Three years and two months ago I arrived in Funky City for my first tenure-track job. At last, my job had come along! My temping days were over, but alas, life was no song. My landing was not gentle, and I’ve written about some of the disasters that greeted me here. I often felt I [...]
Archive for the ‘happy trails’ Category
11 Aug
The smell of privilege in the morning: a self-loathing post, complete with colon-ized title
I have a confession: occasionally I read mommy blogs. Very occasionally. I stumbled upon them way back when I was paying off Sallie Mae and googling about for tips on how to save money by hoarding toilet paper and tampons, and not because my biological clock is ticking. I have no maternal instinct: just ask [...]
14 Jul
Bloodsuckers!
Home again, home again, with, oh, thirty souvenirs from Interesting City: thirty mosquito bites, more or less evenly distributed, on my legs. But one standout stands out from the rest, ruining my uniformly poxy pattern of calamine patches. Yeah, calamine. I’m old school. On my right calf, one welt is so engorged that my leg [...]
2 Jul
The One
Nary a week into summer, and already it’s wasting away as I prepare for my one summer conference, a gift from your children and our future selves the Bush XLIII administration. For once, I am not presenting, and I am just about going mad with anticipation at the prospect of listening to what other people [...]
10 Jun
Don’t do it!
After months of ratcheting up fares to keep up with fuel costs, the airlines are now contritely rescinding their most recent increases. Such was not the case two weeks ago, when I realized I had no choice but to go to Weird City to inspect some papers at one of the world’s most gloriously excellent [...]
27 Apr
What I am doing with my Bush bucks
Like many estadounidenses, I am awaiting a small windfall, a going-away fuck-all-y’all from the White House’s current occupant, a cynical attempt to stimulate the economy by tempting the rubes at the bottom of our socioeconomic hierarchy to go hog-wild on plasma TVs, designer shoes, Wii, artisan cheese, and 1925 first editions of The Great Gatsby [...]
23 Mar
Spring breakage
Chthunk!
That was me, landing in Funky City after twenty-one hours of planes, trains, and automobiles. And waiting.
Most of those hours were spent in a middle seat, next to a long-legged young man who, despite my passive-aggressive attempts to push him within the borders of his allotted space in coach, seemed continually poised for a pelvic [...]
18 Mar
Ten pounds of copies!
I’m blogging from a world capital, at an exclusive, top-secret location whose name rhymes with the Schmittish Schmybrary. For shits and giggles (and research) I’ve been in the Music Reading Room listening to recordings and looking at scores, from which I want to make a few copies.
Heretofore I had been enjoying such a charmed trip [...]
16 Mar
The milk of human kindness. I lacks it.
Unless something extraordinary happens, like a fare I can afford, I tend to fly on weekends. It may be that I am just so unobservant that I should not be allowed to bathe and feed myself or operate heavy machinery, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I realized that weekend flights are also family [...]
1 Mar
Looks like I’ve won
. . . a passport makeover!
But this makeover has a more successful ending than all three episodes I’ve seen of Later Today, whose programming seems as dedicated to “Ambush Makeovers” of people who don’t need really them as Maury Povich’s is to paternity tests for those who do. Don’t ask me how I know about [...]
