boston.

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Here’s the thing: Boston should not feel new to me.  My first college boyfriend was from Boston, so I spent some time there way back in the day.  Then my friend Trav moved there for a year (maybe two?), and I came out to visit him at some point.  And I traveled to the city several times for my previous job, and oh right!, my brother started his collegiate life here too (though he eventually transferred to a school in San Francisco), and I helped him move in.  So you’d think I’d have some sense of the place.

And yet, on a long, meandering walk through downtown Boston and Back Bay and Beacon Hill, everything felt incredibly unfamiliar, but not so much in a curious way, but in a slightly picturesque, tourist-y way where nothing looks like home and yet you can’t help but feel like you’re about to take a photo that a gazillion people have taken before.  It was a bit unnerving, like getting lost in a postcard version of a town you’d never been to before, but had seen all the photos before from the travel brochure.

That’s the risk and fear, though, right?  You come to a new city and your eyes hone in on the most obvious of sights and images.  And you realize that maybe, like all the other tourists, you end up succumbing to the utterly pedestrian, mundane, stock vision of a place.   (Even though, in this case, you’ve been here so many times before.)  Or maybe, you hope frantically, the particular city itself nurtures its cliches.  Maybe every city does.

So I wonder if these photographs will make a Bostonian (is that what I call you?) cringe; oh the banality!   (God, I hope not.)
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