Sanity Hearing

The Beach

I find it very interesting how your view of a place can completely change, yet stay the same. 

For pretty much my entire life I have come to Rhode Island for at least a few weeks plus numerous weekends through out the summer.  Thoughts of summer time and the beach still, and probably always will, contain images, scenes, scents, impressions, and experiences associated with Rhode Island- specifically the area near Newport where my Grandfather's tiny beach house was and where my mother is now building/completing a more modern house to accomadate our family which is now more fully grown.  I spent some of the day with my mom, over at the new house, next door to the house that was my Grandfather's on the beach.  My mom was picking out tile and paint for the new place and I am sure she was imagining with excitement what the place will look like when construction is completed in the not too distant future. 

I was struck with a few different thoughts at our little stretch of beach, for one thing how much things had changed.  The houses on our own little part of the beach were bigger and more modern than before and certainly more expensive looking.  Down the beach where I had wasted away many summer hours walking with my brothers and my dad, looking for rocks and shells, or maybe just sitting and watching sailboats go by, was now being developed into million dollar homes.  Some of that area had once had the rusting metal hulk of the bankrupt Pearson Yacht factory behind it, but there was something quaint and untouched, which I can sense being traded in for a more asthetically pleasing gloss of luxury, but a somehow hollow sense of commercialism and absentee owners who will never appreciate the beach the way (the more admittedly poorer) families full of kids who grew up coming to this beach will.

In some ways the situation at the beach models the way I am feeling about my own life.  Feeling I am at a bit of an impasse, a time to make decisions about what my next move is going to be after school.  Much like the changes on the beach, no single decision is purely good or bad- they all have advantages and drawbacks, opportunities and sacrifices, risks and sure things. 

Looking at the beach I see exposed stone wall in front of my Grandfather's house that my brothers and I built with my dad, he paid us 50 cents for a bucket of small stones or a $1 for a large rock which we carried up from the beach at low tide, making our own makeshift sea wall.  Next door at my mom's new house there is a professionally built seawall, made of massive boulders and arranged in such a fashion as to withstand a hurricane.  On the one hand the new wall has none of the memories that the old one does, but it ensures that the house next door will be protected to make new memories. 

The decisions about school and about life are similar.  Do I use the past as a guide?  What risks do I take to ensure that the future will provide the best quality of life and career down the road?  What do you give up in order to set up something new?  What is important to me? 

I don't have all the answers yet, and for me- maybe more than other people- they are tough decisions to make. 

Stop and Shop v. Whole Foods

I did not do very much this weekend.  On Saturday I spent almost the entire day at the library after class, attempting to read and then finally watching a 3 hour taped lecture as a review on hearsay.  Exciting stuff.

On Sunday I decided I would do nothing school related, sleeping until 1 o'clock and then sitting around watching football.  Finally I was forced to leave the house when I first realised I could not make and coffee because the milk in the fridge had expired back in october and then after that when I went to use the bathroom and saw that we had exhausted our supply of toilet tissue. 

There is a fancy Whole Foods Supermarket down the street from our house, but I was not sure they even carried toilet paper there, unless it was some sort of organic treebark toilet paper, so I asked  Matt where the closest Stop and Shop was- I realize I should know this- but whenever Matt had previously attempted to explain this to me he would begin, "Well, you go right and then there's a stop light..."  whoa, whoa-  what is this an expedition?  Yeah, I am lazy sometimes.

But I figured it was Sunday and I had nothing better to do so I took the (actually incredibly short) drive to Stop and Shop.  What I saw at Stop and Shop was actually pretty intriguing.  Whole Foods has a pretty interesting group of people, but I must admit that the cross section of shoppers there is not representative of society- it is an odd potpurri of hippies, yuppies, health nuts, Brown students, and assorted random people like me.  Stop and Shop on a Sunday in Providence, on the other hand, was a really interesting cross section of people.  There was me, wearing my green "Harford" sweatshirt (represent!), there were cute girls from Providence College buying tea and wearing sweats, there was a whole family of people speaking spanish buying stuff in the isle where they stock the goya products, there were moms buying shopping carts full of food that was an obvious attempt to get the jump on the thanksgiving crowd, there were single people shopping by themselves and buying single serving food, as well as couples shopping together, and moms with their kids telling them to put the candy back on the shelves.

Going to Stop and Shop was more than just a shopping trip in many ways.  In our consumer economy it is often very rare that you can imagine the times in which there was a central marketplace that was more than just a place to purchase things, but also was a center for the community.  Unlike Europe, most American communities came to exist or came of size in a time of the strip mall- and if not strip malls have forced out their town center predecessors.  Some how this Weekend I felt like in some small fashion I was able to feel some resemblance of that sense of community shopping in Stop and Shop- all that just cause I ran out of T.P. and Milk...

The Legend Lives On

Some of you not familiar with the city of Providence or the state of Rhode Island might not know who Buddy Cianci is, but if you live here, it's hard to escape knowing who he is.  Despite the fact that Buddy has twice been convicted and is presently in federal prison- his legend lives on in Providence.  Around the corner from my house the shops on Thayer Street still sell "Free Buddy" t-shirts with a cartoon logo of Buddy's face on them.  It's mostly a joke, but there is an underlying element of seriousness to them.

Last night at the Wild Colonial Matt and I noticed a single framed photograph of the owner, a small boy, and a familiar if not infamous looking stout little figure in a grey suit.  Matt asked the owner, "Excuse me, what is that picture of?"

"That's me, my nephew, and Buddy Cianci at the ribbon cutting ceremony for this bar." the owner replied with an odd sense of pride in his declaration.  People in Providence like a mayor who gets things accomplished even if you break a few eggs (or kneecaps for that matter) while making an omlet- capiche?

Internet Pizza

Initially the idea of pizza that I could order off the internet had me extremely excited. It seemed like the ultimate marriage of technology and convienience. Imagine: I could sit at my office and quietly choose my the delicious toppings for my gourmet lunch, *click* place the order, and the piping hot pizza would arrive at my apartment just as I got comfortable on my lunch break.

However, in the end internet pizza left me disappointed and disillusioned. Although I placed the order at 11:50, the pizza didn't get there until 12:50, ten minutes before the end of my break. In addition, the pizza was far smaller than I had expected and on top of that either they had made a mistake with my order or I had failed to understand the somewhat complicated online ordering system that aparently you need a masters in computer science to figure out.

Lesson learned: much like the tech boom of the nineties, my hopes for the internet far overshadowed reality. Next time I'll use a 20th century invention that seems to work a lot more seamlessly: the telephone.

New links

Just an FYI- I've added a link to Michael's page. Michael works in my office and seems to have an insane amount of knowledge about the music scene around Providence and Boston. Check it out.