November 4

Boston

This is only my second fall on the East Coast. Out in California, autumn is a different phenomenon, in that it's not a phenomenon at all. It just gets rainy and cold. There's no glorious end. The leaves don't fall in a great blaze of color. They hardly fall at all.

All this to say, my drive from Brooklyn to Boston was beautiful. And like the perpetual tourist that I am, I risked the lives of fellow interstate drivers in order to capture my rapture and enthusiasm for autumn on film. It's debatable whether the ends justified the means.

And then I reached cold and rainy Boston to meet up with Boston nanoers at (unbeknownst to me) one of the hippest Boston area cafes, The Someday Cafe. In our blindness and innocence, nano continues to keep its finger on the pulse. And boy, did we mob the joint. All those poor souls trying to study for midterms were consumed by the wave of nanoers who, without hesitation, entirely rearranged the cafe's furniture so as to sit together. A clear display of the initiative and creativity needed to write 50,000 words in a month. I predict a high completion rate for the Boston nanoers.

It must have been around 8:30 when the Someday declared us a fire hazard. It was true. With fifteen or more of us, we pretty well sealed off all avenues to the restroom. We of course complied, assured Someday management that no one had been hurt, and shifted around so that there was a parting of the Nano Sea.