My jaw hurts from laughing at comedian Mike Birbiglia who we saw Friday night at the Wilbur Theater in Boston. I’m thinking of suing him.  

I first discovered Birbigs, more of a storyteller than a traditional comedian really, on This American Life where he did a piece on attending a celebrity golf event where he discovered, much to the chagrin of himself and the other attendees, that he was billed as one of the celebrities. He performed another piece about his dangerous sleepwalking habit that’s well worth a listen. This weekend’s show, “I’m in the Future Also,” is a follow up to his one-man show in New York, “Sleepwalk with Me.” He has a CD, too, called “My Secret Public Journal.”

Birbiglia is a local guy who grew up in Shrewsbury, and a few of his high school friends were even in the audience. Who better to appreciate his story of getting sick at a carnival while riding the The Scrambler with your seventh grade crush? His stories are drawn from his life and don’t need embellishment. He tells them simply and with just the right touch of humor. Because really, if you can’t laugh at life, especially the troublesome or humiliating moments, what’s the point?

Early on in James Toback’s documentary Tyson (yup, it’s about Mike Tyson), I found myself warming to the big galoot. Sure, he was violent, but the poor guy was bullied as a child. He was afraid. Other people hit him. He was a lover, not a hater. All he needed was a hug.

Then my boyfriend reminded me that he went to jail for raping a woman and that he bit a guy’s ear, not once, but twice.

Oh, right. 

Tyson, who sports a Maori tattoo on his face still looks menacing, but he’s surprisingly self-aware and articulate. Well, maybe more talkative than articulate. Though he did blow me away by using the word “skullduggery.” Who knew Tyson could one-up me in the vocab department?

Anyway, even if, like me, the last thing you think you want to watch is a documentary about an unstable boxer, check it out. It’s a well done, revealing portrait of a man who just wants to be loved. And who occasionally gets angry and bites off a chunk of a guy’s ear.

I met a frail old woman outside of her assisted living facility just a mile outside of Harvard Square the other day who asked, “Which way is Harvard Square?” I pointed.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

She struggled with boarding the bus, paying her fare, getting off at the right stop. “Can you take me to the Holyoke Center?” she asked the bus driver. Exactly, I thought. We should all expect the bus driver to drop us exactly where we need to go, even if it’s not quite on the route. “Oh, there it is!” she said as we passed a random apartment building. “Not quite,” I said. The bus driver confused her with directions. I tried to simplify.

Afraid she’d never make it to the Holyoke Center, I walked out of the T with her, wondering if I was aiding and abetting a flight from an assisted living facility—and kind of hoping I was.

I leave the house every morning with nary a thought about which direction to go, how far it is, which bus to take, where to get off. But this 1-mile trip for her was like dropping me off on a back road in Jakarta. Once we reached street level, she convinced me she knew where she was, so I watched her wander away into the masses of people rushing to work and school while she shuffled along at her own pace, no doubt remembering the day when she took this jaunt without giving it a second thought.

I love sitting on the T trying to figure out if the crunching or squeaking noise of the day is something to worry about. Normal? Abnormal? Who’s to say? But I especially love when I’m on the T and reading the front page of the Globe with an article that opens with “The man who spent much of the last three months studying the MBTA said yesterday that he would personally avoid riding on certain portions of the Red Line” due to safety concerns.

Awesome.

Um, next stop, please.

Remember Halloween costumes from the good old days when you went to CVS and picked out a costume in a box? And remember how you sweated so much in the mask that you had to keep flipping it up on your head to breathe? And remember how your whole costume was pointless anyway when you live in New England and you had to wear a coat over the whole damn thing?

I always thought the kids in California lucked out. They could be princesses without the parkas. They could be cats without the leg warmers. If you were wearing a ski mask, it was because that was your costume, not because it was below zero.

Anyway, the whole enterprise has evolved since the 70s. On a recent jaunt to Target with my roommate to Halloween shop for her nieces and nephew (husky, zombie, bumblebee, gorilla) there were aisles of costumes ranging from sexy gypsy to sexy witch. There were about 14 types of witch costumes, actually, with slightly different names though they were all the same.

What do you get for $19.99? A little fringe, a hair accessory, and some cheap tulle. The days of mom sewing your intricate, historically accurate costume are, apparently, over. And why not? These days, girls can just go to their closet, grab a little sparkle and presto, Miley Cyrus.

Oh, Halloween, what’s happened to you? OK, maybe I’m just bitter because here it is, this great fall holiday that’s all about dressing up and getting free candy, and I can’t think of one way to shrink myself into a child again so I can collect massive amounts of chocolate. Looks like I’ll have to steal from a small child again this year.

I eat cereal most days for breakfast. Cheerios, in fact, because they’re good and they’re duh, heart healthy. It was no different today. But this morning, I got in a 5-mile walk that left me spent and ravenous. By 9 a.m. those Cheerios were but a distant memory. Enter: cute cafe on Charles St. where I asked the guy behind the counter what was satisfying.

“Lemon poppyseed muffin?” he offered.

Boring.

“I don’t want to be good,” I said. “I’ll have the sticky bun.”

He proceeded to grab said sticky bun with some wax paper while trying to wrangle it into a plastic container. 

“Just a bag,” I said. You can’t walk and eat out of a plastic container—and the thought of needing a container for the 45 seconds it would take me to wolf down the bun seemed ridiculous.

“You sure?” he said. “This thing is very sticky. I recommend using a fork and saving time to wash up if you have a meeting or something.”

I left with the bun in a bag, now craving the sugary delight in a crack kind of way. Somehow though, in his gushing about the stickiness, he neglected to mention that the sticky buns had been sitting there for two days and were sticky only in the way a brick with a dab or mortar is, which is to say, not much. If I hadn’t already walked so far, I would have gone back, plunked down the sticky brick, and demanded my $3 back, glaring at the lemon poppyseed muffins, which were probably hard as golf balls.

Spain on the Road is one of those shows that make you wish you were driving in the back of a convertible with Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, Claudia Bassols, and Gwenyth Paltrow instead of eating congealed leftovers in front of the TV. I’m not a big Paltrow fan, but I have to respect her for traipsing around the countryside and not caring a whit about being on TV with flyaway hair. In the name of food, I wouldn’t care either. They down olive oil by the gallons, drink wine at 10 a.m., and munch on grapes straight off the vines. Really, they just talk and eat. And yet, it’s a compelling watch. It makes you yearn for good conversation over authentic tapas on a back road in Spain. Or anywhere really.

PBS describes it as “four foodie friends hitting the road.” In light of that, I’d like to propose my own PBS show where I get to take my foodie friends to a warm European locale where we would eat our way through farms and vineyards, all while wearing the most fashion-forward boots and scarves. Because that’s how my friends and I roll. Even though it’s more likely we’d be staying in hostels and subsisting on stale bread.

Blue Heron Bridge

Originally uploaded by crash575

Sometimes you need to take a long walk because it’s a Sunday in October and it’s 70 degrees and you can’t believe it because last Sunday it was a blizzard. A blizzard I tell you.

The trail along the Charles River from Watertown to Waltham meanders along under a splay of trees competing for color with plenty of lookout nooks to sit and watch the river flow by and the occasional duck making out with another duck.

And then, you happen upon the loveliest bridge and you feel like you’re in a corner of Denmark or Finland or somewhere with impressive European bridges that value form and function, but certainly not Watertown. And then you remember how great this little town is. You don’t need Denmark or the Millennium Bridge in London. You have the Blue Heron Bridge in Watertown and it’s as majestic as a blue heron and all the more special because it’s like discovering wildlife…of an architectural sort.

OK, show of hands, didn’t you want the boy to be in that balloon?

In anticipation of the release of Where the Wild Things Are today (hello, childhood), I wanted to share a little story by Maurice Sendak that Jack Kornfield relates in his book The Wise Heart. The book, by the way, is an excellent, accessible exploration of Buddhist psychology peppered with thoughtful anecdotes. And I must mention that Kornfield’s has another book that should win an award for its title alone: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

Anyway, here’s Kornfield writing about joy:

When we live in the present, joy arises for no reason. This is the happiness of consciousness that is not dependent on particular conditions. Children know this job. Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, tells the story of a boy who wrote to him. “He sent me a charming card with a drawing. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over. I sent him a postcard and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim, I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

Here’s to loving something so much you want to eat it.