Boston, MA

In the subtle (but oh so significant) ways relationships change you, I feel the same applies to where you live. You won't notice it right away, true to relationships, you'll notice it after three or four years in the middle of the night on the toilet -- the seat of all life altering realizations. (Take a moment, press rewind. It's totally the truth.)

But in order to determine how a place influences someone, we can't use you in Pawtucket and me in Timbuktu in this equation. We need to begin with a common denominator and use substitution. So let's take your stereotypical sexist boar for the equation: Pr*t + P. Where Pr stands for person, t for time and P for place.

Does  * 4 years + Boston  =  * 4 years + New York City? 

In my opinion, no. Stuck at a watering hole with both swines, I can actually imagine myself having a pleasant conversation about tea and red coats with the one from Boston.

One of these things is not like the other...

See, the city wasn't designed with you in mind, it was designed to make you better acquainted with her. Those diagonal streets and intersections will have you learning her history in indirect ways. You will walk through multiple tour groups, and you will walk around in circles until you read the bronze historical plaque on a brick wall, and you will follow the yellow brick road to freedom. All experiences, dare I say, inalienable to Boston.

This is how our sexist boar from Boston fares slightly better than his brethren in New York City. The city pens in his feral ways, domesticating him into an enlightened citizen. Now that I think about it, perhaps we'll all be better Americans if we lived here at some point in our lives. America's most recent revolutions, universal health care and same-sex marriage, all began in Boston's storied alleys.

Length of Stay

Day trips and weekend visits interspersed in this nomad's life.

Docking Index

     

Six anchors because every time I visit Boston, I'm suddenly hyper-aware of my otherness. No, I don't like baseball. No, I'm (clearly) not Irish. No, thank you, I prefer white wine if your beer is that light. Then again, like our four-legged friend above, maybe my otherness would fade after domestication.