Month: December 2003

Open Letters, Cont’d.

Dear MBTA:
I feel that I am not alone in saying I’d gladly pay double the fare on the T if I thought it would be well-used. That’s why your capital investment program proposal and the comments period are so important: they really makes clear what the MBTA is doing with the money, and that gives me peace of mind and makes me feel that my tax dollars and fares really are at work on something good. To expand on your customer outreach, it might help to put up posters explaining where your money comes from (so much from fares, so much from state grants, so much from the feds, etc.) and what percentage gets spent on things– information that is in the capital investment overview but which is not going to be seen by many riders.

My comments on the capital investment program are as follows:

First, I love that you are planning on the ticketing and fare changes. I especially like the idea that they may some day permit fare adjustments based on traffic (charge more for peak hours, less for off-peak, for example), and if they help us gain better data on passenger usage patterns. Another way to get better system data would be to install GPS systems in busses, like those installed in snowplows, so that we know when and where a bus line is late. For example, the 47 bus is too often late, perhaps because it is such a long route and delays anywhere in the system add up. Maybe it would help to divide it into two bus routes or to adjust its path somehow– you could tell what to do if you had better data from GPS systems.

I would like to point out that the stairways at Park Street station are too small and that it’s slow to get from the Red Line to the Green Line during peak hours when transferring. I guess you already know that, and from looking at it, it wouldn’t be easy or cheap to fix.

In an ideal world, I’d like to see the Green Line replaced with real trains. When you examine the Somerville extension, please consider running it underground rather than aboveground, because you can see on the B, C, and D lines that aboveground lines, especially with so many at-grade crossings, are a disaster.

Also, can I just whine about how Arlington was stupid to reject the Red Line extension, and suggest that the issue should be revisited? I mean, really. I look at Washington DC and what it has accomplished with its Metro system, and it just makes me so jealous– they have interstate cooperation on this thing, and we can’t even get Arlington to agree to something that benefits them and everyone around them? Come ON! We need greater coverage, because Boston is a huge metro area, and if they don’t want a stop, well, put in a Lexington stop and pass Arlington by! And how about Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Chelsea?

Yours,
Aaron Weber
Slummahville

Stats

Top User Agents: Googlebot, Slurp, NetNewsWire, Galeon.
Top Searches: Poo Bear, Cosmetic Pharmacology, Quirkyalone, Peach Friedman.

OK, I think the whole “Quirkyalone” thing is awful and stupid and lame, I feel ambivalent about cosmetic pharmacology (and I talk mostly about cosmetic psychopharmacology, anyway), and the Poo Bear thing was a throwaway one-liner. Are you looking for Winnie the Pooh or something?

Peach Friedman, of course is marvelous, as is Nat.

Look Out

Look out, Mom and Dad, I could still move back home any day now. It’s hard enough thinking you’re done full-time parenting after eighteen years, and done with financial support after another five or ten, but thirty-some-odd years of living with the kids at home? Damn, in my day, if they were alive after five years we counted it a success.

Oh wait, that wasn’t my day, that was an episode of The Cosby Show.

Not Even Inventions

Chindogu, or useless inventions, are only the beginning. Now there are Unnovations as well.

Might I also direct you to The Economist’s recent article on body hair, which begins:

AT THE back of a hairdresser’s shop, just off Piccadilly in London, an Irish beautician called Genevieve is explaining what a “Brazilian” is as she practises her art on your correspondent. A Brazilian strip, some are surprised to learn, is nothing to do with Latin American football. Between each excruciating rip, she explains that she is going to remove nearly all my pubic hair, except for a narrow vertical strip of hairs the width of a couple of fingers. This is known colloquially as the “landing strip”.

In only a few years, this form of waxing has gone from the esoteric to the everyday and is starting to rival the ordinary bikini wax in popularity. At the same time the bikini wax is becoming a normal procedure for women of all ages: the youngest person Genevieve has waxed is a 12-year-old girl. Women are styling their pubic hair into hearts, stars and arrows. It is one of the more notable developments in hairdressing since the permanent wave.

Your correspondent also notes that “The average American man spends about 33 days of his life removing facial hair.” I am SO getting permanent facial hair removal.

Like McSweeney’s, but Not Funny

I have been writing a letter in the tradition of open letters to people who are unlikely to respond, except not funny. I know that the McSweeney’s letters are the deadpan sort of humor that is often not funny, and that the letter I have written may be construed as funny, and may in fact be unintentionally hilarious, but my sincerity is almost real here, which is about as close as I get these days. The letter goes:

I know you blame yourself for Ettore’s death, but I do not blame you. I know you blame yourself because I blame myself. I was surprised by my feelings of guilt, even though I could have expected as much: after all, it’s in the insurance company’s pamphlet about dealing with the death of a loved one.

I haven’t heard from you, and I hope that’s not because you’re afraid I’ll blame you. I also hope it’s not because you never liked me all that much. I like to imagine that you are busy doing late-December tasks, that have thrown yourself into work and art as a way to cope, that you are finding your own ways to mourn.

I want to get beyond this writing of saccharine letters about forgiveness and growth. I want to stop waking up in the night thinking “goddamnit, he can’t be dead, I just spoke with him,” or “Monday I have to ask him about the product schedule,” or “I should lend him this album, he’ll totally love this. I want to stop wondering if I could have done something. If I had known, I would have acted, but I did not know. If you had known, you would have acted, but you did not know.

Fear, suspicion, and guilt cling to us, but they cannot help him and they cannot help us.

Also, I feel a need to confess that at the wake, when people asked me how I was, I kept wanting to point at the body and say “I’m doin’ better than he is!” The statement, while true, was nonetheless very, very inappropriate, and I feel bad for even thinking it.