so yeah, we’re back. it was overall a pretty decent weekend, actually. friday night my dad picked gundam and myself up at south station in boston and we drove to my parents’ house. every time i go back to essex it all seems smaller than i remember, which is i suppose a function of living in brooklyn.

gundam met my parents and their dog (who is insane) and we all sat around having lemonade on the porch for a while, then read until we went to sleep. gundam’s only the second boy i’ve introduced to my parents, the first being adam, way back in the day. i think it all went pretty well.

saturday we slept in late, had toast and coffee, visited my grandparents and then headed over to gloucester to take a walk on the breakwater, which was really nice. that’s one of my favorite spots on the north shore and i hadn’t been in over two years.

on the way back we rented some movies and spent the evening watching them - slc punk which cracked me up because i couldn’t stop thinking of that actor’s character in hackers, and snatch. we also rented run lola run but ended up not watching it. not a big deal. i have a copy of it here and i’ve already seen it way too many times.

sunday morning we got up relatively early and packed up our stuff, then took the commuter rail into boston/cambridge so i could show gundam a little of the city. we spent a few hours bumming around harvard square, which i found sort of depressing. i spent so much time there when i was a scruffy high school kid, hanging out with the punks in the pit and whatnot, but now it’s turning into something else entirely - this really cool old german restaurant is now an abercrombie and fitch, a diner and a couple of other places have given way to a pacific sunwear, etc. there are police-sanctioned street performers playing classic rock in the pit now, so the punks don’t really want to hang out there which is, i suppose, the point. oh well. we still hit a couple of cool old places i used to go to and then headed back to south station and caught our train.

i’m listening to the downward spiral right now. i haven’t listened to it all the way through in years, and it’s a really weird experience. this was such a formative album for me in high school that i can’t listen to it without remembering that time. the first time i dyed my hair, the first nin shirt i bought, being the only kid in my honors classes who didn’t shop at j crew. i didn’t even have it on cd until i was maybe a senior - becky taped me a copy of hers that i lstened to in my car until it wore out. i remember listening to this on my walkman in the cafeteria during study nicki rodoloski, the only real goth i knew for a couple of years. that was only maybe four or five years ago but it seems impossibly far away. i don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

i know it’s not supposed to be cool to listen to nin anymore, since it’s too mainstream or whatever, but fuck it. i still like nin. pretty hate machine and the downward spiral were the soundtrack to some of the most turbulent, interesting, weird years of my life, and it was through nin that i started listening to the other stuff i listen to now. it’s good shit, regardless of how many other people listen to it.

anyway. i don’t know if i mentioned this before, so i will now: i’m going back to nyu in january. i’m actually starting to look forward to it, and i really wouldn’t mind finishing my degree. so yeah. hooray.