I think it was the discovery of Nerd Boyfriend this weekend that led me to pay attention to what the man across the aisle from me was carrying: a tan-and-red plaid backpack from L. L. Bean. Total nerd style. He wears a wedding ring, so will not be my nerd boyfriend, but I’m not sad about that. Sometimes it’s nice to enjoy looking at a good-looking someone without any expectation that Something Might Happen.

At first I thought I wanted to be on that train to Greenbush to see the Patriots’ game. But then, while waiting to purchase a fountain drink, one of the customers suddenly stormed away from the counter, then turned and started pointing and yelling at the teenage youth who was working the cash register. He was enraged because the thing he wanted from the menu was no longer available (maybe because of the breakfast-lunch switch, or a lack of ingredients). He blamed the youth for his slowness, which (theoretically) caused enough time to elapse to make the item unavailable (gee, it took a whole minute for the youth to complete the previous order!). The customer & his pal started walking toward the Greenbush train, I was walking behind them, and saw two tickets fall out of the yelling-customer’s pocket. I wanted to leave them, or take them, or otherwise exact passive-aggressive revenge on behalf of the youth. But of course I didn’t do that. I picked them up and said my own loud “Sir!-Sir!-Sir!” and when he stopped & turned around, I offered them up for the taking.

What I thought about: S. & I had a new-friend dinner-date last night. Over our respective shepherd’s pies (hers the meat/carrot/onion variety, mine the eggplant/tomato/onion variety) we discussed the emotional dimensions of activist & community-building work, specifically the emotions that accompany project- and event-oriented efforts, for which temporary collectives form and make something happen, then disband after the event is over. I’d been thinking about this in the wake of the Femme Show, specifically, about the period of a couple of months where preparation for the show took over my life. As soon as the performances were over, we all moved on to our next projects. Since then, I haven’t seen any of my fellow performers (we live in different, distant parts of the city), and I miss the feeling of being in community with that particular bunch of smart, funny, fierce performers. I’ve also been thinking about this (feelings-after-projects thing) in terms of my Ph.D. program; it’s still sinking in that I’m not really part of Comparative Studies anymore, that I don’t need to read the email announcements about the grad student org’s meetings or events, that I know fewer and fewer students in the program, and so on. Anyway. The conversation S. & I had was great because we were thinking along similar lines but brought different experiences to the (dinner) table, and this morning, I was still thinking about how her thoughts pushed me to revisit these experiences — Femme Show, graduation — that I could still stand to do some thinking/feeling about.

What I did: Ate the surprisingly, disappointingly watery oatmeal I’d picked up before getting on the train; decided that if watery oatmeal was my biggest complaint of the day, I really have nothing to complain about. Listened to the new weird (lady-robot-voiced) itinerary announcement recording that was broadcast in our train cars as we pulled out of South Station, wished that, given time of day & our shared purpose of commuting to work, lady-robot could’ve been followed with “Fitter, Happier” & made that happen with my ipod. Left Commonwealth at work yesterday, so I listened to Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One & thought my thoughts & observed, on my walk across campus, that the upside of the trees losing all those leaves is that you can see some great, big nests.

Last night T. loaded the mp3 of the Casiotone + Dear Nora cover of Missy Elliott’s “Hot Boyz” on my ipod before we parted ways, and as soon as I listened to it, I knew it would be the perfect soundtrack for an act. I’ve been wanting to do something funny & awkward for a little while, and I believe I’ve found my song. As I embarked this morning, I listened to the song a few more times, and had no trouble imagining what might transpire (imagine Liz Lemon doing a lapdance). So now I have something to do in addition to stage managing the next TraniWreck. Hurrah!

I can’t tell you exactly how excited I am about Hardt & Negri’s new book, Commonwealth. It’s a perfect guide & complement to one of my ongoing intellectual projects: figuring out ways to interrogate the ideologies that inform archival principles and practices — specifically, how & why we think of records as property & what the implications are with this approach; the alignment of logics of kinship & provenance; how legal protocols for records transfer create collections that may exclude contributions from donors who do not have legally-recognized relationships to creators. I’m very happy to have found a book that rigorously questions privatization & property-logics, and imagines modes of resistance…and it’s helping me remember certain turns of phrase & vocabularies that I don’t encounter when I’m not reading work in cultural studies.

But there are some clear, commute-related indicators of my excitement: I look forward to reading this on the train, even at 7 or 7:30 in the morning; I’m willing to lug the heavy library-copy hardcover to & from work; I send inappropriately-early-in-the-morning text messages to T. to ask small questions related to the text because I want someone else in on the secret.

This American Life’s episode on marital infidelity didn’t seem all that illuminating. There were funny moments, though, and I appreciated those. But mostly I just felt bad about the statistics being cited — the one about 50% of married people “cheating” especially — because it doesn’t have to be that way. But I know that the idea of nonmonogamous fidelity can seem contradictory, and that signs of being committed in nonmonogamous relationships aren’t as easily legible as the signs of commitment that come with marriage & monogamy. And on the heels of a week that involved some stressful & exhausting emotional & logistical work around holiday travel arrangements to visit two people who don’t get recognized as my family, who are both important to me in different ways, and who both need recognition of this from me (in the form of number of hours & nights spent per person), I wished I was hearing the kinds of stories that could help us negotiate these different ways of living.

We sat on the train in the station for quite some time past our scheduled departure (maybe 20 minutes or so), but I had sequins to sew on a sweater for my Halloween costume, and excerpts from past interviews with Maurice Sendak from Fresh Air to listen to. I was wholly absorbed in the sewing & the listening & wished I had an excuse to stay on the train even longer.

The woman sitting across from me on the (commuter rail) train was reading/studying from a veterinarian’s textbook titled Guide to the Dissection of the Dog. Of course I was curious to get a closer look at it, but respected stranger-boundaries & my own squeamishness and didn’t ask.

Also discovered that listening to Califone is a good way to relax so much that not-noticing that it’s time to get off the train is entirely possible. I’m thankful for the row of mail-trucks in the post office parking lot, which interrupted my daydreaming & reminded me that I did, in fact, need to gather up my stuff and get to work.

Or, more specifically, Weschler’s recollection of the morning after the start of Operation Desert Storm, when his colleague did a search in the LexisNexis database for an article (about a couple buried alive in an earthquake in San Francisco & the outcome of rescue efforts on their behalf). Weschler connects the database, the practice of searching, the CNN coverage of the war on the TV in the office, the fatalities that occur during accidental strikes on civilian targets. I fully believe in thinking critically about our interactions with database & other information retrieval tools, but forget that it’s possible to write so incisively & with such elegance about what’s happening in those moments. Weschler reminded me:

But strangely, the image that haunts me, and the one I just can’t shake, is that of my colleague in the eerie glow of his Nexus console, calmly punching that set of keys, activating the machine — the machine silently humming away, surveying the veritable continents of information before it, instantaneously targeting its quarry, yanking it out of the endless field and delivering it up to us whole. The surgical precision of the whole process. For a moment that morning, my colleague seemed to me like one of those amazing young officers strapped to their battle stations aboard the AWACs control planes circling high above Saudi Arabia — coolly surveying his console, punching in the coordinates, splaying out the information, directing the entire battle.

CNN, Nexus, AWACs — they’re all of a piece. And the carnage on the ground is something entirely else, almost infinitely removed. (Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, p. 139)

Snow flurries + Akron/Family (don’t be afraid, it’s only love/don’t be afraid, you’re already dead) + the 6:59 a.m. train from South Station.

On days like today, when I’ve got my act together enough to pack a lunch & a snack, and think I’m going to get out of the house early enough to stop at the Biscuit, I don’t pack anything for breakfast. But then I don’t make it out in time for a scone-and-coffee stop, which leaves me at South Station wondering what to make of my limited options. So many sweet pastries, or fast food, or nutrition bars created in laboratories — none of it’s good for me. But I like eating breakfast on the train, and the prospect of waiting to eat until I’ve finished the commute is never a happy one. So this morning, when I discovered that I can get a little cup of oatmeal from one of the vendors — oatmeal that’s still hot, and not watered-down or gruel-y, I found myself imagining ways to enjoy many future train-rides-with-oatmeal: I could pack my own dried fruit, carry a little container of granola, stir in some almond butter, or stir in some fresh apple pieces sprinkled with cinnamon. I’m getting hungry again just thinking about it.

Skipped Moby-Dick for the day, listened to an interview with Louis Theroux instead, then more time with the new-folksters on my walk to campus. What with all of the Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, BPB, and Bowerbirds I’m listening to these days, I don’t know how I haven’t sprouted a beard yet. Maybe eating more oatmeal will help with that.