I used to joke that Boston has, pound for pound, the meanest people on the planet.

Oh how wrong I was.

K and I went to a conference in Nashua, New Hampshire this weekend. As one does when one is away from home, we went out for margaritas last night after the last meeting. Went to a place the cabdriver recommended. In my young life, I've had a lot of margaritas, and this was not a margarita. This was lighter fluid on ice with a splash of Rose's lime juice for color. If that wasn't enough, the manager came over to our table to bring us the bill to tell us that our waitress, poor Emily, had been working all day and were we ready to go yet?

So we went back to the hotel bar, where the bartender thought we'd had enough before we even ordered. She brought us one round, and no amount of eye contact could get her to come back over and bring us another. IT'S A HOTEL BAR! This is where people go when they WANT to get tanked. And it's not like she had to worry about us staggering out to the car and driving anywhere.

This afternoon, we went to downtown Nashua, and pulled into a parking space. As we're getting out of the car, the woman in the Sport Utility Assault Vehicle behind us comes over and yells at me that where we're parked isn't a legal space (sorry-- didn't see the sign) and she couldn't get out (then don't drive a vehicle the size of Kansas, because, really, a Beetle shouldn't present you with a problem).

Trying to have lunch, we seated ourselves because we weren't familiar with the place, and there wasn't a hostess that we could see. So then we couldn't get anyone to bring us a menu because we'd broken this protocol. Finally the nice Irish waitress brought us drinks and food and a little shred of friendliness. The local yarn shop, while having a comprehensive stock, was poorly lit and lacked warmth of any kind.

I've never seen people so eager not to take my money.

Could have been worse.

At least it wasn't Manchester.

Is it really good to live in a world where one can download Winger's entire catalog at 3:00 in the morning?

That's it. That's all I've got. My addition to the great philosophical questions of the ages.

I haven't done this, mind you. Nor do I personally know anyone who has. For my own part, I tend to confine my 3 am downloading to the musical stylings of such bands as Wham! and perhaps the occasional Rick Springfield track. Scoff if you want, but it's impossible to be in a bad mood when listening to "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go," even if it's only because of the delicious irony of it all. I also download stuff with a little more musical credibility than that, but really, Wham! is better than Prozac.

And when you mix Wham! and Prozac, well, that there's a party.

But I digress.

Just wondering if having so many things available for instant gratification is a great idea.

I'm IMing The Suz right now, and I'm at the kitchen table, and she's at her desk-- AT THE OTHER SIDE OF THE KITCHEN. Don't kid yourselves. Our kitchen is pretty small. There's a measure of hilarity in this option, but is it really necessary?

Perhaps only if she wants to download Winger songs in the wee hours of the morning.

Amsterdam-- January 1998

We went because Rob needed to get her UK work visa validated, and it was easier to do that by leaving the country and returning through passport control than it was to spend the day lurking around the Home Office down in Croydon. It was my last week in London, because I had no such visa. I hadn't found the right sort of job, and had declined the proposal from hot maintenance guy at the museum. Only because he asked one day too late. Or because I thought I still had Things to Do back home.

We spent the day eating a challah from The Happening Biegel on Seven Sisters Road (I wonder if it's still there. In all my returns, I haven't been back to Highbury since the cold dark morning I shlepped my bags down the ramps at the Arsenal underground station) and calling travel agents looking for a cheap flight to pretty much anywhere on the continent. Amsterdam won out because of the low low price we found and of course the fun factor.

We picked up our tickets in the afternoon from a little place in south London, and were off the next morning.

We couldn't really afford to go.

We stayed in this pensione in the Red Light District. Two sagging beds in a tiny room. Dingy bathroom down the hall. And a window overlooking a sex shop with a three foot inflatable penis in the window.

That week Rob got her purse stolen in a KFC (which we'd gone into because I needed a biscuit to soak up the beer), and we watched two marines run out of the shop and retreive it for her. So much for her diatribes on the military industrial complex. We offered to buy them a drink, but they politely refused. So we bought a round for the house at the Three Flasks in the name of good karma. And met a white cat named Bowie and a Dutch businessman who took us to lunch for wine and cheese the next day.

She got pretty sick on that trip. The following days were spent mainly in the little room overlooking the 3 foot penis. We opened the window, because the room got too stuffy and it was kind of warm that week-- compared to winter in London-- and sang every song we ever knew from our childhoods.

Comfort comes from the strangest places.

So to Rob in California this week, I say--

I wish you were here
I'd buy you a beer (or tomato juice)
and then we could cheer:
Here's to the men that we love.
Here's to the men that love us.
But the men that we love aren't the men that love us.
So fuck the men.
Here's to us.

Most days there’s a moment when I’m feeling a little under the weather
or someone is annoying me and I’ll have a peek in the papers at the
exchange rate from dollars to pounds.

Bigger catastrophes require a more hit of something more powerful. A
bad day has me pricing airfare. A bad week during the winter has me
casually skimming the American School’s job listings. This year that week was
so bad, I actually sent a pre-application. They so wanted me.

Usually these little fixes keep the monsters at bay.

Then you have a week that's worse. And suddenly the radio is playing "Anarchy in the UK" and you can't get past the Old Neighborhood without the Clash coming on.

And when London is calling, you gotta accept the charges.

The gods want me to go back. I'm powerless against this kind of karma.

This is the kind of emergency those credit cards "for emergencies" are for.

I blame the Puritans.

As always.

Every morning this week the idiots on the radio have been buzzing about the Janet Jackson Super Bowl thing. "What about the children who saw that?"

First of all, I don't know about children, but I was watching the halftime show, and I completely missed the big event. Secondly, it's just a boob. Not like most children haven't seen one, or gathered nourishment from one for the first few years of their lives. And third, if mine looked anything like hers, I think the world would have a hard time keeping a top ON me.

It was a stupid celebrity pubicity stunt. That's what celebrities do. They make asses, or breasts, of themselves in public. We act all shocked and appalled by it, but really, they're just doing what we pay them to do. They're getting our attention. It's their job.

So, yes, once again, I blame the Puritanical heritage. These were people who were too stuffy and stiff for the English to tolerate, after all. This is the kind of thing that happens when you let people like that have their own country.

On the morning of January 1, 2004, I looked like I had a really good time on New Year's Eve. Hair was sticking out in all directions. Vestiges of makeup were smeared. Dark circles under the eyes.

One might be tempted to think I was hung over, had they seen me walk into the Cheesecake Factory for lunch on January 1. The stiffness in my gait might lead one to believe that I'd been up to no good the night before.

New Year's Eve is the most overrated of holidays. I've never had a good one. Except for that one time I was in England and learned what snogging is. That wasn' t terrible. In general, though, it's all about high expectations with very little payoff. I am old enough now not to feel ashamed about watching Dick Clark yet another year. I have come to terms with the possibility that there may be people out there who have a good time on New Year's Eve. There may be people who are beautiful and cool and hip and know where the fun actually happens. I'm not one of them, though, and it's okay.

My New Year's Eve was a road trip that began at 1:30 in the morning at my parents' house in North Carolina and ended around 5:00 in Boston. The Suz was along, but she slept most of the way, leaving me alone to discover the joys of sattelite radio in the rental car. I am in love with the XM, mainly because they have a channel that is all 80's pop. I didn't even know how badly I wanted to hear "Der Kommissar" until it came on somewhere in the dark Virgina morning. Even better, the channel called Fred was counting down 2000 alternative essential songs, so they were playing The Clash and The Smiths and The Cure and The Violent Femmes, allowing me to relive my adolescent, post-hair band, angst. I joined the countdown somewhere around song 250 and I heard it all the way up the the end. "Just Like Heaven," possibly one of the most perfect alternative pop songs ever recorded, only made it to #3. Fred and I may need to have a talk about that. But in Fred's defense, when's the last time you heard a radio station play Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party?"

But 15 hours in the car is 15 hours in the car, and it leaves you looking rough the next day.
I drank a LOT of Mountain Dew. Somewhere around Maryland, I stopped making sense.
When I got bored, I'd flip to CNN and announce to The Suz that "This is CNN," or flip to CNN Espanol and turn up the volume really loud. For some reason I found this really, hysterically funny.
In northern Pennsylvania, my ass went numb.* So the funny walk on New Year's Morning can be attributed to the pins and needles sensation one gets when feeling returns to a sleeping body part.

I'd been invited to a party on New Year's Eve. This might have been The Year New Year's Wouldn't Suck.
Alas it was not to be. And so it ended like this:

By the time we got home, I wasn't even using actual words anymore.
The Suz discovered that her boy, "Joe" was off in New Hampshire.
But USA was running a marathon of Law and Order SVU.

I woke up just long enough to watch Dick Clark drop the ball in Times Square.

Two days later, I still look just a little bit like hell. But I'm getting better.

*When travelling to Western NC from New England, 84 from CT to 81 outside of Scranton, PA is the best way I've been able to determine. While I concede to the "I know a better way" crowd that 95 might be a better route to Eastern NC and points South, I've done both routes enough times to know what yields fewer hours of my highway lunacy. I also consulted the Rand McNally 2004 Road Atlas, which I bought instead of the Betty Crocker Cookbook on a recent trip to my local wholesale warehouse, and determined that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel is miles out of the way from anywhere I generally want to go. I now consider this argument closed.