Sometimes, all you need is a cheap rental car and an excuse, and you can be a million miles from Boston in about two hours. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Due to a wedding in this weekend, we got to explore Planet Vermont for a little while. Some notes I took on the Mapquest direction printouts:

* Richmond, VT: The gas station mart sells worms and night crawlers in the beer case, right next to Mike's Hard Lemonade. They also sell Damn Good brand jerky, in Original, Peppered, Beef BBQ, Teriaki, Hot, and Death By Jerky.
* Williston, VT rest stop: Picnic tables shaped like tractors. Signs inside for the Vermont Sheep & Wool Fair, the Civil War Expo, and the unfortunately-named Alzheimer's fundraise, "Memory Walk 2002."
* Georgia, VT: a US flag on *every* telephone pole on Route 7
* Burlington: Cute without inducing vomiting. Definitely a college town. Kids skateboarding in the parking garage. Music fest called "MooseJam" being advertised. Bumper sticker reading "Boycott corporate snowboarding" -- whatever that means.
* St. Albans: The street signs are white with green lettering and little green maple leaves...aw...

And then we reached Highgate Center, the wedding site. If by some strange chance you ever need to host a party near the Vermont/Canada border, I heartily reccommend Highgate Manor which is Victorian and impressive without a trace of snootiness. The women who run the place are charming and serve a mean breakfast quiche. We had this room, so now I know what a sap bucket looks like. Since they kept to just a best man and a maid of honor, I got all the wedding attendant perks (room at the inn, sitting at the bride and groom's table at the reception) without actually having to be an attendant. Which is good, since I would have gotten some funny looks at the tux shop :)

To elaborate, I'm friends with the bride, too, but I've known the groom since we were 14. We have an unspoken vow not to casually reveal what screwed up little devil teens were were back then, so I used all my willpower to refrain from telling embarassing stories. Anyway, nice (short!) ceremony, fun reception, the bride's father played the bagpipes, the DJ took requests, and we all danced like fools.

The next day, we stopped by one of the scariest places on earth, saw a lot of almost-as-disconcerting leaf people, wondered why the store where we bought turkey sandwiches has a website, drank excellent beer in Brattleboro, and eventually made our way home in the dark the long way across Massachusetts, feeling like we'd been gone much longer than 36 hours.

Upon returning home, we found that Tabitha the Wondercat had managed to upchuck in four different rooms. We missed you, too, kitty.

Back to the grind.

Not encouraging:
Professional Staffing Group is offering a FREE temp for a day to help with your work. No strings attached. We have lots of great candidates ready for work, but not enough work to go around.

Back in Februay 2001, when I had an even more half-assed bloggish thing than this page here, I noted the annoying media trend of "Look at the fun-loving unemployed who think getting laid off is funnest fun ever." I also said:

"...here's another prediction: at least some of the laid-off dot-commers who treat their unemployment like a grand vacation will run out of savings and then fail to find a job as quickly as they thought they would. Then there'll be a spate of articles about that phenomenon."

It took a year and a half, but boy, was I right. It seems like every day, some business page or another (and I read a lot of them) has an article about how finding a new job takes a long time and is rilly, rilly hard. Hello.

This seems a good time to point to some of my Media Unspun bits from an earlier, but no less cranky, part of the month:
Labor's Love Lost: Ah, Labor Day. The holiday that honors unions and the American worker. And what an ironically mediagenic Monday it was in 2002. From corporate abuses to stagnant unemployment, this just isn't what the AFL-CIO had in mind.
Market's September Song Is The Blues: We suppose it's technically called "market timing," not superstition, but investors were all but buying rabbits' feet and horseshoes to ward off the bad omens of a lousy September open.

If you've been pitying me while reading my Tales of the Working Poor, feel free to turn that pity into an Unspun subscription.

The tinny reggae is officially Jamaican Me Crazy. They're now covering "Country Roads," as if I didn't hear enough bad dance covers of that song in Germany. Please make it stop.

Today's fun, free game was Find the Reggae.

All day, I've been hearing mediocre reggae in my house like my downstairs neighbor had a sound system or something. Finally, around 6pm, I decided to actually leave my apartment and see what was up. Once I got outside, I realized it wasn't even coming from my street. It was coming from across a marsh, six lanes of traffic, and a bay.

Eight minutes later, I was at UMass Boston, at the source of the reggae. ("Ooh ee, ooh ee baby, won't ya let me take you on a sea cruise...Rastafar-eye!") Questionable covers aside, at least the acoustics got better at the source. Anything will sound cheap when projected across half a mile of polluted water.

I've been getting pretty good at scamming free food lately, but this event had none. Damn state schools! ;)

Too Much Information, and a Public Service Announcement:

So we kinda ran out of food on Sunday night, but it was raining, and getting late, and we were feeling lazy, so we separately threw together some basic sustenance (me: instant rice and jalepenos) and went to bed. I woke up on Monday, still nothing of meal quality in the house. I ignored this and did some work.

Around 1pm, boy, was I getting stupid. Lack of calories does that to me.

I had to go out anyway, and I couldn't wait any longer, so I got a $0.99 slab of something from Burger King as soon as I hit downtown. You do, in fact, get what you pay for. All these hours later, my digestive system still doesn't feel quite right. Fast food: avoid. Oof.

Gefilte tofu. I am speechless.

Six months ago tonight, Rick and I landed at JFK with two suitcases, a backpack, and the cat and resumed life in our home country. Today, we're spending the day pouring German beer. Cute coincidence, universe.

Last night, free opera. A highlight was the introductory speaker who asked the crowd, "ARE YOU READY FOR SOME OPERA?!?" The crowd cheered like she had just asked if they were ready to rock. Only in Boston.

Bad: When you interview for a job and no one bothers to tell you whether you got it or not.

Worse: When you interview for a job and are rejected via email, then again several weeks later by postal mail.

Here's a hint...when you don't want to hire someone, the proper number of rejection letters is greater than zero and less than two.

Speaking of clueless, the most unfortunate job listing I've seen this week is for a "Technical Writer and Web Designer."
Job requirements:
* Three to five years' experience in Technical writing and user interface design.
* Two plus years of demonstrated experience designing and developing useable commercial websites using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, DHTML, XML and XSL using text editors such as, HomeSite (i.e. no WYSIWIG tools)
* Must also be proficient with web graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, as well as online image resources
* Must be two people

Okay, so I made that last one up.

Screw this noise. I'm staying freelance.

Feedback I sent to Boston.com today:

Why does this story on your front page come with a map of the area:
"Two people were shot this morning inside the CVS pharmacy at 1266 Commonwealth Ave. in Brighton"

but not the stories of shootings in Roxbury and Dorchester? Doing this for Brighton but not other neighborhoods kind of feels like, "Yes, white readers, it can happen near YOU!" or maybe "Well, no one in Roxbury uses Boston.com anyway and no one outside Roxbury cares, so..." Maybe it's true that most of your readers wouldn't know Dorchester Ave. from Blue Hill Ave. from a hole in the ground, but maybe they should.

I honestly appreciate the extra information (it saves me a trip to Mapquest.com) but I'd appreciate it more if it was consistent. If you usually provide maps of crime scenes in Boston's more urban areas -- or even make those stories "Breaking News" like the CVS shooting -- I'm sorry I missed it and complained unnecessarily.

-Jen Muehlbauer
Dorchester

It's not too late to have me serve you beer this Saturday. Oktoberfest. You betcha. Tickets are selling briskly, so hurry up.

Strangely, my love-hate relationship with Boston can be summed up by Joni Mitchell and a children's book.

On the door to our apartment, I posted this:

"When they got to Boston, they felt too tired to fly any further...so down they flapped."

-- Robert McCloskey, "Make Way for Ducklings."

And the bar Cambridge Common, just over the river from Boston proper, has a red devil mounted on a wall by the bar. A yellowed sign above it says:

Let's have another round for the bright red devil that keeps us in this tourist town."

-- Joni Mitchell

I think a lot of young people move to Boston because it's easy, then stay because it's very easy. It's a city for suburb people. It's City Lite. So many of my friends bitch about Boston constantly, so what are we still doing here? A bright red devil is as good an explanation as any. Why did I leave and come back? Too damn tired to go anywhere else.

But sometimes, I seamlessly segue into "Love that dirty water, Boston you're my home" mode. This was a helluva fun weekend for many and varied reasons not limited to, but including: free food, local festivals, a townie bar Where Everybody Knows Your Name for real, good weather, old friends, new friends, and good beer.

And hell, how bad is Massachusetts, really? After all, I could live in Florida.

So let's return to navel-gazing and mundane observations, shall we?

1) There's something in the air in Boston today, because on a long walk and bunch of errands, I got pleadingly asked out in the Back Bay, greeted with great smiles and enthusiasm in the South End, and propsed to in Southie.

2) Since quitting caffeine weeks ago, I've only fallen off the wagon once, with the smallest glass of Coke you've ever seen. My theme song for this project has become "Hyper Enough" by Superchunk, which is incomprehensible, except for the chorus that goes "I think I'm hyper enough as it is."

3) I estimate that by the end of this week, I'll have read five books in their entirety since Monday. Blame the public library, Rick's absorption with grad school and GRE stuff, and the fact that I want to throw things every time I turn on the TV, so I don't.

Professionally, a little bit of closure.

Psychologically, a little bit of validation.

Politically, the whole thing still makes me puke.

That's all I'm going to say today.

Today I read the phrase, "Fifty-one weeks ago you had never heard of Al Qaeda, you'd probably never given the World Trade Centre a second, or even a first thought. Ah...those were the days." Except I had given thought to the World Trade Center. Lots of northern Jersey kids, including me, had a father who worked there for at least a little while. We went on class trips there. In fact, the World Trade Center framed my earliest definition of a Big City: a place where you can look up at a building and it never ends. I used to have a glossy postcard of it. I still have a photo of the skyline I snapped from the window of a car in Newark in the early 90s -- without a zoom lens, even the Twin Towers were tiny, but unmissable. Driving from Jersey to New York, you could always pick them out and know you were getting close.

I've been to the Pentagon, too.

Time to stop thinking about this.

Tackiest display of "patriotism" I've seen today (so far): An old woman wearing a t-shirt with an American flag on it, and sitting in front of the flag are two fluffy kittens. Underneath, it says "Stand beside her and guide her." Kittens. Talk about a non-sequitur.

Lest anyone accuse me of being anti-American, let me highlight some German stupidity. From BBC News Online: "German engineering giant Siemens has hastily abandoned plans to register the trademark "Zyklon", the same name as the Zyklon B poison gas used in Nazi extermination camps, BBC News Online has learnt. A year ago, Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete (BSH), the firm's consumer products joint venture, filed two applications with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the Zyklon name across a range of home products, including gas ovens." (emphasis mine)

Even if Siemens' marketers don't know their history, how hard is it to do a Google search before trademarking a word you think you've made up?

I shouldn't touch this with an Atlantic-length pole, but here's a misleading headline if I ever heard one: Survey: Europeans Say U.S. Partly to Blame for 9/11. The actual question was whether U.S. foreign policy, not Americans in general, was partly to blame. Either way, it simplifies the hell out of the issue, which is way too tricky for a yes/no poll.

Here are statements I believe are true:

• U.S. foreign policy is often offensive by the standards of the rest of the world.
  
• U.S. foreign policy is definitely partly to blame for the fact that much of the rest of the world doesn't like Americans very much.
  
• However, one of the things the terrorists got wrong is something every country gets wrong with every war: killing a country's people is a misguided way to express displeasure with a country's government.
  
• So go ahead and blame U.S. foreign policy when people of other countries hate us. Blame religious fundamentalism and psychosis when people express that hatred by flying planes into buildings full of people whose individual beliefs they don't even know.
  

And for proof that most of the world can separate the policy from the people, go here. I was in Hamburg at the time. It was really like that.

Things I was worried about at 1pm: running late to my annual physical, wet jeans from a bottled-water mishap.
Things I was worried about by 2pm: melanoma, heart disease, breast cancer, thyroid disease, the yucky advice that I should get an eye exam, how I'm ever going to be able to afford dentistry again.

Yup. I sure do love seeing the doctor.

Joblessness low, but lasts longer. Result: bastions of salaried idiots asking jobhunters why they're still unemployed.

Okay, enough bitterness and weighty topics. Here's a completely inane moment from my Sunday morning, after staying over at a friend's house:
Got my toothbrush. Got my little travel tube of toothpaste. Hey! They've got Tom's of Maine toothpaste! Hmm, I'm only going to be here for one morning, surely no one will mind if I take a little. Brush, brush, brush...AAARRGGHH! BLECH! What is this terrible...FENNEL?! Ugh, don't brush the tongue! Don't brush the tongue!"

I walked out into the living room and announced to the other two overnight guests to beware of the toothpaste. "Yeah," said one, "I tried it, too. That was nasty. But it does keep the guests from using it more than once..."

Americans still work more than anyone else, that is, if we have jobs at all. For freelancers and temps, it's just another unpaid day off, and moronic economists are still using the oxymoronic phrase "jobless recovery." Happy Labor Day.

Also, Ford is going to stop making electric cars because no one's buying them and our government would rather drill in wildlife refuges and wage war on Middle Eastern countries than support alternative transport (like, oh, say, the train). Ironically, Ford is going to manufacture a hybrid SUV -- if we're lucky, it will only guzzle as much gas as a normal car.

Surly Jen.