A midsummer night's thoughts

Back from travel and more travel, lovely but draining. It was a conference, but a conference in Europe, so I got work credit and the benefits of seeing life from another perspective.

• The perspective of "oh, yeah, Roman ruins, no big deal" to those who live there, but a wondrous thing to me. Walking on roads that I now see are laid in the Roman pattern while not being in Rome gives me a whole sense of the empire's reach that we never got in Latin class and a new appreciation for those stylish nail-soled boots. 
• And to see foundations laid by the Romans, built up by the Normans, abandoned, reclaimed, repurposed into air-raid shelters or what have you--again, magical. Knowing that there's not a square inch that hundreds of people in previous millennia haven't already walked on--which is not the case where I live--still amazing.
• Here as there, people take their dogs everywhere, especially the elderly ladies with their tiny dogs, as a matter of course.
• How I know I'm a hopeless rube: dinner at 9:30 p.m., however delicious, takes some adjustment when you're used to getting up at 5 a.m.
• The blue of the evening sky. The moon. The moon in the blue sky even close to midnight.
• Architecture and public sculpture--aspirational, representational, and worth seeing--everywhere I looked. Things happened in these spaces, some terrible, and they were commemorated lest we forget. 
• Walking to see everything, about 10 miles a day. When you walk, you own the space in a different way than when you ride or drive. We took trams or buses some places, of course, but walked much more than we had before. In my usual walks, I feel as though I own the terrain, as Thoreau did, because I can visualize it all and see the minute changes.  Walking in a strange place gave me a temporary possession or perhaps a different understanding of it, one reinforced by all those cobblestones, narrow streets, and buildings.

Random and highly inconsequential bullets of this week

It's true that some people can read conference papers at close to the speed of sound--good papers, too, though if you're taking notes, you'd better give up before you start.

Speaking of taking notes, why is using laptops to take notes still tacitly verboten in conference sessions in the humanities? I first tried it 10 years ago and was too cowed to try it again until now, when I sat at the very back of a large session and typed my notes instead of writing them down. Since typing is my natural medium, as I suspect it is for most academics, and the notes are clearer and more organized, why don't more people type them? Or would you be suspected of doing what a person a few rows in front of me did--pulling out a laptop to check email and look up the subject of the presentation on Wikipedia?

What stopped me from typing notes in any other session was that ridiculous Windows music that plays when you start up--Bill Gates, are you listening? How about letting us turn that off? We know we're in Windows; we're not so self-esteem-impaired that we need a "Ta-da!" to celebrate turning on the computer.

When I went to check in on the return flight, the person behind the check-in desk asked if I would be checking any luggage. "No." "How would you like to check that bag if I don't charge you for it?" "Sure!" He put the tags on it, saying something about "faster to get everyone on board" if people checked luggage.

No duh. Did the airlines just figure out that we're all carrying suitcases to put overhead instead of checking them? Or that with trying to find overhead space, gate-checking bags, helping the elderly folks to put their bags overhead, and the rest it takes twice as long to load a planeful of people as it used to, even with the flight attendants haranguing you to get out of the aisle? I'm grateful to the renegade check-in desk person for his action and hope that the higher-ups in the airlines, who have probably never flown coach in their lives, will start to rethink their position about charging for luggage.

As we were waiting at the gate, a little kid, probably about two, was laughing and running around in the area with his mother in pursuit. I smiled, but the guy next to me grumbled, "Hard to tell who's in charge of who!" I said, "She's probably just letting him run around to get him tired out for the flight," to which he said, "Hm! Does he have to run around here?" I didn't want to be part of that conversation, so I moved away, but honestly, Cranky Guy: get a grip. Nobody likes it when babies cry on planes, including the parents, but babies can't help it: they're babies. They don't cry as much when they sleep, and they sleep better when they're tired, and if they're toddlers or little kids, they're more apt to be tired if they run around before they board. What part of that equation don't you understand?

[Edited to add: And I'd rather listen to a dozen babies cry than hear the loud-voiced blowhards who for some reason feel compelled to talk about various air disasters as we're taking off.]
[Apparently you can disable the startup sound: http://www.ehow.com/video_2361110_disable-annoying-windows-startup-sound.html. I wish I'd known that sooner.]

Vacation (?) misery

I started work at 5 a.m. today and feel as though I should have gotten up at 4.

I'm in vacation panic mode, which means that I have to leave soon and have a ton of deadline-driven work still to do. I will have to take it with me, along with the books that there's no Netflix for. I will have to make trips to a library an hour away to supplement these instead of hanging out with family. This is my own fault, of course, so as an extra added bonus I get to berate myself hourly for not working faster and avoiding the problem.

If I could send an avatar away on the trip I'm supposed to take and let the real me stay here and work, I totally would. Can't they hurry up with that cloning stuff so that I can have another me to work?

Oh, and why do some academics only admit to "research trips" and travel to conferences during the summer? Did they spring fully formed from the head of the academy? Why do I feel as though I need to hide the family part of this trip and emphasize its work part, which will indeed include a conference and some travel to collections, when I'm describing it to others? Could it be that, like the Marines, academics value toughness and a total devotion to the Corps over family life?

Conference notes

Being at a conference: useful. Getting back from a conference: priceless, and worth every one of the premium chocolate-covered almonds that I scarfed down as a reward when I got home.

My paper went well, as did the other obligations I had at the conference. Secret message to panelists in the session I chaired: thank you for presenting your papers in the time allotted.

Secret message to people who congregate outside the open door when a session is going on: yes, we can hear you. No, we don't want to hear you; you're drowning out the panelists. Go away or shut up, please.

Secret message to the person who sat behind me and coughed and coughed and choked and coughed and coughed, only to leave momentarily, return, and begin coughing again: I know you want to hear the panel, but the rest of us do, too. Please reconsider sitting in the audience instead of standing by the door.

Is it a compliment to hear someone praise a point you made in the previous session if that person announces the point as though it has just struck him at a new idea? Is there such a thing as oral plagiarism?

Did you ever noticed that for some people you see at conferences, you only have about 5 minutes' worth of conversation and after that you don't have much to say, even if you like them?

The best part: taking a long walk through the city in absolutely perfect weather, seeing all the signs in a language that I couldn't read, smelling the fresh and dried fruits that I couldn't identify, and watching the people going about their daily lives because it's not Fabulous City to them; it's just home.

Point to Point Navigation

I am what might politely be termed "directionally challenged." This means that, although I can read a map, I am usually lost, especially if someone's idea of giving directions is "go north two blocks and turn west." Say what? How would I know which way west is?

Thus when people tell me that they've driven into (to use joe's system of naming) Big City Like No Other or Windy City or the Land of the Bean and the Cod to see a show, an exhibit at the museum, etc., my impulse is more to ask "what route did you take?" and "where did you find a place to park?" than about the exhibit itself.

Due to frequent trips there, though, I can almost navigate around City Where Every Major Street Ends in a Bridge without getting too lost or without hurtling across a bridge into another city (and sometimes into another state). I would like to think this is because I know the streets, but after I took the wrong exit on a recent trip (i.e., not the one that Google Maps told me to take), I was able to get to the hotel by thinking to myself, "I must be close, because the trees look right." And I did get there, all because the trees looked right.

This doesn't bode well for taking up orienteering as a hobby, but did I ever feel as though I'd accomplished something once I got to my destination!