Gratuitous Picture Post

A week or two ago, I was suddenly hit with an intense desire to relax. You know--enjoy the summer without working. Not that I've been working all that much, but.... Well, what prompted it was an email in which my mother asked me if I'd started a novel that she'd lent me, and I realized in writing back to her that I hadn't been reading fiction. Forgive my italics, but it shocked me.

So--rather than reading Cloud Atlas, the erudite and clearly fabulous novel from my mom (I started it and was liking it, but I lost my train of thought)--I've been reading Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series. They start off as "mysteries," but lose that moniker pretty quickly; mostly Isabel reflects on moral philosophy, cooks risotto, and drinks wine with her youthful paramour. They're delightful, cozy, and easy on the brain (which sounds insulting, but I don't mean it that way. Look, I didn't want to work! This is a good thing). And they usually end up with some really sweet reflection on love or kindness or something. I like them.

The novels are set in Edinburgh, which brings me to my gratuitous pictures. I spent almost a week in Edinburgh back in '07, and I loved it. Today I browsed through the pictures that I took on my trip there; some of them are quite nice, so I'm sharing. Enjoy!

(And yes, all of them were taking in Edinburgh, even the ones that look like they couldn't possibly be urban--that was Holyrood Park, where I spent one of the nicest mornings I can remember.)

Q&A

Questions

Why do none of my TV-watching programs work in Europe? And why is the woman who lives across the alley from my room (actually like 6 feet away) on a Tom Jones (the musician, not the fictional character) binge? And why is she not bingeing on the character instead, since that would certainly amuse me more? Or perhaps at least be quieter? And why, for that matter, does she spend all of every day sitting either in the window or at the desk right in front of the window talking?

Seriously--every time I'm in this room, she's over there, talking. Until about 11:00 at night. Starting at about 8:00 in the morning. It's weird. But this is her home, not mine, so I suppose I can't complain. Much. A little, maybe.

***********************

Answer*

I've been reading for my Particular Subset of Theory seminar (Fall '10) this week, usually while I'm drinking beer in sidewalk cafes. You know what? Difficult Theorist is better with beer. All theory is better with beer. Yay beer!

*Unrelated, of course, to the question.

I am here

I have arrived!! --in Brussels. (Since there is virtually no chance that revealing my mysterious researching whereabouts will expose my identity, given that I haven't actually published on anything in this region, I might as well tell you where I am, right?)

I got here this morning. I thought that I was doing pretty well with the jetlag--I checked into my hotel at around 11, unpacked, walked around a bit, had lunch at the lovely vegetarian restaurant Den Teepot, then wandered through the City Museum in its entirety--but when I got back to my room it was only 2, and my legs ached so badly that I decided to nap. Then, magically, it was 4. I had some chocolate (I had wisely, but without actually thinking about it, bought a chocolate bar) and overcame my desire to just stay in bed until morning. I emerged into the beautiful (like 70-degree!) afternoon, wandered, checked out the cathedral and a park, called TM, and found an outdoor restaurant where I ate quiche and drank two high-alcohol beers.


It's about time for bed (8:30). But, because I am marvelling at it, I will share with you some pictures of my hotel. If you need a Brussels hotel recommendation (it's cheap and centrally located! And will blind you with its bling!), please do let me know.

Love the Obama poster in this one, especially since it looks like it dates from about 1967. -- Below is my room. Yes, the painting is STRANGE.


Oh! And I must mention Thursday's visit with The Rebel Lettriste & Babies. It was lovely to see Rebel L, who is funny and smart and awesome as always. And the babies, my friends, are, first of all, real (I was charged by The RL with verifying their authenticity, though I wasn't aware that there were any doubts). Second, they are little sweetikins, and I love them. If you're ever in the Lettriste's territory, I highly recommend taking one out for a walk; while they're heavy as hell, they're also utter sweethearts, and everyone who sees you will smile. It was a lovely afternoon.

(I must add that I thoroughly enjoyed watching TM, who joined us a little later, cuddle and charm the contemplative Bede. Meanwhile, active Caedmon attempted to paint my face with spit. But lord, the dazzling smiles on those guys! Even the spit--copious as it was, and goodness was it copious--couldn't detract from their charm.)

Je suis de retour

Once again, I find myself overwhelmed and paralyzed by the wealth of things that I ought to be blogging about. So, once again, I will simply jump in and write something, as disappointing as that something will doubtless be, and probably forego lengthy narratives about my trip (which would be uninteresting to all but a polite few, I'm sure).

I did, however, promise pictures. So here are three more:


That's me and TM (faces blurred) on a tandem bike near Villerville, in Normandy, atop a preposterously long hill. The bike riding was fun. However! I am a fairly established bikerider--or I was, having completed an AIDS ride in 1999, at which point centuries were a more or less weekend occurrence--and thus reasonably hardened to bicycle seat discomfort. The seat of this bike seemed pretty cushy: broad and modestly padded. But by the end of the day (we probably rode 25 miles, maximum; it was slow and heavy going), I felt that what a yoga teacher might call my sit-bones were being ground to a fine powder by means of rotation upon a granite slab. It hurt to sit down for the next two days. TM experienced discomfort, as well, but described his as more of an "impaling" sensation. We were delighted to return the bike at the end of the day.

But don't we look smart in our hats?

And here is the bizarre new branding that I discovered in Honfleur:


Hildegard has gone into business; apparently the abbess/visionary/renowned advisor thing just wasn't sufficiently lucrative. But hey, at least her remedies are organic.

This is TM admiring some curvaceous half-timbering in Honfleur:


Don't you like his hat? Unfortunately it was left behind in Paris. But since it was primarily suited to the resort-towns of Normandy--being all Proustian and all--perhaps that's for the best.

School starts soon, so substantive blogging may resume at some point. (Though there is that pesky wedding thing coming up in two weeks....)

So much...

...to do this week.
...goodness last week.
...to tell, enigmatically.

Just now, on the cusp of the last 1/4th of the academic year, I shall avoid discussing the first and postpone the last. Instead, I'll put up a few pretty pictures and tell you that, this week, I saw:

• flying fish, in abundance
• a baby heron
• a flower called a heliconia (pictured here in a photograph not by me)
  
• Dominica, an island nation of 70,000 people
  
• Iles des Saintes, a French village in the Caribbean
  
• distant volcanoes
• shipwrecks
  
• water that was so clear that, at 30+ feet, you could see the bottom.
  

And also in the past week, I

• jumped off a (sort of) high rock into a waterfall-fed pool
• hiked through a rainforest
• ate bananas, and guavas, and coconuts, and the goo around coffee and cocoa beans, and a tiny shred of cinnamon, right off their respective trees and bushes
• snorkled (in relatively uninteresting waters, alas)
• accrued several really good blisters (alas)
• spent a lot of lovely time with my dad, stepmother, and the Minister
• drank a hearty bit of rum
  
• spoke French for the first time in ages.
  

Dominica and Iles des Saintes are beautiful. Here are a few pictures for your enjoyment. I'll be thinking about them when I recommence the grading...oh, the grading...luckily I have everyone else's blogs--unread for so long--to keep me company whilst I toil!

A view of Dominica, from the top of a mountain ridge.

Bloodroot trees in the Indian River (Dominica).

Red lavender in front of a blue house (Portsmouth, Dominica).

Shipwreck in the harbor at Portsmouth.

Terre-de-Haut, Iles des Saintes.

Secluded beach on Terre-de-Haut (we were just about the only ones there).

And, because I like birds, a hummingbird in silhouette. I actually kind of like the fact that the leaves are in focus but the bird itself is not.

Just FYI

I leave for spring break tomorrow. I don't think that I've told y'all where I'm going yet, so here it is:

The Minister and I will be flying out to a remote Caribbean island known for its rainforests, volcanoes, and coral reefs, where we'll stay with my father (with whom I get along famously) and stepmother (who is fantastically cool) on their 44-foot sailboat.

Sometimes I do think that being a professor more or less rocks.

And so does having a dad who lives on a sailboat.

Better

(I'm leading this post with a picture from my trip--one advantage of jet lag is plenty of odd middle-of-the-night hours to do things like download your photographs. This is a stretch of the Great Wall that we hiked along.)

I haven't really slept at all. I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 2:30; I finally got out of bed at 4. I had all four of my classes today, too--luckily I had three of them doing a totally student-generated discussion thing that didn't require much of me, but my 2:00 class, in which I lectured/led discussion, was dismal. Oh well. That class usually rocks and I told them ahead of time that, to me, it was 3 am, so I think they were okay with it. Plus I let them out five minutes early.

Anyway, despite the sleeplessness, things are looking better than they did yesterday. Just having a work day and remembering that it isn't totally horrible here helped a lot. I've stopped rehearsing my misery in my head--which I'd been doing on and off for two full days, with particularly forceful dwelling during the 19-hour journey home. It's good to shut down that conversation for a while.

To that end, I'll change the subject altogether with a couple of pictures from my trip (I was in Beijing). I'm too tired for extensive writing, so the images will have to speak for me for the time being.

The very coolest thing that we did was a rugged 10k hike along the top of the Great Wall.


A bit of the view:

Here are some monks at the beautiful Lama Temple.


And these are some doors that I liked.

We're Just Going to Assume that This is Okay

After several long and incoherent conversations with the ticket people, I am confirmed on a flight out tonight (instead of the tomorrow morning flight they wanted to put me on.)

I just got the confirmed itinerary that I requested, and I am not only confirmed on the new flight, but apparently on the flight that's leaving, oh, right now, and that I was moved off of.

I *then* got a receipt with price information for the new flight (it's about the same, if not exactly the same, as the original price).

So I thought about calling back to confirm that a) I am not actually confirmed on two flights to Other Side, and b) that I am not expected to pay for Booking # 2.

But then I thought, "You know? I've spent a long time on hold today."

And then, "What if they tell me that I need to pay for the new flight? Of course I won't do it. I'll yell at them and risk not making it out of here at all."

So I concluded, "Far better to just show up at the airport and then, if they somehow try to make me pay (and how would they do that?), refuse."

Finally, "I'm surely just being hyper conscientious here, and there's no chance they're actually going to try to bill me for a rebooked flight when they're the ones who screwed me over in the first place."

Because the airline industry is fuzzy like that.

Right?

What Am I Doing?

I've been meaning to throw in a few words about the conference from which I returned on Sunday, but it's been a crazy scene around here, what with all the work and all. So I will just say that I had a pretty good time in general--saw some interesting panels, one not-so interesting panel (still, it was an impressive interesting-to-not ratio)--and my hotel room was fairly fabulous. Hello, first experience with room service! I made a short film about my hotel room, in fact. (By "short film," I mean that I set my digital camera to "video" and panned around the room so that I can impress TB when next I see him.) Even more splendid was the now-famous Blogger Meet-Up: I spent a good bit of time with Medieval Woman and a grad school friend, and then had a terrific dinner with the two of them and TE, What Now?, and Flavia. All good people. Flavia and I also had a drink at the hotel bar afterwards--very "Lost in Translation," indeed--and it was a pleasure to get to know her in person.

Right now, though, I'm sort of trying to write a cover letter for the tenure-track version of the job that I currently have--if writing half a sentence and then clicking over to the internet could be said to constitute "trying." I honestly don't know how to write this thing. Even addressing it to "Professor Chair" seems awkward, since I certainly don't call the chair "Professor" in real life. I have plenty of positive things to say about the job, I just don't...want to. And yes, therein lies the problem: writing this letter will involve work, whereas writing other job letters involves somewhat less work. And I don't want to work. Or, if I am going to work, I could:

• grade 23 papers
• read my advisee's prospectus
• prep for one of tomorrow's classes
• prep for the other of tomorrow's classes
• read for Thursday (lots of Dante! Yeagh!) (Pronounce that interjection as you will: glee or disgust, it's all valid)
  
• write some other cover letters
• read and check off the final paper proposals for comp (oh yeah I have to do this tonight; can't forget)
• finish reading the thing I'm supposed to have read for this meeting on Thursday morning
• wash a dish
• go to bed, for Pete's sake.

Perhaps blogging isn't the best use of my time.

Where Is My Luggage?

Yes, where is my luggage?

It was not in the airport.

It was supposed to be delivered to me at my house 22 minutes ago.

Perhaps I am holding the luggage delivery person to too high a standard of punctuality, but nonetheless I ask:

Where is my luggage?

*Fuller report on the conference that I attended with said luggage to appear shortly.

Update: Luggage has arrived! Two hours late, but still well before bed time. All is well.

Minor Crises

As I prepare for my campus visit, I can't quite assimilate the fact that I'm leaving TOMORROW MORNING. And that I therefore need to get everything done TODAY. In connection with these little surges of stress, I've identified several small crises, or if not crises then problems, which I don't know how to deal with/don't want to deal with. (Yes, of course there's a distinction, but at this point I'm not quite making it.)

Minor Crisis no. 1: Clothing.
I'm fine for the interview proper. I have a suit which is season-appropriate and comfortable, and a little blue shirt that I wear under it which is actually kind of a flattering color. I'm experiencing a bit of anxiety over necklaces--my mock-interviewers told me that I should wear a necklace in order to appear less severe--because the only quasi-grown-up necklaces I own are, themselves, severe: picture a silver rectangle on a silver chain. (I have two that fit that description, in fact.) I have less severe necklaces, but they're little beaded things that might not be nice enough. But. The point is that I'm pretty much fine for the interview.

But I'm also having dinner with the search committee chair tomorrow night, and am really not sure what to wear. I don't want to wear a suit; it would be uncomfortable, for one (my second suit is not as nice as my main one), and besides there's not a chance that it would be appropriate for whatever restaurant we go to. This is a small midwestern town we're talking about, here. And I don't want to look all intense and hyper-professional. I'm probably going to wear pinstripe pants, a plain shirt, and a nice-ish cardigan/sweater; I could wish for a better sweater, but this might be the best I can do.

And then they've actually built in time in my Monday schedule for me to "change for dinner." What does this mean? Change into what? Can't I just wear my suit? I strongly suspect that this time is in there simply because they don't know what else to do with me for the hour and a half between my last meeting and dinner, but it makes me feel like I have a responsibility to change clothing. I have a skirt/sweater ensemble I could wear, but it kind of makes me feel young and vulnerable. It's funny how clothes affect you psychologically--I feel vastly more myself in jeans than I do in anything else, and most of my clothes are kind of...childish. At least, they feel childish to me. Oh well. There is no time to shop.

Minor Crisis no. 2: Laundry.
I don't have enough quarters. I thought I did, but I don't.

Minor Crisis no. 3: The Job Market Is Not Over.
There are applications that I'll need to mail out during the 3-hour window in which I'm back in Homecity on Tuesday, and I need to write these up today.

And I, like, really really don't want to.

Minor Crisis no. 4: Surely there's something else?
Because I won't be back in town for, effectively, 12 days, I can't help but feel that I'm forgetting...something...many things, most likely? Ohhhh I don't want to pack and get my house ready for vacancy! Not again!

Somebody make me stop this infernal whining. Everything I have to do in the next couple of weeks (short of the campus visit, which I'm really really happy to be going on, even if it'll be stressful) will be highly enjoyable. I think I'm just having a bit of a paralyzing freak-out, for lack of a better term. Because, um, I didn't know until yesterday that I'd be leaving tomorrow? And I've kind of been letting things slide this week due to my post-vacation readjustment? And stuff?

Oh, but it does make me look forward to getting to my mom's house and being Taken Care Of for a couple of days. And needless to say I'm very excited to be seeing my partner again, after nearly a month apart!

Why do I do this to myself?

Okay, because I like visual aids, here are my travel plans for the next few weeks:

Sunday, 5/6 (pm): fly out for campus visit
Tuesday, 5/8 (am--very EARLY am): fly back to homecity
Tuesday, 5/8 (pm): 4-hour train ride to partner's city (I'm giving myself this one treat: train, NOT bus!)
Thursday, 5/10 (am): 2-hour bus ride north to Momville, for my sister-in-law-to-be's bridal shower
Saturday, 5/12 (pm): 2-hour bus ride back to partner's city
...several days of not going anywhere...
Thursday, 5/17 (am): 4-hour bus ride back to homecity
Saturday, 5/19 (am): 1.5-hour train ride to friend's wedding; home that day, presumably
Thursday, 5/24 (pm): 4-hour bus ride back to partner's city
Friday, 5/25 (am): fly out to college reunion
Monday, 5/27 (TOO damn early am): fly back to partner's city...
...where I will stay, for some indefinite time, until I miss my house too vividly and have to go home.

Bear in mind, if you will, that I just got back from Europe on Monday.

Can't I just, like, not move for a few weeks?

Home home home

Ah, jet lag. Yes, it's 6 am; and no, I didn't go to bed early, like a smart jet-lagged person; although I got back to my apartment at 10:00 I stayed up for two more hours, fixing a pot of spaghetti and watching "Sex and the City." And unpacking, albeit in a rather haphazard fashion.

Today's just going to be kind of a grind, is all. I have three things to do:

• file my dissertation (10:30 am)
• have my picture taken for the brochure pertaining to my fellowship (11:30 am)
• stay awake in seminar (12-2)
• come home and expire from fatigue.

Okay, that's four things, but the fourth clearly doesn't count.

(Upon rereading this list, I fail to feel any self-pity. My schedule is so absurdly light. Where do I get off complaining?)

So where am I back from, you ask? Iceland! I can tell you that, because of course my conference wasn't actually in Iceland; I simply stopped over there on my way home. It's a weird and interesting place--I kind of feel like the entire time I spent there (about 48 hours) was a dream. There are so few people and so much wind. Yes, the wind is terrific. And everywhere there are flag poles with no flags on them, banging away in the wind. I don't think I ever actually saw it get fully dark, either, since I went to bed at around 10 on both nights and the sun seemed to be all the way up by about 4:30. The light is also remarkable, being always on the slant, and so the colorful houses on the hills of Reykjavic look terribly picturesque. Reykjavic itself, however, was not as picturesque as I'd imagined. In fact, it's somewhat stark, being neither particularly quaint nor particularly modern. The houses are mostly covered in corrugated metal which is then painted; the paint was usually chipped and peeling, owing, I imagine, to the harsh climate. This picture will give you an idea of a typical street:


It's also extremely expensive. Here's the cafe where I ordered The World's Smallest $12 Sandwich:


Seriously, it was about the size of a cracker. It was good, though. I ate only one actual "meal" per day while I was over there; it was all I could afford.

I started to write a more detailed post about where I've been, what I did, etc., but I'm not sure that such a thing would be all that interesting. I'm not particularly interested in writing it, at any rate. So here are just some thoughts and observations, in no particular order:

• Whiskey is a good thing. I knew this before, but my love for it has been renewed.
• It's okay for me, a WOMAN, to go to a bar by myself. Always before when I've traveled alone, or been alone on an overseas trip--at 25, 27--I've been somewhat apprehensive about Going Out by myself. Which is a shame, because on those trips I often found myself somewhat restless and lonely, and kind of bored in the evenings. But I thought that going to a bar alone would make me too much of a target, or something. And so it might. Within reason, however, it can certainly be done, and on the second major leg of my trip (I was in Scotland; the odds of anyone using that information to track me down just seem too remote), I went out a couple of times and had a beer by myself. And it was fine. Oh, my stupid social anxiety. Most nights I went pretty early--like dinner-time--but for some reason even that used to scare me. And the one night when I actually went to a bar at night, because I wanted to hear some live folk music, I sat at the bar with my book and had a lovely time. It's true that men talked to me, sometimes, and in fact at this particular bar I ended up having a rather long conversation with a 28-year-old guy with OCD who has recently become interested in Wicca. But that was fine, too, and frankly it's nice to talk to someone now and again. I wasn't taking any weird risks, and I wasn't drinking very much, and so there wasn't much more to be afraid of than there is in the normal course of affairs. (There was one guy who was less fine, and hit on me rather too freely, on a different night; but that was at 7 pm, whilst I was writing some postcards, of all provacative behaviors, and he was clearly very drunk, and the bartenders sort of hovered around keeping an eye on things until the besotted fellow took his leave. That was annoying, and unpleasant. One should never declare that one is in love with a person that one has met less than five minutes previously, by the way; it doesn't quite ring true.) Anyway the point is that I realized I'm capable of handling myself, of making it clear that I'm not interested in anything flirtatious, and of not denying myself a small pleasure that I desire. It was actually kind of exciting.
• I don't think that I want to spend my whole life in a city. Every time I came into a new city, I was vastly more interested in whether I could get into the surrounding countryside--of course, it helped that I was in some places with exceptionally beautiful countryside. But this is a tendency that I've noticed in myself before; when I had to go to Denver for a conference a few years back, for instance, I managed to get out to Boulder within 48 hours of my arrival.
• Youth hostels aren't all that bad, if you can ignore all the other people. Especially the deranged 37-year-old gamblers who are on an overt husband hunt (and who think that the 14th century refers to the 1400s. Gah!). Remind me to tell you that story some day.
  
• I've spent a weirdly long time crafting this post.

And on that note, I think I'll finish up. More later.

Oh hey! I got some good news at the very end of my trip. An extremely obscure, tiny literary journal would like to publish one of my stories. That makes two extremely obscure, tiny literary journals in which I will have published!

I'm Off

...in a couple of hours. It's weird to be leaving so late in the day; I feel at loose ends.

I'm really looking forward to this trip: it's the first time that I've been able to justify overseas travel for work! I'm starting off at a conference in a city I've been to before but never for very long (I'm taking an extra day to walk around and look at things), and then I'm travelling to two new places--one on a layover on the flight back. I'm not taking my computer. I'm not taking any work. Well, I am taking some fiction that I want to revise, but that doesn't really count.

There's one downside to this whole expedition, however. When I bought the tickets, months and months ago, I kind of figured that I'd have next year sorted out by now, and, well, I don't. So I'm having my calls forwarded to my partner's phone, and I'll be checking in with him and checking email all the time while I'm gone, in case someone wants to contact me. Which means that there's a little shred of stress associated with my trip, but there's nothing to be done for that.

And honestly, I've been feeling so much better about the job thing recently. I don't know exactly why, except that maybe I "hit bottom" (as they say) a few weeks ago and came to terms with it? I don't know. But I think that I've worked out the worst case scenario for next year, and am taking some steps to lock that in as a back-up, and it isn't so terrible. In fact, WCS would allow me to visit my partner every weekend--unheard of!--since I'd only be about two hours away from him. And it would give me some time to start working on a new article, maybe. (Provided I could get access to an academic library somewhere. But that should be manageable.) So, while I'm still holding out hope for a couple of things, and some outcomes would be more exciting than others, I actually think that I'm okay with whatever happens. This is such a huge relief. And it's helping me to not resent or envy the few people I know who did get jobs this year, especially who were also on the market for the first time. Besides, it's not all that long until next year's JIL comes out!

But the point is that I'm going away. I plan to check in from the road periodically, but I'm not sure how often I'll actually do that, and I probably won't be reading many blogs while I'm gone (but oh, the hours of reading delight that will await me upon my return!).

................................................................

In completely other news, I've been thinking a lot about the VATech shooting. I don't have anything to say about it that hasn't been said, better, elsewhere. But my thoughts and sympathy go out to all of those who were affected. It's such a terrifying thing to have happened. Words fail me.