American bagels have no character.

I realised this yesterday while I was eating my morning bagel. Since I’ve moved back to the states, I feel the need to slather my bagel with cream cheese—the more the better, to the point that the bagel becomes merely a carrier for the cream cheese. Any bagel-ness that might be there is completely lost under the taste of the cream cheese.

When I lived in Montréal, I almost never put cream cheese on my bagels. Usually just some butter or a touch of jam. But I was also perfectly happy just eating them unadorned, just the way they were created. But maybe that’s because they had flavour; they had character; they could stand on their own.

Just a thought.

Life in the Land of Port this fourth week of 2006 has been good. All four weeks of 2006 have been good. Except for that cold the second week—although that was chased away by a heavy dose of Maker’s Mark at the suggestion of my bartender. She’s good like that.

UPS is still holding the boy’s birthday gift hostage—I think we’ll get it tomorrow or Saturday, since I finally just told them to hold it at the distribution centre for me to come pick up. Of course, it’s all the way the hell out in South Portland (or So Po as it’s called locally), which means I need a car to get there. Damn poor public transit system. It’s also open only 12-6, which gives me precious little time to get there before work, even if I were able to get there on public transit. Not that I’ve really looked into getting there on the bus, but Portland doesn’t have anything like Montréal’s Tous Azimuts and, to compound the difficulty, there is the Portland ‘Metro’ bus service as well as the South Portland bus service, which are completely separate entities. You can get a Portland bus to South Portland and a South Portland bus to Portland. But it’s like the STM versus the South Shore bus (the STL [Société de Transport de Longueuil]? or is it STRSM [Société de Transport de la Rive Sud de Montréal]? I never had to know, so I’m not sure. I guess it must be some variation on the second one, since STL is the Laval bus service, I think. Enough of that tangent. I’m writing this offline so I can’t just look it up.)

In any event, he will either tomorrow or Saturday finally have his birthday gift. Damn UPS. Supposedly they made two delivery attempts—but didn’t leave me a notice either time. When I phoned to try to change the delivery to one that didn’t need a signature, they wouldn’t let me. Stupid UPS.

I, of course, have not been keeping up with my schedule that I set out for myself at the beginning of the year to use my mornings effectively (although I’ve been good this morning) but I’m working on it. I’m almost through the first book on my list (The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore)—hopefully I’ll be done with it by the end of the weekend—and I’m not sure what I’ll tackle next.

Work is going well. The other shift lead has been named manager, which I think is a quite good thing. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it’s probably better for me not to be manager right now. Even if I do reapply for grad school in the fall, I won’t be leaving for another year after that. All the same, I probably should stay focused on what I need to do for myself right now rather than getting even more wrapped up in this job. In other words, I’m already overly committed to this job—to the point where I have a tendency to jump in and help out when they need the help and it’s my day off and I just happen to have stopped in for a cup of coffee. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, but I need to figure out what the hell I want to do with my life since I know that this isn’t it.