Paul had noticed already that in Los Angeles automobiles were a race apart, almost alive. The city was full of their hotels and beauty shops, their restaurants and nursing homes - immense, expensive structures where they could be parked or polished, fed or cured of their injuries. They spoke, and had pets - stuffed dogs and monkeys looked out of their dashboards, and fur tails waved from their aerials. Their horns sang in varied voices...few people were visible. The automobiles outnumbered them ten to one. Paul imagined a tale in which it would gradually revealed that these automobiles were the real inhabitants of the city, a secret master race which only kept human beings for its own greater convenience, or as pets.
-Alison Lurie, The Nowhere City

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Reminder

Boston, Massachusetts
Originally uploaded by Zakcq.

Today is the last day you can register to vote in Mass for the elections in November.

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So, wow, two and a half weeks without a post. I guess I've been busy.

At school, I usually try to take a couple of more challenging classes and an easier one to balance it out. This semester my easy one was supposed to be Social Problems, which was kind of a mid-level soc class. Unfortunately, the professor for Social Problems had the joint problems of not seeming to have a great grasp on the material (showing the movie Remember the Titans is NOT teaching about race in America) and thinking that he's a stand-up comic, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Anyway, I decided to switch into another class, which means I've got three fairly tough graduate classes right now. Two of the classes, Real Estate Development and Municipal Finance and Budget, are really just on the edge of my interest in cities, so they can be pretty tough. The other, Urban Design, is the most challenging class I've had. Period. I really enjoy it, and it's the way that I've tried to look at my surroundings for a long time, but actually trying to get it out on paper is frustrating. Our assignments are stuff like manifestos and interventions instead of papers and projects. Awesome.

I've also been working a lot, but this week they're sending me to some corporate meeting weekend thing in Pittsfield, Mass (it was originally known as Awesomeville, but there was a truth in advertising suit). I'm not looking forward to it. Bright side is that I was able to take three days off this week, which I'm spending getting ahead in homework, cleaning the house and doing some shopping.

J is off at Jury Duty right now. It's pretty amazing that she's made it two years in Massachusetts without getting called already. I got called about a week after I got my drivers license.

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