Transit-Filled Weekend

This weekend brought me a handful of new T stops, visited both deliberately and in the course of my other adventures. I spent Friday afternoon working at a cafe in the Charles MGH area (the last new-to-me Red Line stop that's on both lines!); its architectural feel is a pleasant mix of modern urban business district and (literally centuries-)old-school upscale rowhouses.

I'd also heard great things about "that liquor store at Charles MGH", as friends had been describing it, so I stopped by. The store did not disappoint! They had two entire walls lined with single bottles of beer, including a lot of fancy/unusual brews. I've been a deficient beer geek (and hop lover!) in that I haven't yet had a chance to try 120 Minute IPA, so I was excited to be able to pick up a bottle -- though at 20% alcohol, I haven't yet found the right time to try it.

Saturday Jesse, Sam, and I spent the afternoon on an odyssey of many-transit-typed adventures around the city. We first went to an art space in the South End to see more of this guy's work (first encountered at Somerville Open Studios). We hit the Silver Line to uber-terminal Dudley Station for lunch -- though the Silver Line isn't a T stop for the purpose of my transit project (the Silver Line is not a train, my friends! it is merely a bus laboring under the *delusion* that it is a train!).

Post-lunch we took one of Dudley's approximately 7234582910 buses to Roxbury, where much to our dismay The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Center was closed. Another time! The visit was not in vain, however, since on our way to the Stonybrook Orange Line stop (in a pretty neat place, across from a cutely-landscaped park), we accidentally walked by the Sam Adams brewery and accidentally got free beer (they were asking visitors to vote between two samples of beer, only one of which can make it into next year's officially-marketed lineup). Nom nom nom!

Since our evening plans were in Somerville (and since this was a stop I hadn't yet visited), we rode the Orange Line all the way across town to Sullivan Square. Like Dudley, Sullivan is a mega-transfer point, where many bus lines have their termini; unlike Dudley, Sullivan, as far as we could tel, offers absolutely no motive for visiting other than transferring to a bus. So, that's what we did!

More T Stops, More Studios

I furthered my plan of visiting new T stops this weekend -- we went to the open studios at the Distillery in South Boston by way of the Andrew T Stop. The Distillery was about a mile from the T stop, so we got to explore South Boston on our walk, which was pretty interesting and cool (though not literally cool -- Boston's 3 weeks of nice spring/summer weather seem to be over, and it's oppressively hot and humid). Southie wasn't quite what I'd expected -- with colorful, close-together houses on hills, some streets looked surprisingly San Francisco-esque, but the Irish pub we stopped into definitely didn't (its decor tended more toward Irish nationalist propaganda).

Later, after walking downtown post-studios, we also hit up the New England Medical Center T Stop to get home -- I hadn't realized that the FAO Schwartz Bear had a new home!

This was the smallest of the three open studios I've seen in the past year, and the artists skewed the youngest -- one friend commented that it seemed like college art, which I agreed with. In contrast, the Fort Point studios from last fall were full of mostly professional artists, and the Somerville studios from earlier this spring seemed to have a lot of adult amateurs (a demographic that I think produces a lot of interesting work!).

Alewife

When I first moved to Boston I decided that before I move away I want to visit every train station on the T -- my rules are that I have to get on or off the T at the station as well as explore the immediate surrounding area.

This week I made my first deliberate visit to a T stop I hadn't been to, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way -- Alewife is one of the closest T stops to my apartment, just in terms of distance, but I'd never taken the T there because there's no bus from my house to there and biking to Harvard (which is close to the same distance) is usually a lot faster overall given the extra time I'd spend on the T.

On Friday, I decided to get to Harvard by biking to Alewife and taking the T from there. Alewife is the last stop on the red line and boasts a large parking garage where commuters from the northwest suburbs leave their cars while taking the train into the city; I was pleasantly surprised to note that they also have huge bike racks, which were totally full in the middle of the day. I took the T back around rush hour, and watched a lot of people get out to go to their cars and bikes -- the people in cars probably live in places like Arlington or Lexington, but since Alewife is kind of in the middle of nowhere I'm curious where all those bikers come from.

Getting There

One of the things I like most about living in the Boston area is how much easier it is to get from place to place than in other places I've lived. The city is pretty walkable in general, and most of the time, I can choose between five different methods of travel (walk, bike, drive, public transit, taxi), depending on the circumstances. Circumstances usually also dictate that one or more of those methods is totally stupid -- the weather is too nasty to walk, or I've left my bike somewhere, or I'm planning on drinking, or the bus doesn't go there, or a taxi is too expensive -- but given the plethora of options there's usually a good one that's obvious. Sometimes, however, circumstances collaborate to make my transportation choices much more obscure...

I'm currently hanging out near the Davis T stop, which is also about a 20 minute walk from my house. In a couple hours I am heading to somewhere else which is also accessible by T. My house is a 10-minute bus ride from the T (but the bus only runs every half hour).

I've also left my bike near the Harvard T stop with an underinflated tire; Harvard is a short T ride from Davis and a 20 minute walk/10 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride (but the bus only runs every half hour) from my house, and I have a bike pump at my house.

PROBLEM: What is the optimal way to get from point A to point B, given that I also want to drop some stuff off/get some stuff at my house before arriving at point B? You may use scratch paper.

Tomorrow early in the morning I'm coming back to Davis. I'd hoped to get may bike back home by then so I could bike here, but that's seeming pretty unreasonable by now -- so I'll probably take the bus to Harvard (which is of course in the opposite direction from my destination), and then take the T to Davis. And that's why the MBTA should start bus service from West Cambridge to Davis.

Biking Annoyance

I understand (sort of -- it's still frustrating) when motorists think they have the exclusive right to the road (hint: legally, NO) and honk/yell at bicyclists going slower-than-car-speed in front of them. But when a public bus honks at me to get out of the way when I'm riding down Mass Ave, exercising my rights as vehicular traffic -- well, I'd have hoped the MBTA would train their drivers more thoroughly in the rules of the road.

January & February Books

I never got very far with Gravity's Rainbow last fall, but I think that was in large part because it's too bulky to toss in my purse when I go to work -- this year, I started reading while riding/waiting for the T, and apparently I spend a fair amount of time doing that, as I've finished two books recently with very little time spent reading in non T-related settings:

The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell

This was a Christmas present from my parents; the author is an animal behaviorist who addresses human misconceptions about canines from a perspective that is part hard science, part personal experience. She contrasts canine and primate behavior: e.g., primates love hugging, while canines find it kind of weird; loud primates get high social status, while canines don't really respect loudness; etc. I was pleased to take some of this information to my dog job, where I practiced not looking dogs in the eye in order to appear non-threatening. (Successful.)

The Mind's I, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

This was a Christmas present from my favorite philosopher of science; it's a collection of stories, essays, etc. that are primarily thought experiments on the nature of "selfdom" or "mind" (including, e.g., the paper in which Turing proposes the Turing test, some science fiction about robots and putting minds in new bodies, Searle's famous "Chinese Room" counter to Turing's arguments), each followed by "reflections" by the editors. I read my first Richard Dawking in this book, and found his analysis of living organisms as "survival machines" for genes compellingly reductionist (I always have a weakness for reductionist arguments). The editors advocate a more-or-less materialist view of the mind, including some fairly convincing arguments against mind-brain dualism; essentially, their position (counter to the position of some of the essayists) is that consciousness comes from a system behaving in the way that a brain behaves. And also, I suppose, minds are tricky, tricky things that no one really understands, but they're probably just made of neurons and not some amaterial "soul".