Boston?

I have been thinking about Boston recently, wondering if that's the place I should end up living, but I haven't really been sure why until I got an email from Ellie saying just that: she'd been thinking about Boston and if that's a place I could end up living. Thank you, psychic twin link.

Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of built up biases against Boston, but I can't really tell which ones are real and which ones only have to do with being from New York. Like the sports thing: my years spent as a New York kid in a Boston-heavy boys camp has helped me be acutely aware of how unbelievably stupid the stupid obsessive Bostonite sports thing is; the nigh-religious blinding forfeit of self-awareness and rational decision-making, the wilful acquiescence to deep-structure predjudice and bigotry that comes with the donning of a BoSox cap. Yes, I probably feel more strongly on this for having been the ostracized--and me barely a follower of the sport of baseball aside from Field of Dreams and Ballpark Franks--but that doesn't make it any less truly ugly, and its viral proliferation inside the Boston beltway turns me off.

The plus side is of course that almost every positive thing that has happened in America since 2002 has happened in Massachusetts. It seems to be the state to be a liberal in.

But I don't really have much of a real feel for the city itself, Boston. All the people that I know from there are actually from the suburbs of there, and let's face it, it should be some YEARS before I end up even potentially wanting to live in the suburbs. Urbs I can see me doing, and demi-urbs and small towns and country locales, but suburbs feel like they shouldn't happen. Suburbs is like the end of life.

But Boston. What is Boston even like? I get the feeling that it's not all that great, that the things to do there are geared towards frat boys or yuppies, I kind of hate being surrounded by each of those kinds of lives. Most of the images I have in my head about Boston involve the meat head beer helmet sports bar crowd or the crew cut sweater vest snowboard on the weekends kind of crowd and not the underground reggae hula band hookah bar kind of crowd or the literary art making kind of crowd. Is there art and music? Is there nightlife? John lived in Boston for 4 years and he never spoke too highly of those aspects of the place. But there must be, there are like sixty five colleges and universities around there. What's the deal with Boston? Someone fill a brother in.