One of my favorite things about Greater Boston is that, sometimes, I don't know if it's the train or the podcast making noise. I listen to podcasts on my or when I'm going to see friends, so I often listen to Greater Boston on the T. The Red Line, usually, because I'm a MIT student and we have our own stop. I think about there being a secret lab whenever I get on.

It's the little things that make me know how much love is in this show, you know? It's listening to the season 3 finale and hearing the sound of the screeches and going "wait, are Dimitri and Mallory on the Green Line?" moments before Mallory says it. It's the one time I recognized the voice of someone being interviewed. It's Nichole saying she's going to get Pinocchio's, the pizza place I usually get pizza from when I decide to be fancier than Bertucci's. It's knowing that's the same pizza place that makes me feel fuzzy inside.

When Covid hit and I had to leave, I listened to Greater Boston just to hear the sounds of the T.

I never listen to an episode in one place. I never listen in one sitting, especially not one as long as this. I walk around my little bubble of Cambridge to go to work, to get lunch, to go out, and I hear the stories and they tug at my heart. I listened to the train. Smash as I arrived in Kendall. Oh, the timing wasn't that perfect; we could only dream of such things. But last sequence riding from Park Street to Kendall. I didn't plan on it; I was just coming back from seeing a movie with a friend. It meant something, though. Dancing as I stepped on the the T. Smash as I stepped off. It wasn't quite perfectly timed, but what in life ever is?

Greater Boston is about magic. Literally, in some cases, but so much more than that. It's that Bernie can always deliver a letter, no matter where it needs to go. It's that Louisa can figure out that narrative quirk and use it in the narrative. It's that Michael can understand every person he wrote a letter to and write them beautifully, even when he was starving. It's that Dimitri is always lucky to be in the right place at the right time (except the one time he wasn't). It's that Nika is always unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (except the one time she wasn't). It's Gemma, who never believed in herself but had to find the man she met and summoned and saved. It's... god, I'll be here all night if you let me. Greater Boston has some of the best character writing I've ever heard.

It's Leon. Oh, it's Leon. He willed himself to die and willed himself to live on. He snarked at an omniscient being and took over his job. He shouldn't have. He should have. He made so many mistakes. He made no mistakes. He cared, he loved, he fought, he won. He became the spirit of Boston itself; he touched every heart in the city just in a desperate desire to help. Not just his friends, not just his loved ones. He took a man everyone would have given up on and helped.

An incredible season. Thank you, @greaterblogston. Cheers to a phenomenal season.

also, just to ruin the mood a bit, there was an amogus on the tracks

Michael Tate was introduced in Greater Boston as someone mourning his best friend; his grief after Leon's death is a key part of his character arc. Four seasons later, in his farewell letter to Louisa, we hear him thinking of himself as a best friend who someone else would mourn - a kind of tragic role reversal. In that letter, Michael refers to both Leon and Louisa as his "best friend". As he faced the prospect of death, he thought about how it felt for him to lose Leon and he used that experience to empathise with the grief and anger and regret that Louisa would feel at losing him. He tried to ease the pain that Louisa would feel at his death while knowing that he couldn't. There's something so powerful to me about that potential cycle of loss. Michael, whose narrative has been so shaped by grief, had to confront the idea of someone grieving for him with a similar intensity…

might as well post blasphemous michael/leon fanart trilogy here

i wonder if leon’s ever gonna tell gemma about the omnipresent demon lurking in the minds of the vast majority of the cast.

“btw there’s this guy (i like to call him  “the narrator”) who has been inside of the brains of basically everyone involved with red line ever since my death AT LEAST, and he’s been putting thoughts into their heads and influencing their decisions this whole time.

i like to call him the narrator because he tends to narrate the innermost thoughts of the “characters” (that’s you and your friends and also every single person who exists in this world btw) to this “audience.” (i do the same thing btw. i’m a narrator. i’ll tell you about the audience later.) also, he’s the ceo of the largest mega corporation in the world, and i’m pretty sure he isn’t human.”

“...huh.”

wasn’t particularly looking forward to Greater Boston having a romance plot this season because I’m not really into that but the angle being ‘man locks you in his office to die? seduce his wife’ is so funny I’m not even mad

On one hand, train suicide as an imminent threat.

On the other hand, so much hope for fail women.

Obsessed with the fact that they stuck Felix Trench in there, accent and all, and just told him to be fake-British Mark Wahlberg. Unhinged behaviour <33

The Lonely Side of Salad: Writing Half of ‘Arugula’

Warning - This post will have heavy spoilers for Episode 44 of Greater Boston (Arugula).

Before the start of pandemic I was thinking about changing jobs. I had worked at the same college for nearly fifteen years. I loved it but things were beginning to wear on me in ways that were continuously frustrating. Then the pandemic grew to the point where quarantining was necessary and I found myself working from home, sitting next to my daughter, logging her on to Zoom kindergarten every morning. We did YouTube Yoga. I helped her learn how to ride her bike wearing masks in a nearby church parking lot. We even made a storytelling podcast. 

Then my college started rumbling about financial shortfalls. They laid off my boss. They promoted me and then told me I had to help layoff 12 people. Then a job I had applied for before the pandemic hit reached out and asked me if I was interested. I interviewed and got the job and was so distraught about what was happening at my current college that I accepted. 

I started a new job in June of 2020. I can not begin to explain to you how strange this was. We had meetings every morning to discuss what initiatives we were working on. I panicked about this every day. I was new. I didn’t have any initiatives. Nobody was talking to me. I’d get the occasional email, the odd request. But days would go by with no feedback from my boss or colleagues. I sat at home refreshing email and literally trying to Google what I should be doing for work. 

Soon after, my new supervisor quit. Then several other colleagues quit, more than a dozen key college figures. There was talk of a toxic work environment driving people away. I would come to find out this was true later. As more and more people left, this particular person would become my supervisor. I logged into work every day assuming I would be fired. My new supervisor was mean spirited, critical, and vindictive. I had full-on panic attacks. And the whole time, I continued to try and help my daughter survive Zoom school. My wife works in healthcare and clinics never close. 

I was writing Season 4 of Greater Boston at the same time and I was having a difficult time with it. The show we started was full of optimism and hope and I was sitting there thinking about how wrong everything was. The horrible day of letting people go over zoom was in my thoughts daily, and although I knew it would happen whether I was involved or not, my involvement left me emotionally devastated. These were colleagues I had tried to energize to buy into an unhealthy work ethic our college promoted - do more for the spirit of the place. We’re a family. We can do this if we pull together. And then seemingly overnight we were cutting costs, we were letting them go via a streaming service. Dispassionately. With tight legal wording. 

Meanwhile communication continued to be an obstacle at my new job. When people were communicated with, it was with derision and division. Faculty felt cut off from their students. Students were having a difficult time learning in a forced learning environment. Without face to face interaction, with only emails and forced sterilization of Zoom calls (cameras off, mics muted), the different unions and working groups were assuming the worst about each other. Everything was broken. Nothing felt like it mattered. 

At night I would sit and listen to music and ask myself this question. How did I get here? How did my life unspool in such a direction that was making me completely miserable? Obviously the pandemic played the biggest role but there was so much wrong beyond that. I felt completely cut off from my family even though we were spending more time than ever. I would break down into tears occasionally and it scared them. I would try to hide my emotions but then resent that I had to hide them. Even therapy wasn’t an outlet. It just felt like work. Zoom call. Discuss your feelings. Breakdown. (Nods sagely). See you in two weeks. 

So it was with all this in mind that I sat down to write half of Episode 44. Every character is in a precarious place in this episode. Leon is struggling with having so many characters and people to deal with, and Ethan’s experiments aren’t helping. Gemma is struggling to disclose that she actually has the spirit of Leon in her possession all while Dimitri has joined her, despite Leon’s pleading. Dimitri is struggling to find his place in Red Line, helping Gemma. And he’s struggling to give hope to Nica. And Nica is struggling to find any sense of hope at all. The only hope here is Omi’s offer to take a few of them with her. There is a comfort in her decision to sink into her sadness, to own it, to wrap it around herself like a blanket. Hope, after all, is a struggle. It’s work. At the time even though I was only at this job for months, I was applying for new jobs, telling myself it could be better, that I still had control. And I was exhausted in doing this. Not only was it taking significant physical energy, the emotional energy was draining - forcing myself to focus on a better future during an unprecedented global disaster that had left me numb at best, overwhelmingly depressed at worst. 

I knew I had to address these feelings with my writing. That’s how I best process most of the things I struggle with. I started Episode 44 over and over again and was not satisfied with it. It felt like the antithesis of what Greater Boston should be. There was no finding strength in community, no comfort in each other. I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite writers, Richard Yates. “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

This is of course true. But I’ve always subscribed to the notion that what unites us is the fact that we are all cut off from each other, and that we’re all looking to each other for comfort, guidance, and love. *Spoiler Alert* - there is even a line that touches on this later in Season 4. 

So this episode starts not with any of our main characters. It begins with people waking up, starting their days. And the only thing that unites them is that they are alone. They are alone and the sounds of their routines are being processed by Leon, who is also struggling to accept all the various characters thoughts and internal narrations. The sounds of people in isolation adding to a symphony of loneliness. In the episode description, I wrote the following:

[The morning routines slip back, one at a time. Someone is crying silently. We do not know who. Nobody speaks to one another. There is no talking. Nobody is together. Everyone is alone] LEON (pained) My head…I can’t — 

And then to top all this off, I have a character we’ve never heard from call their partner and tell him they’re leaving. They can’t deal with it anymore. It could be they’re saying goodbye to their partner. It could be they’re saying goodbye to...well, everything. I wanted to leave that ambiguous, but also hint that the loneliness of a life surrounded by so much possibility, vitality, people was too much for someone who had all that around them all the time and still felt impossibly alone to their core. It just doesn’t seem right or fair. Their partner composes a song to deal with his sadness. This is a standin for me, writing this episode. He writes and sings these lines:

If you dug yourself a hole Unearth the lonely dirt below You still won’t find, my love Space for loneliness to grow.

Nica gets the submarine at the end of this episode. Dimitri means it to be a signal of adventures to come, but Nica takes it her own way. She’s sinking, settling into her cell, her loneliness. There was once a fantasy of her meeting celebrities and getting famous, a fantasy of what she would amount to. But at this point in time, she feels her cell - completely cut off and isolated - like a ship designed to sink in the water - is all she can amount to. 

But it’s important to remember that this is a choice she’s making, just like Gemma is making a choice about not disclosing Leon to his siblings. To lead back to the conversation Michael has with Chelmsworth in Episode 11 - choice really does govern everything, even how you feel.

Speaking of Michael, it wasn’t originally intended this way, but we ended up pairing the sadder aspects of this episode with something completely different - Michael and Louisa going to meet Autumn West. Originally this was going to be parts of its own episode Alexander was writing, but we combined them not only to give people a break from the bleaker stuff, but to show the other side of this choice. Michael is with one of his best friends. He is apprehensive about meeting the wife of the man who attempted to kill him, but focuses not on that aspect. Instead, he focuses on the connections they share. He gets excited by what they have in common, not what divides them. 

It’s obviously not always that easy, but I think for me writing this episode helped reinforce that two things can be simultaneously true. We are all, in the words of Richard Yates, inescapably alone. But that by itself isn’t reason to despair. Hope and human connection? It is challenging, difficult work, but in choosing to look for our commonalities, even if they exist only in the way we are all isolated? We chose to not give in to something that can never grow for the sake of something that may. Loneliness is easier because while everyone says there are no guarantees in life, being sad and isolated absolutely provides one. I urge you to gamble on believing in something greater. 

the Stamatis Family News hour!

leigion greater boston podcast would SOOOOO rainbow capitalism in june

Me: Some almonds, goldfish, pretzels and yogurt is enough dinner for me

My guardian angel (Currently taking the form of Leon Stamatis to try and get me to listen to him): I am scheduling adding a vegetable at 5:20 pm. You should follow it

By the way, I am still thinking about the Greater Boston Season 4 finale, and I am obsessed with the idea that when you have days where you wake feeling strange and unsettled without any identifiable cause, it might be because someone who you never met but who would have narrated you kindly has passed on out of the world.

one time chelmsworth gets WAY too busy to sort through his own belongings after a move so he asks vincenzo if he can do it for him (chelmsworth thanks him 7 times) and vincenzo is having a GREAT day until he starts picking up books like "The Deadbeat Dad’s Emergency Guide to Last-Chance Redemption" and "An Inadequate Parents’ Guide to Unearned Love" and "What To Do When You're a Terrible Father with the Best Son in the World and You Wanna Blow Yourself Up".

The Narrator: Oliver’s your next project, isn’t he? I’ve seen how you operate. You need to be needed. You love attaching yourself to people with problems. You see a terrible person and want to make them into the better person you  believe they can be. Of course you needed someone else to focus on.

Leon who has no one else to talk to and a vested interest in neutralizing the Narrator’s power:

[ID: A neutral face with a hand reaching toward the screen.]

Jottings: Season 7, Episode 4. Well then, best not die

As Tom Christie would say, "the Lord does answer prayer, you know": this week has been indeed bigger, better, brighter and more. Tissues might or might not be needed - it's up to you to decide (fun fact, I almost did), but ice cream is a must (steamy moments ahead, ahem).

Back at Lallybroch the pixies broke the alarm clock-cum-radio, while someone is wiping his nauseous mouth with the Declaration of Independence in Wilmington. And there can be no greater contrast when it comes to casting, than the one between SS and Vandervaart. She is trying, bless her heart she does, and it shows a lot. Yet no matter how hard she does it, she will never overcome, I am afraid, that stilted delivery and that genuine uneasiness that make you feel alternatively dismissive and sorry for her. In the economy of Outlander, SS is more than a waste: she is a casualty, because she managed to unwillingly kill Bree, a character with a difficult, often unsympathetic design to start with.

For his first substantial on-screen appearance, Vandervaart passed my scrutiny with flying colors. Now I might be biased, because I am a documented victim of this particular Boston Brahmin charm, that screams old money and boat shoes and Ivy League and effortless sophistication. But it's more than this, of course, and I suspect solid brains and a great deal of preparatory work. This kid has managed to impress me, with his subtle nods to the mannerisms of JAMMF and LJG. The scene with Young Ian and Rollo is flawless. The diction is perfect. He cares for William enough to become William and this is something to behold and applaud.

Both Hunters are quintessential. There is a sort of steel butterfly quality to Rachel and Denzell Hunter's kindness could melt my B&J's Chocolatey Love A-Fair bucket on the spot. Their likeability index will probably increase with time, and not only in this fandom, but also in the silent majority of casuals.

Which brings me to Tom Christie brilliantly showing us that, as my beloved Wilde once said with perfect clarity, "every saint has a past and every sinner has a future". This is the moment when I almost reached for the tissues, because I once was Tom Christie, and I know how damn hard is to keep your dignity in a hope against hope situation. And I could have done without that burlesque kiss altogether: but that is just me.

We've been waiting for this one since the trailer was released or even since I Am Not Alone. At last some bedroom maneuvers that are not: a) scampered; b) implied; c) muted and faded to cheesiness. I didn't even ask for much, did I?

Spoiler: "The thing about Tom is he wants you. Badly." That golden light. That serene grace. That perfect dialogue of bodies and souls. That cheeky raspiness. Not about Tom and not exactly JAMMF. I almost shivered, it was just like the good old times. And then, BAM!

A PLAGUE ON YOUR HOUSE, INTIMACY COORDINATOR VANESSA WOMAN, WHOSE NAME I DO NOT EVEN BOTHER TO GOOGLE AT 03:55 AM LOCAL TIME.

YOU SET OUR HOPES HIGH, PUSHED US TO THE EDGE AND THEN HAD THEM FADE TO THAT TOTALLY CLICHE MIRROR TRANSITION. HELLO? YOU FEEL OK WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR, WHILE YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH?

Enough said. And the next lost soul who darts out of Mordor with rumors of body doubles can go directly to jail, not pass GO (heh), not collect $200.

Is next week the Singapore (Sling) one? Lucky I am still in town, then. That is a mystery in the waiting. Onwards.

(Gif taken from @divineandmajesticinone, credits given accordingly - great work!)

Happy audio drama Sunday! I know I’ve been a little absent online recently, but there are some shows that I really need to yell about this week

First of all, @twinstrangersp are currently crowdfunding for Syntax S3, and need your help to reach their goal! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/syntax-season-three#/

If you’ve heard the first two seasons, you KNOW they’ve got some fantastic stuff in store for us. And if you haven’t? Now’s the time to give them a listen before the crowdfund ends - their S2 crowdfund was what got me hooked on the show, and I’m so glad it did 🥰

Also, I’m still not emotionally recovered from @monkeymanproductions Moonbase Theta, Out finale. I won’t say too much about it yet because a) spoilers for anyone who hasn’t listened yet, and b) there are epilogues coming.

But god, this has been such a beautiful story from the start. MTO is one of the first ADs I ever listened to, and it’s the one that stuck with me most vividly. I remember exactly where I was when I was listening to the first season, what the weather was like, which house I was in (I’ve moved a lot), what I was doing during each finale.

It would be easy for a show like that to have a disappointing ending, but no. The finale beautifully reinforces everything this show stands for for - community, radical hope, small victories against seemingly untouchable oppressors. I’m forever grateful that this story exists for me to revisit (and I will be revisiting, often).

And finally, I know I’m late to this one but I’ve been powering through Greater Boston in time for their live-show at London Podcast Festival this evening! I don’t know why I waited so long to listen, this show is hilarious, chaotic as hell, and has made me cry an alarming number of times considering a main plot arc is “cheese robots”

I’ll be at LPF tonight watching @ameliapodcast @greaterblogston and @wefixspacejunk and idk about you but I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend my Sunday evening ☺️