mrs-roboto's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Look On The Bright Side I just couldn't bear to leave that last entry up here. It really reflects the worst of my personality and who needs to read that right before the holidays? Instead, I am going to remind myself of just how lucky I am by recalling a fine tale of a Thanksgiving of yesteryear. About a million years ago, in the year 1990 and 2, I moved to Boston with a dollar and a dream. Well, I at least had the dream part. You see, I was rooming with a gal at a small university in Upstate NY and one day we devised a plan to escape the rural doldrums Tiny College Town, USA. I still can't remember why we choose Boston (perhaps I was heavily intoxicated), but so it was that I packed up all my stuff and moved north. On my first day in Beantown, I decided to take a trip from my apartment (located in Allston) to the famous Harvard Square. I understood there to be a train station about a block from my flat so I headed out ambitiously to do some sightseeing. Growing up in NYC, I was raised on mass transit. I have been riding the subway since before I could walk and so the idea of taking the "t" in Boston was by no means intimidating. I spotted the station, a small above-ground shelter where a handful of people stood reading papers or staring off into space. I went and stood amongst them. Within minutes, a tiny, two car, trolley approached and all the people around me boarded it. I watched the vehicle depart and continued to wait for the train. Another trolley went by and then another and soon I'd been waiting for an hour. I asked a salesclerk at the outdoor newsstand when the train to downtown would arrive. I explained I'd been waiting forever "Honey," she said, "They've been coming and going every fifteen minutes and you just stand there and watch like a fool." And so it was that I learned two valuable lessons in a single day. Lesson one, people are just as rude in Boston as they are in New York and lesson two, people in Boston are delusional if they think a trolley is a train. I bumbled about quite a bit that first year. I was just eighteen and still trying to figure out how to get by in the world. It didn't take long for me to realize that life in the big city was a bit pricey. Actually, that's an understatement. It was downright expensive. My rent and bills came to approximately $600.00 and my take home pay from my glamorous job at the wannabe Au Bon Pain shop in Harvard Square was roughly $750.00 per month. Since I needed about $100.00 for entertainment (read: alcohol) this only left me with $50.00 for food per month. I ate a lot of pasta and many boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix (just $1.00 for 4 boxes). For an extra special treat, I'd steal sugar packets from McDonalds, add them to the cornbread batter, and make a specialty I liked to call corn cake! Rice was a popular entree too. Somewhere along the line, I'd acquired a shaker of chili powder and by combining it with rice, I concocted a famous dish I aptly named Chilean rice. Exotic , eh? For the entire first year I lived on my own, I did not buy a single name brand item. I folded toilet paper in squares and called it a napkin. I slept in a sleeping bag on a cold wood floor. My roommate had her sleeping bag on the opposite side of the room. In the morning, we'd just zip them up and smooth them out and pretend they were actual beds. I wore my tights no matter how holey they got and called it punk rawk. I did all my laundry by hand in the bathtub just to save the coinage it would cost to use a machine. It was a pretty sad situation. When Thanksgiving rolled around, we were broke as usual but decided to spend a few bucks anyway. Hell, everyone deserves a treat once in awhile. We purchased a half pound of generic, pressed turkey cold cut. You know the kind that's sort of gray and is probably made up of minced turkey breast and turkey ass? We also bought two potatoes for $.35. We heated those food products in a microwave I'd found in the garbage a few weeks earlier. Have you ever nuked sub par cold cuts? They basically shrink into crispy rinds of meat. Sounds tasty, doesn't it? Oh and for dessert - you guessed it, delectable corn cake! We sat and silently ate our holiday meal in front of our 12" black and white television (also acquired via a dumpster dive) and watched the Underdog float make it's way down 5th Avenue. And when it was all over we headed to Store 24 where we read fashion magazines until Akbar told us to "Buy something or get out!" This Thanksgiving, I will be dining at the top of the Space Needle with my fantastic husband and his family. Hopefully, there will be clear skies and a perfect view of the Cascades. Even if that's not the case, I'm sure the food will be an improvement over the feast of 1992 and I can drink vast amounts of Merlot while the restaurant rotates. If that doesn't sound like a recipe for holiday cheer, I'm not sure what is! 8:49 p.m. - 2002-11-25 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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