It’s ok, I know it looked like you didn’t have any ideas that were going to cohere today, but you’ve got it now.
No, you’re right, I know, it totally isn’t your fault that you’ve been buried under a five-foot tall pile of snow. And right, the MBTA! The MBTA keeps shutting things down. And when it’s running, nobody wants to go anywhere because all buses and trains, when they turn up, are packed. And broken.
And, once you swallow your terror and get on board, there will be no sitting down. There will only be upright spooning with strangers, and then swaying together — human spoons, nested, swaying, pretending to be elsewhere. Thank god we’re all wearing big puffy coats to help us maintain the illusion of personal space.
Yesterday was nice, though, right? WBUR Meteorologist David Epstein said the weather wouldn’t get bad till late, so we could all keep our Valentine’s day plans. After gleefully trudging a mile and a half to Davis Square, grabbing, on impulse, 2 chocolate chip cookies for $2.49 at the Davis Au Bon Pain, you and Tim didn’t bat an eye at the mob of people waiting for the train. Delays due to a severe and mysterious medical emergency at the Park Street Station…Who Cares?! Love! Cookies! And the massive angry crowd of Valentines people was thinner at the back of the train! No stranger spooning! Score!
In spite of the falling snow, icy temperatures, wind, slush, and sidewalks-turned-giant snow caverns, you still got to the Russell House Tavern in Harvard Square for the raw bar, lobster sliders, and a lovely glass of bubbly. And then pen shopping at Bob Slate Stationers, followed by comics at The Million Year Picnic and a new pair of whale socks at Newbury Comics (which sells more socks now than it does comics…or music, but no matter. One must find one’s cool-ass socks somewhere.)
Over night, though. Wow. Here’s the neighborhood:
The beautiful, frozen MysticTim wanted to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic, so we walked over there. It usually takes us about five minutes to get to this bridge. This time, maybe twenty minutes? Twenty five?I could not see over the bridge’s snowbank to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic. But that’s ok!I can barely see over the top of this snow cavern, but that’s ok!My home is totally buried in snow, but that’s ok!And around the home, we have beautiful, terrifying Ice Dams that could fall and kill us, but that’s ok!Because under what other circumstances can I get away with rocking these cool-ass socks?
Yes, those socks are cool-ass, indeed. And it’s ok that the only thing you really have to blog about is the same thing that everyone in eastern Mass, parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine has been talking about for the past month? I mean, it is a crazy huge amount of snow. Seriously.
I am not in the habit of cataloging my movements as they happen, but I have become enamored of editing Wikipedia, enamored of writing women into it–and I got to make an infobox for Mary Almy, of Cambridge, Massachusetts architecture firm Howe, Manning & Almy, Inc.
This morning I went to a mini-editathon (only 2 hours) at the MIT library archives. We used archival materials to enhance the presence of some women in architecture and some other fields. We were about ten women, in the lovely archives room at Hayden library at MIT, typing away in silence. Very intense, concentrated, productive, and super fun silence. At an editathon, this kind of silence exists.
The reading room of the Institute Archives and Special Collections in building 14 at MIT. (public domain)
By the way, infoboxes are those things on the right side of a Wikipedia entry. They look like this:
a screenshot of the infobox I made (which no longer belongs to me, but to wikipedia and the world. CC-BY-SA.)
Better ones have pictures. But to post an image to Wikipedia, it either needs to be in the public domain or have Creative Commons licensing BY-NC-SA.
BY means “Attribution” (you have to give credit to source.)
NC means you can only use it for Non-Commercial purposes.
SA means “share alike,” which is more cryptic than the other pieces of the license. To “share alike” under Creative Commons means once you use the thing in question for your purposes, you have to apply the same CC license to it. (I am increasingly enamored of internet citation, it would seem. Nobody said I wasn’t a nerd.)
Anyway, images that meet those criteria are hard to find. The next time you do a google image search, try clicking the “Search Tools” button, and select “Usage rights” and then “non-commercial reuse.” A lot of the pretty pictures you just found will go away. Including all the ones you wanted. (Unless you image search kittens. A lot of kittens will stay. *there are kittens behind the “google image search” link.*)
I headed over to the MIT campus along my usual route, but this time in the dark. Spring semester won’t start for a few more weeks, and MIT people are in the middle of IAP, or “Inter-Activities Period,” a month-long session full of lectures, how-to classes, dance classes, tours, you name it. The only thing I had to do out in the world this day didn’t start until 7 pm. It was raining a little, but I walked the 30 minutes to the Davis T Stop anyway. I wore my duck boots. My umbrella just covered both my backpack and my head. I had to bring my laptop so that I could learn how to edit Wikipedia.
I know, it’s not really all that difficult to edit Wikipedia. Way back in 2008, I demonstrated to my Advanced Writing students that Wikipedia was not a viable source for their research by defacing Wikipedia myself.
“See, class? Any asshole can go in and make changes.”
I am not proud of this, though I’m pretty sure I only did it once.
One of the students in that class — a junior architecture major — politely raised his hand and informed me that what I did was not in the spirit of Wikipedia, that people work hard to get rid of this kind of vandalism, and that sooner or later, Wikipedia would be a viable reference for research. I was surprised to hear that what I’d done was vandalism, and I decided I probably wouldn’t do it again. As for the usefulness and viability of Wikipedia, I saw his point. I conceded that by the time he and his peers were making decisions about what constituted reliable sources, Wikipedia just might be on the list. But in 2008, it was not on that list, and they weren’t allowed to cite it.
But they were allowed — encouraged, even — to use it. Because the wikimedians creating and editing entries are held to the same standards as my students. They must cite reliable sources — sources that pass through some kind of editorial or peer review — if they want their work to stay on the site. Today, in addition to teaching students how to navigate the library and Google in order to yield strong sources, we also teach students to follow the trail of research that wikimedians leave behind, and then use those sources to dig deeper into the existing research and scholarship on their topics.
And that’s great! And generally, in life, if we encounter something we want to know more about — in my case, who succeeded whom in the British monarchy and how that whole thing works, or the defining characteristics of the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune— we probably go check out Wikipedia. And that’s great, too.
But there’s a problem: if you work hard, contribute to a field, and open doors for people like you who come after, but Wikipedia doesn’t know about you, do you make a sound? Well, yes. But if more and more people turn to Wikipedia to learn about the world around them and its history, then we want to have as much of that work represented as possible. And People of color, lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer people, and women in general, it turns out, are really underrepresented on Wikipedia.
I’d known about these representational issues for a while, though the gender gap has had the highest profile. Amanda Filipacchi’s April, 2013 New York Times Op-Ed, “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists,” first drew my attention to the gaps of Wikipedia. The recategorization of American novelists who happen to be female, from “American novelists” to “American women novelists,” has since been named “categorygate.” Sue Gardner’s response, “What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and sexism,” (posted to the WikiMedia blog in May of 2013) openly acknowledges the problem, and then clearly conveys how a better understanding of Wikipedia’s core principles can help us better address its gender gap. In “Wikipedia’s gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias,” Adrianne Wadewitz unpacks and comments on some problematic assumptions that go along with recent efforts to address this gap.
I just happened upon “Writing Women into Wikipedia” by chance, as I scrolled through the IAP listings. This editathon was unlike typical editathons that last only a few hours. This one took place over four nights. We wiki-newbies got solid introductions to the gender gap, Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, and different ways to contribute. And then we worked.
Some things about Wikipedia are easy. It was certainly easy for me to vandalize, back in the day. And Wikipedia encourages newcomers to start with simpler tasks, like fixing typos, and then working their way up to more substantive corrections. But “Writing Women into Wikipedia” is a little different. So many lists of writers, artists, innovators, and scientists (and so on, and so on) lack entries for women who belong there. Copyediting is great, but at this workshop we were encouraged to start new entries. And that was hard.
My “expert” topics are very well covered already. None of the authors featured in my dissertation are missing from Wikipedia. I wanted to help where help was needed, and I didn’t think fixing grammar on George Eliot‘s page was going to do that.
I’ve been very interested in comics, and frequently saddened by the dearth of female comics creators on my reading lists. I decided to start there. Then, I decided to go with British women comics creators, because 1) that keeps all my literary expertise in the same nation, and 2) though there were few American women comics creators listed, there were even fewer from Britain. It didn’t take me long to find my candidate, but it took a very long time to gather enough information from reliable sources to create an article for her.
But, at long last, I did. You know you want to see. Go ahead, click the link. Here she is: Suzy Varty
She’s just a little “stub” right now (that’s “an article containing only one or a few sentences of text that, although providing some useful information, is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, and that is capable of expansion.”) Not much, but something to build on. This little stub isn’t mine any more, though I will continue to tend her and help her grow. She belongs to Wikipedia and the world. Hopefully other wikimedians will add and edit her, and help her become a real article. Hopefully the wikimedians will let her stay.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
PS
If you’re interested in becoming a wikimedian, check out New England wikimedians for information about Wikipedia meetups, or just Google wikimedians in your area.
If you’re interested in addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia, here’s an overview of how to get involved, from FemTechNet. And here are some other WikiProjects:
African diaspora, a wikiproject that “aims to improve all articles related to the cultural contributions of people of African descent all over the world.”
Another date at a coffee shop. Tim on the left, Rebecca on the right.
CAMBRIDGE
April, 2005
1369 Coffee
The cafe was full, but I’d arrived early and gotten a small table, just across from the entrance. The door was open to let in the spring air.
I’d been frequenting 1369 Coffee since I first moved to Boston from Ohio, eight months prior. In 2005, the punk-rock aesthetic that most of the baristas sported seemed like the epitome of cool to me. And is that Radiohead’s The Bends I hear playing in the background? And are all these stern looking people reading and writing at their little tables probably intellectuals, poet/writers, or revolutionaries? Yes. After eight months living in Boston, 1369 Coffee in Cambridge was probably the coolest place I’d ever been. It made me cooler, just by walking through the door. Why hadn’t I arranged to meet my other blind dates here?
In his Friendster pictures, he was either peaking out from behind a fluffy cat or posed in quiet contemplation. In one picture, he was gazing out a large window, leaning forward, palms together, hands pressed against his lips. He looked like he was praying, which I found odd, but the cat pictures intrigued me.
He walked in and I set down the copy of The Journals of Lewis and ClarkI’d been studying. From my seat, he seemed impossibly tall. The late-afternoon sun blazed behind him through the cafe’s vast storefront window, lighting him up, golden.
We said hi. He smiled. I smiled. He’s way out of my league.
I’d seen pictures of Tim on Friendster, but that was only after I found him on Craigslist. This was a few years before the Craigslist killer, and before the “dating” sections became indistinguishable from the “casual encounters” section. I went with Craigslist, first of all, because the only other method of online dating that I knew was match.com, and the only people I knew who used it were my mom’s friends and my forty-something ex-boyfriend.
All of those people were divorced professionals. In 2005, I was 26 years old with a dial-up connection, and if I hadn’t just moved so far away from everyone I knew, I’d just keep relying on the age-old matchmaking network of friends’ friends congregating at parties and bars. But I didn’t know anyone in Boston. I’d spent the entirety of the fall semester either in class or in my bedroom. By January, I thought, that’s enough of that.
I first heard of Craigslist in May, 2004, when I first visited the Northeastern campus. I’d never had to find roommates from a distance before and was growing increasingly worried that I would wind up in a hugely over-priced utility closet in someone’s basement. The PhD student* who was showing us around told me I could find roommates on Craigslist.
“Regs List?”
“No, Cuh-raig’s List.”
I found the site. Its mass of tiny blue links dazzled me. You can find roommates here! And jobs, and bicycles, and clubs to join! And also, maybe, boyfriends.
These days, getting your pictures online is child’s play, but when I was reaching out through my dial-up connection I had to use my roommate’s scanner to upload my school ID picture. And I didn’t know how to change iPhoto’s HUGE auto-setting for attachments. After one or two gigantic picture exchanges that went nowhere, I established a rule of no pictures in either direction — a rule that would immediately sink any on-line dating endeavor today. I would respond only to well-written and intriguing Craigslist personals.
Between January and April 2005, while also keeping up with my grad school coursework, I went on about four blind dates a week, sometimes two dates in one day. Most of those were one and done, but I did manage to court a few guys for a while.
There was the research librarian who was very nice and smart, who was taken with the way I wrote Library of Congress call numbers on the back of my hand, but who reminded me too much of my uncle. There was the pony-tailed radical who seemed to know everyone, everywhere we went, and who lost interest in me because I asked too many questions. And finally, there was the Spanish graduate student — this was the most romantic courtship by far. On our second date, as I was telling a story about something, he abruptly leaned across the restaurant table and kissed me on the mouth. “I could wait no more,” he said. I liked him most of all…but alas, when I admitted that I was still dating around, he broke it off. Damned honesty.
But it doesn’t matter. I thought I liked the Spanish guy, but that was before I met Tim at 1369. I told him on our third date — after we’d decided to go steady — that until I met him, I thought I was doomed to never really like anybody ever again. Everyone I’d dated between January and April was cute, nice, smart, interesting — the test of writing style had worked! And yet…meh.
After things ended with the radical and the Spanish guy, I took matters into my own hands. I posted my first and last ever personal ad on Craigslist.
“I was just on my way to the sink to wash my hands of dating,” the ad read, “but maybe someone can change my mind.”
Turns out, someone could.
“Is that Lewis and Clark?!”
Was he genuinely interested in this book? It seemed so. We talked for a while about Lewis’s brooding intensity and Clark’s abysmal spelling. Apparently there had just been a story about the Lewis and Clark Journals in Smithsonian, so the extreme differences in their writing were fresh in his mind. I was impressed. I tried to impress him back with a story about how Clark doted on Sacagawea’s son. Clark nicknamed him “Pomp,” or sometimes, “Little Pompy.”**
This prompted some giggling on both sides, and then an awkward silence. We decided to go for a walk, down Mass Ave. to the Middle East Rock Club, then across the street and back up towards the cafe. We stopped at Rodney’s bookstore. We meandered through the stacks. When I found the “Cat” section, I stopped and started pulling out books. I wasn’t really into cats, but, for reasons then mysterious to me, I loved that he was.
Suddenly, he thrust a book toward me. On the page, a line-drawing of two cats mating.
“REEOW!!!”
He meowed and broke the quiet of the sleepy bookstore. He meowed, and I dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
In his pictures, at the cafe, and all along Mass. Ave., he radiated an intriguing combination of calm reserve and something else. Something very silly and mischievous kept peaking out from behind his shy smile. And here it was. “REEOW!!!” indeed.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Met at 1369 Coffee. Walked down Mass Ave., then back up, then into Rodneys where the deal was basically sealed.
*The PhD student who introduced me to Craigslist became a life-long friend. She even played the piano at the wedding.
Tim’s bicycle has a broken axle. He bought it when he was 23, when he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey back in the spring of 2000. The bicycle before that was purchased the previous summer, in Delaware. It traveled with him–first to Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed for one month in late summer ’99, then to New Brunswick, where he stayed a bit longer, for basically the whole ’99-2000 school year. Somewhere in there, Tim left that bicycle under a tree in the side yard of the blue split-level colonial where he lived with five other twenty-somethings. The bike got stolen. He replaced it with a black Jamis, which he has ridden ever since — until the day he crossed the railroad tracks near Kendall Square in Cambridge and busted the axle.
Though Tim is a freelance editor today, he used to be a math teacher, and before that he worked raising money for environmental causes. After graduating from college, Tim took a job as canvas director for the Fund for Public Interest Research. He would travel from town to town setting up canvas offices and deploying teams of college students to knock on doors, raising money for things like Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign. He worked for the Massachusetts bottle bill his first summer (a new version of which just failed…again). He had a big win the year his bike was stolen: he helped protect about 90 million acres of national forests from the logging industry.
Tim is tall and thin with light, wavy brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile that digs deep into both cheeks. Though he looked younger than most of the college students on his team, for as long as he was in town he was an effective manager, running things with an air of good humored sincerity.
His work involved a lot of hustle and bustle, but he also spent a lot of time alone. When the kids were canvasing, Tim would canvas too, walking miles all alone, knocking on doors, sometimes getting donations, sometimes not. On these jobs, there was plenty of time to think — he would, for example, theorize the correlation between the outward appearance of a house, the likelihood of donation, and if they gave, how much. He once told me about how on his rare nights off in West Hartford, he’d stop at a nearby used bookstore, buy a paperback and read the whole thing in a night. This reminded me of the time he fell asleep under a tree near Spy Pond (Arlington, MA) while reading Kafka’s short stories. A solitary but contented man.
On our second date, in the spring of 2005, I saw him crumple his water bottle up into a little ball and stick it in his pocket to recycle at home. I thought that was so weird, I fell in love a little. I soon learned, Tim does not just throw things away. His bike is a prime example. A couple of years ago, when we brought our bikes in for their annual April checkup, Tim and the bike guy shared a little moment, laughing at how long the old Jamis had been hanging on. A few years before that, Tim noticed with chagrin that someone had stolen his bike seat and replaced it with a lesser model. This seat tips up and down and is generally a pain in the ass. I have suggested that he go buy himself a proper seat at least once a year for the last eight years. “Eh…it’s fine,” he says. “Now it’s rusted in place!”
But, this past August, the axle broke. The Jamis is currently unrideable. Fortunately, Hubway exists, and it is right in line with Tim’s sensibilities. It’s a bike-sharing program with bike stations all over the greater Boston area. There are annual and monthly memberships, or you can get a 24 or 72 hour pass — you swipe your credit card at the Hubway kiosk and you can ride as many times as you want within the time-frame you select. You just can’t go over 30 minutes a ride.
The day before I wrote Smoot Bridge, I got the urge to ride my bike over there. I used to ride across the bridge every day, but it had been years and I wanted to recapture the feeling. For a tense moment, we thought I would have to do this alone…the Jamis’s axle is broken, after all. But then we remembered Hubway. Tim decided to do the 24 hour pass. If he could switch bikes in under 30 minutes, he could get away with paying only $6. Challenge accepted.
We walked from our house to the Tufts Hubway station and grabbed the first bike. Being the first one, this transaction took the longest. We rode from Tufts, down to Mass Ave, and through Harvard Square. We heard the noontime bells ringing, and Tim realized he only had 7 minutes to return his first bicycle. I was totally oblivious to this. He charged up Mount Auburn and Mass Ave, on the lookout for any sign of Hubway. He found a station at the Central Square Post Office, with only a couple minutes to spare.
He had a little trouble with this one, because the original 30 minutes wasn’t up yet. For a second, he thought he’d misread the website and he’d be stuck bikeless in Central Square. Once the 30th minute arrived, he tried again and was immediately given his next bike. He figures either the time was an issue, or the kiosk needs a couple of minutes to recognize that the bike is back. (here’s a word from Hubway about what happened.)
We kept riding down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, where I stopped to take some pictures for the blog. Tim didn’t say anything, but he knew the pictures were going to make it difficult to get to another Hubway station in time. He thought he could make it once we got going across the bridge, but, as he rode out to the patch of Esplanade across from the Lagoon, he realized that I had disappeared.
In fact, I had stopped as soon as I got down to the Esplanade from the bridge. The sailboats were looking perfect and I wanted a picture. I tried to call after him, but he was way out of earshot. Once we met back up, everything was swell until, on the foot bridge at Mass General, Tim realized he had 2 minutes to find a Hubway station. I was in mid-sentence when he realized this. “Time’s almost up! Gotta go! Gotta go!”
Tim’s Hubway Adventure was truly excellent. He may try it again some time, but he wishes we had a station closer to our house. We both feel lucky to live somewhere with a service like this, but we both love our own bikes. I asked him what he wanted to to do about his, fully expecting that at long last he would agree to replace it with a new bike. I don’t know what I was thinking. The Jamis isn’t going anywhere.
–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Hubway Adventure Route!Tim on a bike path in Wales, holding bikes that look exactly like ours…yet which are not.
It stretches across the Charles River, between the MIT section of Memorial Drive and Beacon Street in Back Bay. A steel haunched girder bridge, its design is less ostentatious than the Zakim and less stately than the Longfellow. Still, it is sleek and purposeful as it crosses the longest distance of any Charles River bridge. It is 659.82 meters, or 2,164.8 feet, or 364.4 smoots long. Plus or minus one ear.
Smoot tells his story in The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT
The non-standard unit of measure known as “the smoot” is equal to five feet and seven inches, or about 1.70 meters. This was the length — or, I should say, height — of one Oliver Smoot in October, 1958. This Smoot was a pledge that year for the MIT chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha. Having become frustrated with the seemingly endless trek across the bridge, his pledgemaster declared that the bridge should be measured and demarcated in pledge-lengths. Oliver Smoot was chosen both for his diminutive stature and for the sound of his name: “the name sounded ‘scientific,’ like ‘meter’ or ‘watt,'” reports MIT Newsoffice Editor, Susan Curran in her salute to Smoot.
And lo, Oliver Smoot was laid down “end over end,” and the long walk from Boston to MIT was measured. Ever since, for over fifty years, the pledges of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha chapter repaint. Over the years, the smoots became such a fixture in the culture of Boston and Cambridge that when the superstructure of the bridge was renovated in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department asked the fraternity to come and repaint the markers. You see, smoots had become useful in reporting the precise location of accidents. During renovations, officials even agreed to “score the sidewalk at 5-foot-7 Smoot intervals instead of the usual six-foot ones.” I have to look for that, next time I walk across.
the total distance, recently repainted; also, note the scoring of the concrete.
Plus or minus an ear. If you look at the total-distance marker now, it only says “+ 1 EAR,” but according to Robert Tavener, in his Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity (Yale University Press, 2007), the original measure of “plus or minus” signifies the MIT frat’s choice to build-in error, to express the uncertainty of measurement, and to recognize the fallibility “ever-present in human affairs” (xvi). This care for precision through recognition of uncertainty embodies something so important about science — the findings of each new study don’t increase certainty, but rather they open up new questions, new avenues in the pursuit of truth.
I’m no scientist, but I’ve dedicated the better part of my life to asking questions and looking for the many forms truth. Multiplicity, uncertainty and the slipperiness of meaning are some of my favorite things to think about. But a head full of things like that can soon feel far too full. Over the last 10 years, I’ve found respite from thinking and feeling too much on the long, straight stretch of bridge across the Charles.
For five years, when I lived near the Somerville-Cambridge line, I’d ride my blue-green Raleigh to work. I’d ride down the bike lane on Hampshire Street, along the Vassar Street path (past Frank Gehry’s Stata Center), down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, into the rush of Back Bay traffic, and over to Northeastern University to teach writing and work on my Ph.D. In graduate school, a lot feels uncertain, a lot of the time. On top of that, I was settling into a new marriage and trying to forgive my parents for being fallible human beings. When describing the dark brown muck of my worldview to my therapist one day, I realized that the only relief I felt from an otherwise constant state of anxious depression came to me as I rode my bike across the Smoot Bridge. I have since expanded my Smoot Bridge feeling; the dark brown muck has receded.
Over the river, the world opens up; the blue of the sky, the smell of the water, the sun, the sailboats, the quiet. Riding or walking, I often shift into automaticity, fading into and out of awareness of my movements. Nice and long, on the bridge you can forget yourself, then remember again, and maybe, once across, see things a little differently than you did on the other side.
–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
featured photo: friend and colleague Lana Cook’s “Sunset of Yarn.” A good walk to work.
PS: In 2011, “smoot” was added to the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary.
Also, check out this Panorama from the bridge in winter, at Wikimedia Commons.
Inhabit Your Town 
