City of Illusions

I final­ly had the chance to try out the Euclid Cor­ri­dor today, rid­ing the #6 to a Flash Action­Script class at the Cole Cen­ter for Con­tin­u­ing Edu­ca­tion. When I start­ed at the ISC just over a year ago the direc­tor empha­sized his encour­age­ment for us to take skill-build­ing class­es. If there was an award for most class­es tak­en, I’d prob­a­bly win it. I haven’t quite fig­ured out how the whole Euclid Cor­ri­dor thing works, but the bus dri­vers know it, and step­ping off a bus right onto the bus plat­form was much nicer than step­ping off a bus into a big pud­dle of snowmelt, and I only had to walk half a block to get to the Cen­ter.

First snow­falls and morn­ings are hand-in-glove. It was very qui­et and dark wait­ing for the bus, then chat­ter­ing bright­ness.

Now all the days and nights of jour­ney­ing through the for­est drew togeth­er and were behind Falk. He was not camp­ing: he had come to a place. He need not think at all about the weath­er, the dark, the stars and beasts and trees. He could sit stretch­ing out his legs to a bright hearth, could eat in com­pa­ny with anoth­er, could bathe in front of the fire in a wood­en tub of hot water. He did not know which was the great­est plea­sure, the warmth of that water wash­ing dirt and weari­ness away or the warmth that washed his spir­it here, the absurd elu­sive vivid talk of the old man, the mirac­u­lous com­plex­i­ty of human con­ver­sa­tion after the long silence of the wilder­ness.

Ursu­la K. Le Guin — City of Illu­sions

Time for class.

The way home was­n’t near­ly as fun. The #6 does­n’t run west­ward on Euclid just yet, and the 9X, with its sta­tus as an Express, does­n’t stop and runs rel­a­tive­ly rarely on Chester, so I had to walk 30 blocks to Pub­lic Square, where I was just in time to catch the 23. On the plus side, dur­ing the walk I saw a roller-blad­ing San­ta Claus wield­ing a ski pole.