More mince pies than you can shake a stick at. If you liked them before Christmas, you sure as hell won’t want to see another one after, and if you didn’t like them before Christmas, well…I don’t envy you. A bout of “unseasonably cold” weather (you didn’t see this coming? after how many centuries? really?). Lots (and lots and lots) of subsequent talk about how cold it is. Very beautiful snowflakes. Weekend girls with bare legs, pretending that it isn’t unseasonably cold out. Lots of sniffles and coughs. Frost making art deco patterns on the cars at night. Stoic cyclists. Bare branches. A flurry over hot alcoholic drinks before Christmas (mulled cider, mulled wine…) followed by a general laziness about them after (who can be bothered?). Potatoes for dinner, every night. Root vegetable feasts and homemade soups. Log fires. Coal fires. The smell of log fires and coal fires on the streets. Scarves. Girls in very cool boots. Pubs, but not pub gardens. A brief glorification of the English summer (“oh, I can’t wait for June…”) followed by a berating of the English summer (“ugh, it’ll just rain the whole time anyway). A general sense of polite but vaguely uncomfortable waiting.

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I woke up this morning and thought, I’d really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there’s nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven’t gone for my run.

I’m doing research, and in order to continue this post I’m going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I’m writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I’ve been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It’s certainly not fiction, but it’s also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is “the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction,” while “narrative nonfiction…is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal.” Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I’m to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I’ve ever been able to pinpoint what I’m writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It’s The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee–you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I’m stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to “look at the value your book offers to the reader,” and that’s something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: “Why do you want to be president?” and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you’re going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question “why.”

Why? Because I’m too young to write a book; because there’s no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we’re finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We’re becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world–as individuals, as a generation, as the human race–is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are–physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually–the better we’re able to understand where we’re going. And because there’s always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It’s finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.

*Obama: “But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old.”

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On the T, late at night in a crowded car, I used to like to stand at the front, practically brushing up against the driver. It was the only way to lose my sense of claustrophobia, to quiet my distress as the crush of bodies closed around me and the smell of sweat (even in coldest winter), the stifled coughs, crept closer. It only worked on the green line, two linked trolleycars ambling through America’s oldest subway system, but from the front car you could see the tracks and feel your own speed, and that was something special.

When I first moved to Boston I rode the subway often, and for no reason at all. I liked how novel it was, how the shape of the city changed beneath ground. I liked being moved by something huger, faster, older than myself; I liked being moved with other people. My knowledge of the city was twinned with my knowledge of its transport. Falling asleep I would name the stops the way they appeared on the map, emanating outward from Park Street–Boylston Arlington Copley Hynes Convention Center, Kenmore.

Once a boy and I took the blue line all the way to the end, to Wonderland. It was Halloween night and I had a paper to write but we walked through the October fringes of the city ignoring the time, ignoring the darkness. I put my feet in the Atlantic ocean, but even so it was an ugly part of the city. The houses looked like they might crumble and fall under a harsh gaze and you could see the pristine skyline faraway, and it looked impossibly distant. There’s no way there’s a relationship between here and there, I thought, but of course there was, the painted blue trains, they were the relationship.

Another time the same boy and I were on the red line. We’d taken it very far and very late at night and suddenly our car was empty. Have you ever been on a completely empty subway car? It’s like the city dissolved. There was only trash on the floor and our jouvenile nervousness. I thought this was romantic, but now it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Already I was isolating us, cutting us off (cutting me off) from everything–the city, the people, and hopes and dreams and happiness.

I used to take the train to Harvard Square for the bookshops. My favourite was a ten minute walk from the station and it was such a cold and empty walk through Cambridge. Sometimes on the way back, if it was late and dark enough, I would steal through the Harvard campus. It seemed a dead campus. You got one or two people cutting through quads and a few lights glowing in stony buildings but compared to the bustle of the city or the intimacy of the train it was nothing, nothing.

When the Red Sox won the world series for the first time in 80 years we took the green line to Kenmore, to Fenway Park. There were people shouting on the train and our entire car broke out into a chorus of, “Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” even though it wasn’t the Yankees we’d beat that night.

Once, in my second-t0-last semester, I was on the train going to class when I saw a boy I fancied. I’d never seen him before and I would never see him after but I thought he was good looking and I must have stared all the way from Kenmore to Copley because at Arlington he looked me square in the eye and said his name. We reached across the aisle and shook hands. He told me he was a musician, a guitarist. He was playing a gig that night. I could come if I wanted. I smiled and said maybe I would and got off the train, but of course I didn’t, and I was horrified at myself for being so transparent.

It was always too hot in winter and too cold in summer, and in between, you could feel the relief.

That claustrophobia. Once a pair of men fighting jostled their way into my train at Government Center. They were yelling and shouting and the crowd inside tried to make room, and then one of them said, “I’ll fucking stab you you asshole” and pulled out a knife and no one screamed but you could hear the breath suddenly hang in everyone’s throats, and then someone took charge and dragged them both back onto the platform and the doors shut and people went back to reading the Metro.

The long waits. The later at night the longer, and then, like a beacon of hope, the squeal of rails, the headlights, the rush of wind. The rush of hot wind–I always liked that. It smelled of city. If you were in a great hurry to get somewhere of course you would have to wait. Maybe the T had a sense of humour, I don’t know; maybe it was just trying to say look at you, taking yourself so seriously, but does it really matter, is it really going to make you happier, getting to your job or the gym or the bar on time? And the funny thing is, it never really was.

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I had a rejection from The Guardian yesterday. Why advertise my failures? Because (perhaps misguidedly), I genuinely think this is an improvement. It’s the first time they’ve actually responded to one of my queries. So first they ignored me, then they rejected me–surely the fact that they’re paying me any attention at all is a good sign. Eventually, if things continue on this trajectory, they’ll have to accept something for publication.

Please don’t burst my bubble here. I’m being charmingly optimistic–let’s leave it at that.

I’m writing this at work (I know, shame on me), and just had one of those incredibly awkward interactions with a pair of students that make me think, wow, I should just quit my job right now. I was utterly, utterly unhelpful to them. At one point, I simply sat staring at them, my mouth hanging open, making confused little “um” noises.

It occurs to me that I get like this when someone asks me, say, where the Philosophy class is meeting today or where students can go if they want to play hockey, because I am in no way an authority on these things. More crucially, I don’t actually give a damn about them. This isn’t an especially grand statement–I’m not an authority on most things, frankly, and lots of people don’t give a damn about their job–but it is an important one. If they were to ask me to discuss last night’s speech, or ask for an obsessively anotated bibliography of Oxford literature, I’d be happy–thrilled, in fact–to oblige. But I ought, for today at least, to resign myself to the fact that they’re highly unlikely to ask me any of these things, and focus instead on class timetables and hockey pitches.

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I’m up much earlier than usual today. I’ve had my breakfast and now I’m sipping tea. I’d like to say I’m enjoying the view (it’s a beautiful blue-sky morning and I can even hear a few brave birds chirping) but there’s an enormous black and orange truck parked outside the lounge window, so, you know.

These days I’m…

Listening to…Ray LaMontagne.

Watching…30 Rock. Recently we’ve particularly enjoyed their rendering of Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and also James Carville’s guest appearance (I couldn’t find a YouTube clip of that), though as he’s aged he has started to look increasingly like a character from Lord of the Rings and it’s hard to believe that when I first saw The War Room I actually found him weirdly sexy. That was definitely a triumph of brains over brawn.

Reading…Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. Let me explain: ever since I met him, the Man’s been going on about how funny Terry Pratchett is, and reading me excerpts from the only two Pratchett books in the house (I’d like to draw your attention to that number–two–so you don’t get the idea that the Man is a Terry Pratchett fanatic of some sort), and I’ve been duly ignoring his suggestions that I have a go at reading one, paying more attention to my eBay adiction or whatever book I did happen to be reading at the time. The Man likes to read Pratchett before bedtime–make that re-read, for the five-hundredth time, probably–and I’ve gotten used to seeing his book covers as they slump down onto my pillow and the Man slips into sleep. I even bought him two new Pratchett books this Christmas, partly because I knew he’d enjoy them but also partly because I’d gotten really tired of looking at the same two book covers all the time.

I didn’t actually consider reading one until I got sick last week and couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed to find a suitable book. So I reached over and grabbed Going Postal, and you know what? It’s really, really, quite good. I keep reading the funniest bits out loud to the Man, who tries to hide the look on his face that says, yes, that’s great, I’ve actually read you that passage before and you ignored me. Last night I told him I was thinking of putting this into a blog post and he said, “so it’s basically a blog post about me being right?” and I said, “yes, yes it is.” So there you go.

Ugly truck update: two men got in and drove it away a few minutes ago. The birds are chirping with increasing authority and bravado, but the blue sky appears to be diminishing. But none of that matters, especially, because by this evening, we’re going to have a new POTUS, and man, that makes me happy.

Now I have to get off the couch and go to work.

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