The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

After a week of company, I'm finally alone here. It's strange how you can commit, plan for something, prepare for months, and still have no concept of how taxing it will actually be. Nonetheless, I'm now mostly settled and I'm very pleased with my surroundings.

My roommate is far better than expected. His name is Eric; he's an urban planning student from San Francisco. Consequently, he seems very interested in Detroit lore, which is apparently much crazier than we ever had the perspective to realize. He arrived with no television and, after a few days of tiptoeing around the issue, stated the he would much prefer to keep it that way. He was born in Columbia and happens to make excellent tacos.

The apartment is huge and difficult to furnish. Eric and I used my parent’s car to capitalize on some Craig's list finds, one of which took us on a dizzying two hour excursion through Boston’s north end and no less than three neighboring suburbs. I was also unsuspectingly forced to merge into the big-dig from the right; an experience which I think made us closer friends.

Boston is incredibly active. I've been through roughly 25 miles of it on foot in the past week. The downtown area is apparently small, say people from real cities. Go figure. The beer here is excellent and I have yet to find a bad meal. At least two Sam Adam's brews are on tap everywhere I've been. At the moment, Boston Lager and Summer Ale, which is heavenly. Harpoon brewery is also very close, so I'm drinking quite a bit of UFO.

Cambridge is arguably more happening than Boston. I live right off of Massachusetts Ave., which connects MIT to Harvard via a series of bars. There's an Irish pub called The Asgaurd, which has yet to cease being humorous. There's also a place right across the street where I can get giant slices of pizza for two buck until 1 or 2 am every night. Unfortunately, nothing stays open 24 hours around here. Cambridge law forces all but a select few bars to close at 1 am, and the subway stops at 12:30. There's a strip club for cross-dressing men right next door, which I will go to as soon as I find the right dress...

MIT is sweet. The keynote speaker at my welcome address was a co-founder of the Human Genome Project. He was an absolute badass. I get free internet and the Institute subsidizes just about everything I've tried to purchase since I got here. I get 15% off my monthly phone bills and I haven't paid for a meal in the last week. My classmates are way cool. I went to the campus bar with them the other night. Last night 20 of us bought a 30 pack and an array of liquors and went to an apartment downstairs from me. It was 6 o'clock. Roughly six hours later I was forcibly removed from a lounge in a neighboring dorm where I had been innocently napping for an undisclosed period of time.

All things considered, I'm doing very well so far.