I am very tired. I am sitting on the couch with a little cat on my shoulder. I left the house at six-thirty this morning and got back about twelve hours later. I had a really good day.
I did not expect to: I got up on two hours of sleep for audiometry at Kenmore and then a consult with an ENT and I was terrified that something was going to have gone wrong with my hearing in the year since my last exam. It was instead an immensely reassuring visit. My results are identical to the results of last year's exam are identical to the results of my previous exam ten years ago. Despite all the noise and physical stress, my hearing has not been damaged; it remains substantially better than average, especially for my age. Given how much time I spend wearing earplugs, it's nice to know the damn things are working. I have also been informed that the white noise and tinnitus generated by the TMJ are neither mechanical nor neural problems; they can annoy me, they can interfere with my ability to enjoy a quiet afternoon, but they cannot cause hearing loss. I was sent home with a copy of the audiogram and some non-prescription advice on the reasons I'd been told to make the appointment in the first place.
So that was all over and done with by eight-thirty in the morning. I was at loose ends in the land of the Citgo sign and a call to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel quickly confirmed that neither of the restaurants we'd been talking about were actually open at this hour. We agreed to meet for brunch at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, which given the disparity between the time it took me to walk there and the time it took Rob to negotiate the MBTA meant that I killed an hour walking up and down Newbury Street in the bright cool sunlight, which made me think of summers with my grandparents in Maine. Text messages from this time include "Dammit, the Roman-style pizza place does not open until 11, either." Eventually I settled at a table at the bookstore, drank herbal chai and read Nicole Kornher-Stace's marvelous post-apocalyptic katabasis Archivist Wasp (2015), which I had bought at Readercon and completely—this appears to be a recurring theme this year—failed to get signed by the author. Presently Rob arrived, wearing his green roller coaster T-shirt with the logo upside-down. He got the French challah toast, which came stuffed with lemon ricotta and covered with blueberries. I regret nothing about ordering a sandwich called the "Turvocado" except slightly the name and the fact that focaccia is still denser than I can really chew. It was the first thing I'd had to eat all day.
We had talked about walking to a museum, because we had an early enough start for a full day rather than an hour before closing or a late night; we ended up at the Boston Public Library, because it was right there and we so rarely are. We found dioramas, marionettes, how to request access to the archive of Fred Allen's papers; we walked through galleries with empty shelves and rooms where the architecture was as interesting as the books. There are split-tailed mermaids painted in a niche on the first floor. And simply by following a stairwell, we found the Sargent murals, which I had never seen before. The way the morning sun slanted in from the skylight, I had to shade my eyes to make out some of the details of the paintings in the vault. Rob took pictures.
( I saw my reflection come right off your face. )
I am not sure how much time we spent in the reading room after that, because I was reading first Helen Berry's The Castrato and His Wife (2012)—an exploration of the marriage and separation of eighteenth-century operatic celebrity Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and Dorothea Maunsell; among other things, it's a study of a gender identity which is much less high-profile today—and then the rest of Archivist Wasp. I recommend both highly.
And the rest of the day we just wandered around Boston. We walked into the Pucker Gallery because I saw that one of their currently featured artists is Samuel Bak. (If you have a copy ofstrange_selkie's A Verse from Babylon (2005), you'll recognize his style. If you don't have a copy of A Verse from Babylon, you're really missing out.) We got iced tea and chocolate mice at the other Burdick's. We saw ducks and geese and swanboats in the Boston Public Garden. We bought the best pork buns (and one lotus paste bun with preserved egg) from Eldo Cake House. We never quite got to the North End. We came home by Green Line from Haymarket and the 88 from Lechmere. I promptly made dinner and collapsed on the couch and should have finished this post hours ago, but I got distracted by analyzing the murals. And being extremely tired, since as previously stated I did this entire peripatetic day on near-zero sleep.
It was like having a vacation.
I did not expect to: I got up on two hours of sleep for audiometry at Kenmore and then a consult with an ENT and I was terrified that something was going to have gone wrong with my hearing in the year since my last exam. It was instead an immensely reassuring visit. My results are identical to the results of last year's exam are identical to the results of my previous exam ten years ago. Despite all the noise and physical stress, my hearing has not been damaged; it remains substantially better than average, especially for my age. Given how much time I spend wearing earplugs, it's nice to know the damn things are working. I have also been informed that the white noise and tinnitus generated by the TMJ are neither mechanical nor neural problems; they can annoy me, they can interfere with my ability to enjoy a quiet afternoon, but they cannot cause hearing loss. I was sent home with a copy of the audiogram and some non-prescription advice on the reasons I'd been told to make the appointment in the first place.
So that was all over and done with by eight-thirty in the morning. I was at loose ends in the land of the Citgo sign and a call to
derspatchel quickly confirmed that neither of the restaurants we'd been talking about were actually open at this hour. We agreed to meet for brunch at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, which given the disparity between the time it took me to walk there and the time it took Rob to negotiate the MBTA meant that I killed an hour walking up and down Newbury Street in the bright cool sunlight, which made me think of summers with my grandparents in Maine. Text messages from this time include "Dammit, the Roman-style pizza place does not open until 11, either." Eventually I settled at a table at the bookstore, drank herbal chai and read Nicole Kornher-Stace's marvelous post-apocalyptic katabasis Archivist Wasp (2015), which I had bought at Readercon and completely—this appears to be a recurring theme this year—failed to get signed by the author. Presently Rob arrived, wearing his green roller coaster T-shirt with the logo upside-down. He got the French challah toast, which came stuffed with lemon ricotta and covered with blueberries. I regret nothing about ordering a sandwich called the "Turvocado" except slightly the name and the fact that focaccia is still denser than I can really chew. It was the first thing I'd had to eat all day.We had talked about walking to a museum, because we had an early enough start for a full day rather than an hour before closing or a late night; we ended up at the Boston Public Library, because it was right there and we so rarely are. We found dioramas, marionettes, how to request access to the archive of Fred Allen's papers; we walked through galleries with empty shelves and rooms where the architecture was as interesting as the books. There are split-tailed mermaids painted in a niche on the first floor. And simply by following a stairwell, we found the Sargent murals, which I had never seen before. The way the morning sun slanted in from the skylight, I had to shade my eyes to make out some of the details of the paintings in the vault. Rob took pictures.
( I saw my reflection come right off your face. )
I am not sure how much time we spent in the reading room after that, because I was reading first Helen Berry's The Castrato and His Wife (2012)—an exploration of the marriage and separation of eighteenth-century operatic celebrity Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and Dorothea Maunsell; among other things, it's a study of a gender identity which is much less high-profile today—and then the rest of Archivist Wasp. I recommend both highly.
And the rest of the day we just wandered around Boston. We walked into the Pucker Gallery because I saw that one of their currently featured artists is Samuel Bak. (If you have a copy of
strange_selkie's A Verse from Babylon (2005), you'll recognize his style. If you don't have a copy of A Verse from Babylon, you're really missing out.) We got iced tea and chocolate mice at the other Burdick's. We saw ducks and geese and swanboats in the Boston Public Garden. We bought the best pork buns (and one lotus paste bun with preserved egg) from Eldo Cake House. We never quite got to the North End. We came home by Green Line from Haymarket and the 88 from Lechmere. I promptly made dinner and collapsed on the couch and should have finished this post hours ago, but I got distracted by analyzing the murals. And being extremely tired, since as previously stated I did this entire peripatetic day on near-zero sleep.It was like having a vacation.
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