Running Happy
Running Happy
At lunch time I went for a run along my customary Brookline loop, a route which with a particular rhythm that I’ve grown fond of the last few months. After crossing Comm. Ave, the Allston Street hill quickly gets my heart going and legs tight, but then terrain levels out and eases up on me as I cut across the Break and Circus parking lot. Just as I begin to feel winded, the long downhill along Washington street tugs me toward the center of Brookline. If my legs feel good and I hit a feel-good song on the radio when I cross Beacon Street, I can often reach that heightened emotional state that all runners must crave.
Breakfast at Sorella’s
This morning I went with my housemate, Monica, and her parents to Sorella’s in Jamaica Plain, and I was glad to discover a spot to add to my list of good Boston breakfast joints. What’s remarkable about this small restaurant on Centre street is the shear amount of reading it takes to sort through your options. The menu can’t contain the list of inventive omlettes, pancakes, waffles, and french toast; the choices spill out into the restaurant itself, onto the hand-written descriptions plastered on every spare inch of wall space.
On Being from Fargo
(Today I dusted off this essay–it’s about four years old now–and decided it would make a good addition to the ‘hometown’ section of this site.)
On Being From Fargo
Where are you from?
Boston driving, with a human face
The warmer weather apparently is enabling Boston drivers to be jerks to one another in more personal ways. Now that more windows are rolled down, intravehicular communication has moved from pantomimed abuse to more direct verbal confrontation.
Maphub
“MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. Collecting information about people, places, events, and notes, can help to document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based Hubs. The project is in development.”
Ecotone topic: Time and Place
After much lurking and hanging back, I’ve decided that it’s time to post something for this week’s Ecotone topic, “Time And Place.” Even as I’ve fallen behind on writing in my own place blog, I’ve been thinking about the affect the practice of place blogging can have on perceptual pace. If a weblog has been defined as a “website organized by time,” then it makes sense to define a place blog as a weblog organized by place. What this offers is a writing medium that encourages a regular encounter with the ordinary places we inhabit.
The Bathroom Diaries
As I was trying out the Vindingo mapping features on my PDA, I ran across a way to map all the nearby public restrooms. I was glad to see the Bathoorm Diaries site making explicit what most of us are unwilling to admit: that restrooms are central to our experience of place, especially public places.
Boston Stories and the City Stories Project
Today as I made my way through the Ecotone site, I found my way to Derek Powazek’s The City Stories Project and subsequently to the Boston Stories site. The Boston site is organized by neighborhood, so I visited the Allston section, only to find no-one had posted anything. An excuse for me to write something, I suppose…
The Cities Stories Project strikes me as similar to the other Derek’s– Derek Owens– 21st-Century Neighborhoods