Time, Loss and Gain of

I see this view a lot

When I moved here, I lost a few parts of my life. Largely, I lost a lot of ways to spend my time. This sounds like an odd thing to be concerned about, I will grant you. It is annoying to have to spend an hour getting anywhere in Boston, whether you are walking, driving, or T-ing. In some ways, of course I don't miss that at all. But when you walk somewhere, you also take your time. You look into store windows. You scope out the apartment listings on that realtor you pass every day just because they're there. You stop for italian ice at that sketchy looking pizza place where you've never actually eaten pizza. On the bus, you read a magazine. On the T, you people-watch and are never bored (cranky or bemused, but not bored). Here, where everything is expansive everyone drives a car, only the poor and the hipster take the bus, and I spend about an hour every day just driving myself to and from work. As daily commutes go, I realize this isn't that bad. Some people commute for hours each way. But frankly, I think those people are psycho. Anyway, the thing is that even spending an hour in the car on a given day I have, on average, halved the amount of time I spend getting to and fro. And in the process, I've lost the little delays and distractions that make the journey interesting. So in a way, I've simultaneously acquired more free time and a lot more boredom. This doesn't even take into consideration the free time produced by living alone, by not having a TV let alone a game console, and by the relative desert of gigs that has been Spring in Austin 2011. But fret not, gentle reader! For I have not been sitting idly by, watching my life zoom past! Wait, actually I HAVE been doing that. But I have also been doing some other things. So I'm going to write a few blog posts about those things. I figure this might also make up for the fact that I've been completely terrible about blogging lately, as Aphy has often mentioned.