A Baker's Dozen of Bullet Points

Since it has been almost two weeks since I last wrote anything worthwhile here and since a lot of things happened in the past two weeks, I figure the least I can do is give you some bullet points. So here are a bunch of things I should have written about days ago, in whatever order I happen to think of them:

1. I got to visit two states I had never been to before during all of the road tripping Penn, Kiki and I did during the past two weeks. It's so easy to visit states in New England, you can just take a half-hour detour and, ta-da, you've crossed another state and can mark it off the list. Now I'm up to 31 states plus D.C. The problem now is that the 19 states that are left are primarily states that I have no burning desire to visit. Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota...I can't really think of a compelling reason to go to any of those places. I mean, maybe you're from one of those states and they're awesome and I don't know what I'm missing and I'll get there eventually and be pleasantly surprised, but somehow I think it's going to be hard to come up with a reason to visit Mississippi any time soon.
2. I really liked Boston a lot, but here is my tip for anyone planning to go there: don't ever, ever, EVER drive in Boston. Seriously, don't do it. We used public transportation when we could, but there were a few situations over the weekend where we thought it would be easier to take our own car. And...NO. It wasn't easier at all. When I go back in November I'm taking the T or cabs everywhere. I don't care if it's a $50 cab ride, it will be worth it. I don't know how we got out alive and with an undamaged car. The city of Boston doesn't believe in labeling streets or highways clearly. They also don't believe in traffic control devices. Apparently in Boston you're just supposed to go hurtling out into traffic and hope that nobody hits you. I'm only slightly exaggerating, people. Driving in midtown Manhattan seemed easy in comparison, that's how bad it was. So do yourself a favor and just don't ever drive a car to Boston.
3. The two wedding ceremonies I went to last weekend were vastly different. One was a ten-minute affair on a cruise ship, the other was a forty-minute Lutheran church service. I surprised myself when I realized that I really preferred the church service. I never thought I was the sort of person that needed a church wedding, but the church wedding just seemed so much more real. There was more dignity and gravity to it, and I guess I just feel like if you're going to commit to spending the entire rest of your life with someone that commitment ceremony should probably take longer than six minutes.
4. Weirdly enough, the bridesmaids wore bright green at both weddings. I guess green was the trend that bridal shops were pushing this summer?
   
5. The North End in Boston made me feel like I was in The Godfather. And there were actual Italians there, which was cool because so many Little Italy neighborhoods are pure tourist traps. This one felt at least somewhat legit, though. I just wish it hadn't been pouring rain the night we went so that I could have leisurely browsed around a bit more instead of racing from one doorway to another. Kiki, Penn and I had dinner at a restaurant there and the waiter, Marcelo, was obsessed with Kiki. He was about 65 years old but he kept finding excuses to come over and talk to her, and I'm pretty sure he even gave her his number at the end of the meal in case she ever needed "reservations"!
6. Penn drove about a thousand miles during all of our travels. He was also incredibly patient every time we got lost. We got hopelessly lost in Boston one night for about an hour and he didn't even snap at me, and vice versa. I think if we can manage not to bicker over maps and directions when we're both stressed, that's one sign that we're pretty solid. I thought that after spending ten straight days with him that I'd be sort of ready to have some time to myself, but no. If anything, being with him for that long just made my addiction to him even worse. That's what it feels like, honestly. The more time I get to be with him, the more I want to be with him. That's great, of course, and I wouldn't want it any other way. But it's also a tiny bit frustrating because there's no feasible way we can live in the same place any time soon. That's good though, right? It's probably good to have jobs and leases to prevent us from getting too hasty and moving this relationship forward too quickly. Just because it already feels like we've been together for a very long time doesn't mean we actually have been, and I think it's good that I have some things in my life that are forcing me to pace myself and give myself time to keep getting to know him gradually instead of being like, "Woohoo, move into my apartment tomorrow! Who cares if it has only been five months!" Slow and steady, right?
   
7. My brother came to visit this weekend, and we had a great time. I took him to see some of the famous sites in City A and we went to a fun interactive museum there and to a baseball game in City B. We also went out with all of my school friends on Saturday night and he really liked everyone, which surprised me since I thought we'd be too old and nerdy for him. The baseball game was his favorite part, of course, but he liked everything else, too, despite the fact that he told me, "Don't take pictures of me looking like I'm interested in this stuff! I have a reputation to uphold!"
8. My brother talks about nothing but sports. Really. I'd say maybe, maybe ten percent of our conversations were about something other than baseball or the Olympics. How he and I came out of the same womb is beyond me. Luckily we get along anyway.
9. Do you think the new movie with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro will be awesome or horrible? I really want it to be awesome, but I have my doubts. The name sort of makes me cringe. Righteous Kill? Really? Hmmmmm...
   
10. I'm not sure how I feel about my new assistantship. They ended up hiring a receptionist (which was supposed to be ten hours of my job) so now I have become personal assistant to one of the secretaries. I started working a little bit last week, and as far as I can tell my job is pretty much going to entail doing all of the grunt work that she doesn't feel like doing herself. Today, for example, I spent two hours rolling up posters about the department and putting them in tubes to be mailed. Next up I'm supposed to organize some filing cabinets. It's hard not to do that stuff without feeling like it's sort of a waste of my abilities, but, then again, it might be kind of nice not to have to think too much for that particular assistantship. The good thing about the change is that I can now do all twenty hours of my assistantship work on my own time and I don't have to come in to man the office at any particular time. The bad thing is that I think between working for the secretary and working for Dr. AMP I'm definitely going to have to do my full twenty hours a week this year, which I very rarely had to do when I was TAing last year.
11. The other thing I'm not sure about is my new office space. This year all of the grad students with assistantships are sharing a giant office. They converted a couple of classrooms into our "office suite". It's basically fifteen desks in a room, a kitchen (which is actually pretty nice), and a conference room (that is pretty much just a closet with a table and four chairs in it; Bob and I have already started calling it the Interrogation Room). Some of the grad students in the other section of our department have started referring to our suite as the Daily Planet, which I think is great. It really does look like an old-fashioned open plan news room. In some ways I think it's actually going to be fun having our own space (we're downstairs from the faculty so we don't have to scurry from office to office and close doors to gossip anymore) and it will be much easier for us to communicate if we're all sharing one big room, but I have no idea how any work is ever going to get done down there. Luckily I never really used my office space to work in the first place.
12. I had to go to court today to try to get a traffic ticket dismissed. There's nothing like being at traffic court to make you realize how many morons there are in the world. First of all, there were supposed to be about 100 people there during my hour but only about 50 people actually showed up. Of the people that did show up, several of them took naps in the court room and I'm fairly certain that at least two of them were drunk. There were way too many grown men wearing sports jerseys. And then there was my favorite guy: the judge called him to the bench and said, "You're charged with failure to carry registration. The police officer is not present. How do you plead?" and the guy said, "Guilty." The whole courtroom full of people burst into laughter. Why the hell would you plead guilty if the cop wasn't there? The judge was like, "Sir, are you SURE you want to plead guilty?" Idiot. Of course my state trooper ended up being there, but I was at least able to get the fine reduced by half and to get the ticket expunged from my record, so it could have been worse.
13. I thought I had a lot more to say, but it turns out it's pretty impossible to sum up everything that happened in the past two weeks. At any rate, August was a good month and I'm still not in the mood to go back to school next week.