Surviving Wednesday

It may well be that I'm still sick. Or sick again. The chills are back, and the moment I felt like lying down on my office floor - dubious enough because I'm not sure anyone has ever really vacuumed them - in the middle of office hours, I began to suspect.

And yet the oddness of the day makes it compelling.

I started a sort of Facebook experiment awhile back, creating a group to organize students in the department, and it's been going well though requiring some adjustment. It's been a success in that students I don't normally hear from are contacting me, but the downside is that since I'm the only member of my department there, there are a lot of students who ordinarily should be contacting someone else are now coming to me, too. What has been really nice about it though is that it's let me look for some of our alumni - the alumni office here is another one of those spots on campus that doesn't seem to serve any function other than to make sure there's a head associated with the department's nameplate. And they're starting to chime in to conversations, reinforcing some of the things we've been making big wind about to no avail. One of them today lamented how he'd not done more internship work.

And I just heard from a job I was rejected from that someone else in the same division jumped ship, and so they're scrambling. It'd be funny if one of them went to the job I've been currently wondering about. Who knows what it means at this point, but it's an interesting hiccup to the day.

And most thrilling, my latest shipment of new music arrived, and the bit that I'm truly excited for isn't the punk stuff (a Social Distortion disc I'd been dying for and a Ted Leo and the Pharmacists disc) or the Canadian super-band escapee (Emily Haines of Broken Social Scene) but a copy of "La Boheme." I'm not ordinarily a classical fan, and I don't think most people would pick me for an opera buff (I've only seen one and if you need two guesses of which one it is, you need to read more carefully). I've been pretty hard on musical theater in my time, honestly, and find Broadway shows as a concept amusing at best.

But way back in my grad school days, our graduate secretary who may well have been a Bodhavista or a Tzadikim Nistarim (apologies for faulty spelling and conjugation there) so serene and centered and lovely was she, chanced into a pair of tickets for this opera, and unable to go, passed them on to myself and another grad student. It was a night out on the town for us - dressed up, off to a nice dinner and drinks, and the opera itself. The fact that, years later, I've bought a copy of it should tell you how amazing I found it.

I don't speak Italian, and so a lot of the subtlety may well have been lost on me. But it was truly beautiful, and I've been watching for a copy on my usual used CD site ever since. It may well be my best example for trying things you're sure you won't like just once. I'm dying to listen to it, but the roommate would be home soon, and lovely or not, opera blaring isn't the sort of thing you spring on the unsuspecting.

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.

The Only Way To Be For Spring Break

Hooray - Spring Break!
Hooray - traveling tomorrow!
Hooray - flu like symptoms!

No, really. Hooray, 'cause it wouldn't be a break without an illness or some pressing academic task so that there's little possible way to enjoy it.