Boston and Shopping and Oh, My!

Today I awoke at the unreasonably early hour of 8 o'clock to hop onto the Dartmouth Coach for the 9 o'clock bus down to Boston. The ride was uneventful, mostly because I slept the entire time. I was awake for the beginning and ending parts of the ride, however, which was exciting because it meant that I got to observe the woman next to me do her O.C.D. rituals. Now, my loyal readership of two knows that I have my own mental issues and I have no desire to mock other people, but when you count your bus tickets out loud 16 times (I know it was sixteen because she counted), and then count all the change in your wallet and then snap your fingers three times twice before the trip starts and before the trip ends, people notice. And it's kind of interesting to watch. Mostly 'cause I only ever really witness neuroses from the inside, so it's interesting to see someone else succumb to some mental health quirk and think "hey lady, calm down. you really don't need to do that."
Once we had all safely arrived in Boston, my mom picked me up at the bus stop, and drove me to this totally awesome store that she discovered in Roxbury. This store sells shirts that fit me and my ginormous boobs. It's kind of exciting.
Afterwards, my mom and I went to lunch at The Haley House Cafe. Their food is delicious, plus it led to an interesting conversation. Roxbury is a predominately black neighborhood. Haley House cafe was started in part by Didi Emmons, a local foodie who has a restaurant in Cambridge. As a result, a lot of people who wouldn't normally go to Roxbury go there to go to this cafe. A lot of those people were white. The clientele of the cafe is very diverse, but it doesn't really reflect the residents of the neighborhood, or the clientele of the other businesses in the area. Is that a good thing, or does it mean that we get a lot of white people in Roxbury feeling like they're being all hip and multicultural, but not really experiencing the cool things Roxbury has to offer that you couldn't find in other parts of Boston, like the Back Bay? Like Ashley Stewart, where I got my shirts, or the dollar store where we got clotheshangers and tupperware and 15 toothbrushes all for under ten dollars, or any of the variety of restaurants I discovered when I worked in Roxbury for a summer five years ago. Maybe it does help people discover Roxbury; we certainly wouldn't have found that store if we hadn't been going to the cafe. So maybe it does work. I don't know; it was just weird to see all those white people in the cafe after we had been the only white people in the stores, which were just across the street.
After that we went to see a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Huntington Theater. It was good, but only after the intermission, where I drank some coke. Before that, I was falling asleep.

Note: Sometimes I talk about race more frankly than is really appropriate. I don't think I did that in this post, but because this is the internet and you never know who reads these things, let me explain: when I was in high school, I spent a couple of summers working at The Food Project, an awesome organization that, among other things, raises issues of race awareness among teenagers. It got me thinking and talking, and I've been doing it ever since. I'm sorry if I've offended anyone or said something insensitive.