walk another five minutes to the gym, I put my yoga pants on under my jeans; and while I took them off once I was settled back in my office, I will be putting them back on when I go home. One of the major local channels described today's weather on their website as 'ridiculous cold'. I swear I'm not making that up.


3) The weather, some more. We have also been getting record snowfalls. I've had one snow day a week at work for the last three weeks, and am likely to have at least one more this week thanks to the rain/snow/ice storm scheduled to hit us Tuesday-Thursday. (By which I mean all of those days. Not sometime between Tuesday and Thursday. All three days. Really.)

Now, I know that some of you will look at that and say it should be exciting and fun. And you know what? Yes, snow can be really pretty when it's fresh and you're watching from somewhere warm. But at the risk of shattering some illusions, let me tell you that that is not the whole picture.

Snow is messy. It gets everywhere and is hard to clear away completely to make safe paths for walking or driving. What's left behind turns to nasty wet slush that gets into your shoes and socks and pants, or more dangerously freezes and tries to kill you. The sand that the city and residents put down to melt the snow gets all over the snowbanks, which adds a texture effect to piles already discoloured by pollution and dogs. Snow is heavy to shovel and hard to to walk through, until it gets packed-down and becomes impossible to shovel and hard to walk over. And while getting snow days is exciting and fun when it happens, what are you meant to do when the Mayor and the Governor are telling people it's too dangerous to be on the roads, but your work is open anyway? Because that happened to me last week too, and you know what? It's a shit decision to have to make, and one that people here have to make far too often. I'm lucky that I work at a college and as
such am more likely to have classes (and therefore work) canceled, but most people don't have that luxury and it's fucking dangerous. And don't even get me started on the mess that happens when schools get the day off but their parents have to work.

It's not that nice. It's really, really not.

*****

Lest I sound overly grim, though, I will add that I've had a lovely 24 hours courtesy of A Certain Chef who took me out for fancy drinks and fancy food at fancy places last night. Still can't quite shake the feeling that something's missing, but I'm putting the time in to work it out. I'm well aware that what's missing might just end up being 'the crazy', and while I will say it's kind of boring without the crazy, it's also kind of nice. We'll see how sensible I end up being.

Spring takes winter.

That's a Darren Hanlon reference, by the way. (Excuse me, indie-pop sensation Darren Hanlon.)

The weather here has been tortuous. It's been raining almost without a break for two solid weeks. What's weird is that it doesn't feel like particularly rough rain to me, accustomed as I now am to Sydney's semi-tropical electric downpours; it's much softer and the drops are small, and if the wind isn't up and you've got an umbrella and waterproof shoes you can be outside without too much trouble. It totally takes Sydney in stamina, though: it just goes on and on and on, and on, and then on some more, until finally you walk downstairs to find that your basement is buried under half a metre of water. (Not ours, fortunately, but entire towns have been flooded out and the Governor of Massachusetts called a state of emergency - and that was before the most recent series of storms.) Jamaica Pond is creeping over its banks minute by minute, and if it's not soon appeased it may well swallow the neighbourhood whole. We have awakened the Kraken.

With summer coming, all this rainfall is theoretically a good thing, as it means we're less likely to have a water shortage (yes, we have them here too). In fact, this is not the case: because of all of the flooding, many areas of the state have had their emergency reservoirs polluted with outside water. Those people are now in the confounding situation of being on water restrictions while having the firies pumping floodwater out of their houses.

But finally, finally, a change is coming. In Sydney, seasons change with the calendar, and the second you flip that page the weather follows. I don't understand it, but clearly a deal was struck somewhere along the line and you all just go with it. But in Boston, you know the seasons by their smell. No matter how many cool days you have, it's not autumn until you wake up to that smell of wood and cinnamon and crumbled leaves; no matter how much snow you get, it's not winter until there's cold tin in the air; and no matter how many times you see the sun, it's not spring until you smell the earth waking up again.

And you can smell it. Everyone can. And it changes people: they smile more, they're suddenly outside in droves. Everything's a celebration. A couple of weeks ago we had two beautiful 70˚ days, and on Friday afternoon in Jamaica Plain it was like the entire neighbourhood was having a street party: the rush hour traffic stuck around with the cars just cruising playing soul and Motown and soca and reggae, and all loud with the windows down; people of every age standing around on street corners laughing and talking and flirting with strangers; no coats or scarves or mittens to be seen. Sydney may have better weather, but it's almost a fair trade when you get this much more joy out of it when it comes.

Oh, and I learned today that I got a second interview for the job I'm going for. As the first interview lasted two hours and involved four people, I can't imagine what they've got left to ask me, but as this one is scheduled for 90 minutes clearly it's something significant. That's not until next week, though, and there's a whole lot of burlesque between now and then!

XOXO

Boston : Melbourne

As many people have remarked over the years, Boston resembles Melbourne in lots of ways. It's being driven home to me every day as I head into my temp job, because the part of Cambridge I'm working in looks a lot like South Melb... which is not an entirely flattering comparison, but it's not meant to be: the resemblance lies in the way that both cities have taken what should be lovely, water-adjacent land and managed to turn it into stark, concrete-laden bleakness. That's quite an achievement when you think about it, but I would encourage you not to think about it.

Other ways in which the two cities are similar:

• They're on the water but not quite of the water in the way Sydney is
• There are beaches in the city but you wouldn't want to swim in them (South Boston and Revere : St. Kilda)
• There are quite nice beaches a bit of a drive away (Cape Cod : Mornington Peninsula; though our beaches aren't anything like that nice - and the water's way colder - the scenery is really pretty and surprisingly not dissimilar)
• We have above-ground public transport (trolleys : trams)
• There's a big arts/music/education culture (admittedly we're not as good on fashion, but our music scene would blow most other, bigger cities out of the water, so that's the trade-off)
• The weather is extreme, and quite grim for several months of the year (hence all the cultural hoo-ha mentioned above: when you're stuck inside a lot of the time, you have to do something to keep busy)
• There's a strong (and not always entirely successful) blending of old and new architecture
• We have an intense rivalry with our biggest neighbour city, about which the smaller city cares much more than the larger does because we have an inferiority complex that informs pretty well everything we do, not that we'd admit it (Boston-New York : Melbourne-Sydney)

I wish to god this weather would break.

XOXO