I'm gonna tell you a big bad story, baby

This announcement may come as a galloping shock to some of you and as absolutely no surprise to others. But here it is:

I miss Boston.

It all started about a month ago, on a date. (Did she say "date"?! I suspect that's the part that will come as a galloping shock to some of you.) When I got in his car, the Date gallantly offered me two choices for music: XM satellite radio, or "something that will be nostalgic for you." Intrigued, I chose the latter, assuming it would be either Beatles music (we had gone to see a Beatles cover band on our second date), or '80s music.

But it turned out to be the soundtrack to Fever Pitch, the Jimmy Fallon/Drew Barrymore movie about love and romance among the 2004 Boston Red Sox season. "Awwww!" I said as I heard the opening chords of the Standells' "Dirty Water" ("I love that dirty water/Boston, you're my home").

Then there was the great Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle, during which multiple U.S. cities were infiltrated by a stealth advertising campaign for the Comedy Central show. Among them, only Bostonians freaked out and erroneously thought the ads were actually homemade explosive devices. New York Newsday published several unflattering articles about Boston's ill-conceived war on terror (and by "terror" here we mean "lame advertising concepts"), insinuating that Bostonians were merely simpering crybabies who were easily duped by talking fast food. On behalf of Bostonians, I was offended. Boston is the kind of place where residents take notice of the mysterious and sudden appearance of small, bomb-like devices on their usual route. New York, on the other hand, is the kind of city where people like David Copperfield regularly perform every stunt short of exploding into flames in Lincoln Center and no one pays much mind. We are, remember, home to the Naked Cowboy.

Then I heard Alex Trebek, on Teen Tournament Jeopardy!, do the absoute worst Boston accent ever produced by a non-Boston native (naturally, he was trying to pronounce "park the car in Harvard Yard" -- leave it to the New Englanders, Alex).

Then, more recently, the Date asked me if I ever missed Boston. I thought about it for a moment. "Yes," I said, shrugging, "but not really enough to go back there."

Alas, sometime in the past few days, my mom has developed a liking for the Augustana song "Boston" and has taken to singing it around the house, a song which contains these immortal words ripping into the Cheers theme song and tearing out its optimistic heart: "I think I'll go to Boston/I think I'll start a new life/I think I'll start it over/Where no one knows my name." Ouch, Augustana!

Still, there is something there, something that reminds me of late summer nights whizzing down Route 2, of ice skating on the Common and window-shopping on Newbury, of jogging through Medford and into Malden along the Fells. Today I almost went to see The Departed, not because it won the Oscar last night, but because I wanted to hear some Boston accents and catch a glimpse here and there of the Boston skyline: the Pru, the Zakim Bridge rising up above the chaos of the Big Dig, Fenway Park with its billboard about gun control looming over the Mass Pike.

I miss Boston -- maybe not enough to move back there, but enough to perk up when I hear it referenced, enough to click on any news links that mention it in a headline, enough to tell stories that confirm the outrageousness of Boston drivers and Boston public transportation. Enough to recognize that it is a special city, where I had special experiences with special people. Enough to carry it all around with me every day. New York may be my home, my first true love, but Boston is at least my exciting affair. New York may be where I grew up, but Boston is where I really grew up, grew into my own, grew my future life.

It's also where I learned to call traffic circles "rotaries." And that, my friends, is an important life lesson worth learning. Because you can take the girl out of Boston and put her back on the subway, but once she's driven through a Massachusetts rotary, you can not take the road rage out of the girl.