"Crickets mean it ain't a city,"
I remind Aaron. We are lying in the grass of the green continuing a standing debate. Having just ran the annual New Haven labor day road race, he thinks he has new insight from his flight across 12.5 miles of this town. But I can hear crickets from my 4th floor apartment at night.
The apartment is prettyfuckingsweet, as Dave Leiberman would say, all one word justlikethat, like e.e. cummings shooting Buffalo Bill's clay pigeons. It's on Park street, right across from Pierson's green shuttered bricks between colonial windows. From living room, you look out across the college's roofs, the slate atop the cabaret. Towards the theater swathed in Yale's favorite new garment, construction, and the obligatorily ugly corrogated-cardboard Architecture building. Towards the sunlit stone of the college art gallery. Past Dwight Hall, the penis pinnacles of Phelps gate, and Old Campus. In the near distance the Taft apartments, downtown New Haven. "Downtown" uttered with irony, of course. Looming in the middle distance of the canvas of our view is my favorite, Harkness Tower, eery ghostbuster green as always at night. Comfortingly saying I'm home, at Yale.
The apartment itself is devastatingly huge for two people. Everyone who comes in says so, and I am kinda amazed. I walk around dazed after my Stiles single, no common room days. I go from kitchen, to long living and dining room, down the infinite hallway. Katie's room, bathroom, my room, drawing room. The first night back a week ago I half freaked out when I realized how much it was to clean and that it was all ours. It didn't help that Katie and Erin returned home from BAR, wildly giddy after a night out to a place I'm underage for, with spirits I was unprepared for after a weekend of all our own world in Maine. But Erin moved into her dorm room last Wednesday. And so far living with Katie is prettyfuckingperfect.
For the moment I'm relieved to be under 21. It's a repreive. An excuse for why I can't go out with my friends that doesn't hurt their feelings. Last year they didn't go to so many bars, clubs, but junior year, everyone wasn't old enough except me. For now I'm enjoying evenings starting at senior events with everyone, sticking around hours till some move on to somewheres they card, then heading home to the apartment, or hanging out at the Hall house with a different kind of crowd. During day I've been trying to throw together a woeful Fulbright application. Reading new neuroscience articles, I've never felt so dim witted, but the project's shaping up with help from a British scientist at the Salpêtrière in Paris who I'm hoping on every superstition I don't believe in to work for, but don't have more than a few paragraphs for. A proposal has to happen by September 11th. When the grant's due.
I've also been exploring. Something about living off campus makes Yale expand. Charles or Boyle, Avogadro, one of those Ideal Gas Law scientists must have come up with a law about it. To describe this phenomena of freedom. How there's more life living outide of dorms. We entertain at the apartment. The boys bring friends and food. And there are more streets, more shops. I'm getting to see the college campus in context. Not bad by juxtaposition with this non-city, not bad at all.
Around ten o'clock I wander down to the green, through sweaty 5K finishers and kid inflatable carnival castle jumpers and long beer-line millers. A middle-aged garage band plays "Ophelia." Today the top half of the green is drowning in an unlikely mix of odors. Free Atticus bread for the hungry runners, cheap beer, sweat, popcorn and the overly sanitized smell of porta-potties. It's a festival. Complete with families, strollers, tents and amusements. Down by the finish line the air is clearer although people are crowded along the sides of Temple Street to see the single-file spaced out runners come in. At the end of 20K I am surprised at the sprinting. Aaron, 228th, looks exhausted. His rubber band legs collapse in the Lower Green grass. I hand him water. He stretches. We talk about the town.
The apartment is prettyfuckingsweet, as Dave Leiberman would say, all one word justlikethat, like e.e. cummings shooting Buffalo Bill's clay pigeons. It's on Park street, right across from Pierson's green shuttered bricks between colonial windows. From living room, you look out across the college's roofs, the slate atop the cabaret. Towards the theater swathed in Yale's favorite new garment, construction, and the obligatorily ugly corrogated-cardboard Architecture building. Towards the sunlit stone of the college art gallery. Past Dwight Hall, the penis pinnacles of Phelps gate, and Old Campus. In the near distance the Taft apartments, downtown New Haven. "Downtown" uttered with irony, of course. Looming in the middle distance of the canvas of our view is my favorite, Harkness Tower, eery ghostbuster green as always at night. Comfortingly saying I'm home, at Yale.
The apartment itself is devastatingly huge for two people. Everyone who comes in says so, and I am kinda amazed. I walk around dazed after my Stiles single, no common room days. I go from kitchen, to long living and dining room, down the infinite hallway. Katie's room, bathroom, my room, drawing room. The first night back a week ago I half freaked out when I realized how much it was to clean and that it was all ours. It didn't help that Katie and Erin returned home from BAR, wildly giddy after a night out to a place I'm underage for, with spirits I was unprepared for after a weekend of all our own world in Maine. But Erin moved into her dorm room last Wednesday. And so far living with Katie is prettyfuckingperfect.
For the moment I'm relieved to be under 21. It's a repreive. An excuse for why I can't go out with my friends that doesn't hurt their feelings. Last year they didn't go to so many bars, clubs, but junior year, everyone wasn't old enough except me. For now I'm enjoying evenings starting at senior events with everyone, sticking around hours till some move on to somewheres they card, then heading home to the apartment, or hanging out at the Hall house with a different kind of crowd. During day I've been trying to throw together a woeful Fulbright application. Reading new neuroscience articles, I've never felt so dim witted, but the project's shaping up with help from a British scientist at the Salpêtrière in Paris who I'm hoping on every superstition I don't believe in to work for, but don't have more than a few paragraphs for. A proposal has to happen by September 11th. When the grant's due.
I've also been exploring. Something about living off campus makes Yale expand. Charles or Boyle, Avogadro, one of those Ideal Gas Law scientists must have come up with a law about it. To describe this phenomena of freedom. How there's more life living outide of dorms. We entertain at the apartment. The boys bring friends and food. And there are more streets, more shops. I'm getting to see the college campus in context. Not bad by juxtaposition with this non-city, not bad at all.
Around ten o'clock I wander down to the green, through sweaty 5K finishers and kid inflatable carnival castle jumpers and long beer-line millers. A middle-aged garage band plays "Ophelia." Today the top half of the green is drowning in an unlikely mix of odors. Free Atticus bread for the hungry runners, cheap beer, sweat, popcorn and the overly sanitized smell of porta-potties. It's a festival. Complete with families, strollers, tents and amusements. Down by the finish line the air is clearer although people are crowded along the sides of Temple Street to see the single-file spaced out runners come in. At the end of 20K I am surprised at the sprinting. Aaron, 228th, looks exhausted. His rubber band legs collapse in the Lower Green grass. I hand him water. He stretches. We talk about the town.
