It’s unusually cool and cloudy for an April day in Santa Monica. It’s almost exactly the kind of weather that I’ve experienced on many a Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts. Patriot’s Day is more festival than holiday; a day when citizens and visitors can watch the Red Sox play at 11am and cheer on the thousands running through the city streets in the country’s most prestigious marathon. 

I wish I were there today, but I am grateful that somehow it seems that Los Angeles is making its own tribute to Boston in the form of the weather.

I find that indulging in nostalgia too often can lend itself to missed opportunities to love the place that you are in the present, so I try to reserve those moments for when they are truly deserved. Today, in honor of the best day of the year for athletic tradition in Boston I felt it appropriate to reflect on how much those streets really do mean to me.

Many of my best moments of thought and reflection were spent walking the streets of Boston. The only time I have come close to that out here is on the beach walk from Santa Monica toward Venice just at the start of sunset. It’s magnificent and calming and reminds me to be enormously thankful for the blessings that allow me to live here.

But that was how I always felt when I walked through Boston. Even in my hurries. Even when rushing through traffic to get to the Garden for work or after a 30-minute adventure trying to park on Hanover Street. Once I was there and free from the maddening frustration of being on wheels in Boston, it was damn near impossible to be upset about anything.

It did something special for my consciousness. I found a special type of peace whenever I walked the city, whether I was by myself or with others.

I viscerally remember my ambles along the ocean in the seaport or past the Italian cafes in the North End. I loved navigating the cobblestone streets on Beacon Hill and near Faneuil Hall or strolling the tree-lined streets and brick of Newbury St. I even liked pushing my way along the crowded pub-filled sidewalks of Landsdowne and Yawkey.

This may sound like a bunch of poetic memory that has been generously rewritten in my mind with time and 3,000 miles. I promise you that it’s not. Some of it I’m sure can be credited to the fact that I was young and vibrant in my enthusiasm for being on my own in one of the greatest cities in the world. But I’m still young and vibrant so I know it wasn’t just that.

I felt it as a teenager, taking the commuter rail to the Patriots and Red Sox parades. I felt it as a college kid, celebrating my 21st birthday at Fanueil Hall and taking buses from my college campus to the bars near Causeway Street. I felt it when I’d go to the theater district to see a show with my mom or to the TD Garden to watch the Bruins with my stepdad.

I stood by myself in line for a concert at the House of Blues, attempting to go over the bizarre circumstances of my relationship in my head after I’d been ditched by my off-again boyfriend. It was the type of moment that generally would’ve forced me into a cab on my way home to drink wine and cry. Yet standing in an alley staring at the ugly backside of Fenway Park’s walls while sound check murmured behind the closed doors was a quintessential Boston-music-fan moment for me, and it made me feel calm and grateful.

It wasn’t just the thrill of being in the big city. It was just Boston.

One of my last memories of walking through the city before I moved was parking just around the corner from Fenway Park and walking to an academic building on the Boston University campus as a guest speaker about life as a young professional in sports media. It was the culmination of a lot of important things in my life, just as I was about to embark on a massive new journey.

I remember the exact shade of grey of the pavement on the sidewalk, and the faint waft of pub food from the bars around the corner. My heels were killing my feet. Once my ego had been fed by a bunch of enthusiastic college kids I went to meet my friends for dinner at a Mexican place nearby.

Yes, I believe my last meal in the city of Boston before I moved to Los Angeles was at a Mexican joint. How apropos.

It was one of the only times I can remember not loving my walk through Boston, because I knew it would be one of my last for a while. It was bittersweet.

The streets of Boston, the heart of the people running in them and lining their sidewalks and the history of this day are powerful. It is an experience that is inimitable, just as the city itself is. I have been away long enough now that these memories have become important keepsakes. I had them tucked them away in a safe place so I could take them out when I want to feel a little piece of “home.”

I took them out for the first time today. Thank you for taking that trip back home with me. I love you always, Boston. 

In case you haven’t heard by now, McHenry is a D.C.-based reporter for ESPN that recently had the misfortune of having an ugly, expletive fueled rant at a towing facility videotaped and released to the public to go viral. She has been suspended one week by ESPN and has since issued an apology on Twitter.

“In an intense and stressful moment, I allowed my emotions to get the best of me and said some insulting and regrettable things," McHenry wrote.

"As frustrated as I was, I should always choose to be respectful and take the high road. I am so sorry for my actions and will learn from this mistake." 

People I love and respect very much have sent me links with articles featuring the Britt McHenry video and remarked that perhaps this doesn’t help the cause for women in sports. Seriously though, let’s not even go there. 

If public incidents were an indication of ineptitude in the sports television industry, ESPN would have been the one-woman 24-hour Robin Roberts channel a long time ago. Women in the industry have enough hurdles to clear without being held accountable for one woman’s rant after her car was towed.

In fact, I don’t think McHenry herself is accountable to anyone but the employee she berated. She didn’t break the law. She didn’t cross a physical boundary. She didn’t break a major moral code of conduct. She was insolent and crude to a person at a place where people are insolent and crude on a regular basis.

The reason I want people to empathize with McHenry is because the things that really irked people within her verbal assault are a direct reflection of the image of that society and her employer push on her every day.

Being a female in a sports newsroom or on a sideline you learn very quickly that these two things are extremely important to your success: how you look, and where you went to school. Obviously women across all industries deal with this, but it is particularly represented on a microcosmic level in TV. It is reiterated persistently in every aspect of the work day.

The way McHenry looks and her Northwestern education were paramount to her achieving her position at ESPN. She may be a great reporter, but those two factors were more than likely a too-large majority for why she was awarded her highly-coveted position. If I know that, then she knows that.

McHenry grew up in a society that already over-emphasizes the fact that being attractive and going to the best school and having the best grades and maybe even being on television is directly correlated to ultimate success. So she went to one of the best journalism schools in the country, worked nights and weekends to prove herself and made sure she always looked as perfect as possible. Then ESPN validated all of that for her by offering her this chance at her dream job.

So now she receives feedback on social media every single day about her physical appearance and how that may or may not affect her ability to do her job. People constantly make the way she looks a focal point of her day. And it’s not just people on social media. It’s her coworkers, her bosses and her bosses’ bosses. It’s the other reporters and writers and producers in the field. It’s the athletes that she is interviewing.

The incessant commentary on her face, her hair, her body, her makeup, her outfits and her place within the ranks of other attractive female reporters is relentless. Despite the fact that this incident has caused a media frenzy over the last few days, these were links found on page one of the google search “Britt McHenry hot”.

Stunning Photos of Sports Reporter Britt McHenry
Hot pictures of ESPN reporter Britt McHenry from Instagram
Britt McHenry hot photos
Britt McHenry hot Instagram photos

So now you put her in a situation where she is angry because her car was towed (which is how everyone reacts when their car is towed), and she is probably feeling victimized in some way by this inconvenience. For context, check out the Yelp! Reviews of this place. There is a strong possibility that she was the target of some unethical business practices. Add that to the normal tow-related stress and now most people are on their last nerve.

So in her rage, she asserts her superiority by drawing from what everyone around her tells her is worth valuing about herself; her looks, her education and her job that she attained through said looks and education. She may have been in the wrong, but she is still a human being whose adult life has been shaped entirely by those two very shallow signifiers of self-worth.

Whether she had a right to get that angry, I cannot say. But it seems a little unfair that now everyone decides to say “Wait a second, Britt. We can all talk about how hot you are and tell you that you need to be smart and pretty simultaneously in order to win our approval. It’s our right to assert that unnecessarily, not yours.”

I don’t follow that logic.

The there’s this gem from Deadspin: Britt McHenry has a history of being rude. Are you kidding me? Am I the only person on the planet that thinks that pointing out that someone in the entertainment industry is rude is redundant? Not only do I not care, but that applies to so many people who do that job that it just ends up looking a little more than biased when you single one person out for it.

Especially when you make the mistake of using Bill Simmons and KEITH OLBERMANN as examples of people who don’t need “camps” to speak on their behalf. Excuse me Deadspin, but do you really want to go down the Simmons/Olbermann white-dudes-who-are-inexplicably-still-employed-and-paid-exorbitant-amounts-of-money-by-ESPN rabbit hole right now?

I didn’t think so.

The human characteristic of being rude is something everyone encounters on a daily basis. But being rude to a random person outside of work does not get you suspended from your job. It just makes you a jerk. Maybe McHenry is just a jerk who is full of herself and thinks she is better than other people and treats most strangers this way. If she is, then she fits right in with a large majority of people that are standing on the sideline right along with her.  

Or maybe she's not that much more rude that the next guy. Maybe she just gets defensive and derisive when her integrity is attacked and she got caught in a pretty low moment on a video camera. If I turn on the TV right now, within minutes I could find a semi-famous millionaire screaming obscenities and throwing a glass at someone’s face before security interferes. And I could find that on various different shows on multiple channels. 

Maybe we are misplacing our societal outrage.