February 5th: Somerville Adventures:

"No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another prhase."
-Translation Studies, Susan Bassnett McGuire

So after a productive stint of research memo writing (sans internet, obvioooo) at the o-so hipsterlicious Bloc 11 Café in Union Square (there were also a lot of small children there too which was rather an odd mixture), I went on a quick grocery run to explore the local food store offerings. I stopped into a Brazilian Paderia (bakery) for some delicious and reasonably price coconut /sweet bread. YUMMM. There's also an Italian store and several stores with Indian products and several with Hispanic food products: basically, it's an awesome cultural hodgepodge.

I stopped in Market Basket as well, the dirt cheap grocery store with the amusingly economic sounding name, which never ceases to inspire me with its astounding multiculturalism. I was only buying eggs and ended up having to wait in line for nearly half an hour since pretty everyone who lives in Somerville and their mother (literally) were trying to buy things before the storm. I heard Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Haitian Creole, Nepali or some other language from the Indian subcontinent, Chinese and possibly Korean and Russian. Mothers and children, pregnant women, the elderly, college students, the working poor, Cambridgey hippies, immigrants representing every single legal category and nationality , middle class moms, White, Black, Latino, Asian American, Muslims, mixed race, etc. etc. etc.
And I realized how absolutely singular* this particular moment was: each of us was interpreting the same space and sensory inputs was and translating what we saw in the world around us into our own language, maybe even languages, our own biases, our own very very varied life experiences. All of us waiting in line together, no one with any more power to change the situation than anyone else despite our complete differences in opportunity and wealth and happiness and socially constructed labels. And where else could this possibly occur but America: a conjunction of people who have so little and yet so much in common, all sharing the same corner of this earth, making the best of what we are given, striving for better lives for ourselves and/or potential offspring. HELL YEAH.

*Probably pretty singular. In my class on globalization, however, we've been talking about how incredibly diverse trading communities in the Indian Ocean in the 1300s-1500s or so were. But I'm going to guess not quite this diverse.