More Notes From the Road

This has been one of the odder trips I've ever taken, though thankfully not only because of the fact that I'm a little Typhoid Curmudgeon spreading my plague throughout the countryside. At the moment, for example, I'm in a living room of old grad school friends. We've had a lovely dinner, and now we're all surfing the Internet in silence.

I don't think this is what Jello meant when he said become the media.

Among the weird events was getting a "blast from the past" e-mail from a former grad-school friend (the former applies in both cases) writing to pick my brain in a passive-aggressive way. I've been holding off on the response, just because I don't particularly care to feed this cycle. As someone told me once - I think maybe the folks who made me dinner tonight, in fact - sometimes you have to remember that you can get off the bus if you don't like the trip (and if it wasn't them, they get the credit for it anyway because the dinner was, as always quite delicious: even if they claim to know - and mistook me for - someone who doesn't like gravy which, really, is at least two kinds of heresy).

There was also a bit of networking built into the trip, and that's where things get really odd. Perhaps its the culture out here to have an utter "wait and see" attitude to things, but I'm used to people actually asking a question or two sometime. Imagine just how hard it is to make a university professor more than usually bothered that no one is asking questions. It has to be extreme, doesn't it? I mean, people don't ask me all the time. You could say I get paid to have people not ask me questions (it'd be a cynical view of my job, and certainly we'd NEVER expect to see that sort of thing come out of my mouth (or keyboard)). But it could be said. So this must be extreme.

And last evening, in the hotel bar - which charged exquisitely high prices for the beer I took my Advil Cold & Sinus with - the world's oldest and worst lounge singer began to belt out tunes. I mean, he must have had some pipes when he was alive. Still, that didn't stop me from trying to find a way to request he sing "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi. If he wasn't going to have any shame, why should I?

It's been quite relaxing which is really one of the joys of things. I mean, I could fret about the fact that I'm with old friends and I'm blogging, or I could recognize that I"m in what amounts to one of the most safe and comfortable head spaces I've had going in months.