wickedqueen.net

So it’s 5:00 am, and I have been awake for an hour.

I don’t need to be awake, actually, for another 30 minutes (the plan is to leave for the airport at 6:15), but as I was recently remarking to a friend who finds she cannot sleep in anymore, although I CAN sleep in (although I was truly surprised a week or two ago when I actually slept until 12:30 on a weekend–I was pretty sleep-deprived after ASA, though), since I have gotten old,* I find that if I am woken up, I cannot go back to sleep. I, who used to have lengthy conversations with people and then roll over remembering NOTHING, slowly drifting back to consciousness four hours later,** can no longer get back to sleep if someone calls me at 8:30 on a Saturday.***

Usually I don’t just randomly wake up on my own 90 minutes before I need to, at least, but I guess I’m a little stressed out about the day’s itinerary. Very shortly I will need to put on my special Compression Pantyhose, a must-have for the clotty traveler. They are like a girdle for the lower 2/3 of my body. When I arrive at the airport in Madison, there will be a mad dash to the bathroom to get out of them, let me tell you.

I just hope that I packed my giant sherpa backpack lightly enough that it will actually fit under the seat in front of me. On my flight from Boston to San Francisco in May, it was stuffed to near-zipper bursting and could not be wedged underneath to save my life, but for some reason none of the flight attendants seemed too bothered about it, so I got to ride with my feet up for approximately six hours. This time I tried to leave some wiggle room–perhaps even enough that I might be able to fit a four-pack of mini-bottles of wine in there. They sell them past the security checkpoint at SFO, you know, for $10. Since the tiny bottles of wine are $5 apiece on the plane, and I am typically forced to consume two of them for medical reasons,**** this represents quite a savings.

The packaging for the mini-bottles of wine, incidentally, suggests that you might like to take wine cycling, hiking, or BOATING. No mention is made of air travel–too obvious, maybe.

At any rate, it is time for breakfast. Don’t want to drink on an empty airborne stomach.

—

*I’ll be 26 on November 6 if you were thinking of sending a card, or perhaps some black crepe.

****Blood thinner.

Really, being this nomadic and yet NOT being an itinerant folk musician is just Not On.

I am leaving Mountain View in like 15 minutes. Lunch with friends in downtown Palo Alto, afternoon/evening in San Francisco, and a ride to the airport in the morning. Internet access will be spotty, although I MAY have my home DSL connected as early as Monday–but it never does to put too much trust in ATT, of course.

There is sociology karaoke on Thursday. Huzzah.

(I shipped a bazillion boxes of crap to Madison on Tuesday night, and guess what I forgot to pack? MY COOKBOOKS. I had to put like six cookbooks in my checked luggage. Yeah, I think I’m going over the weight limit again. Damn my domesticity.)

Isn’t it cute how I totally thought I’d be writing my dissertation by now?

To be fair, I do have a paper I wrote this spring that I plan to transform into a chapter, and I also didn’t realize when I made the post linked above that I would be spending Spring 2007 as a not-TECHNICALLY-enrolled visiting student at MIT rather than taking classes for actual credit back in Madison. I’d still only have a semester of coursework left, except that our required methods course is ONLY offered in the spring. It’s not so bad; I’m going to be TA’ing anyway, so a light course load is a good thing. And I HAVE passed both my prelim exams, which is probably difficult to appreciate if you don’t have any of your own to take, but believe me, it’s a relief (even if no one can figure out how I managed to finish prelims and still have classes left to take). Finishing up my coursework this spring, I should still be able to get out by Spring 2010, which puts my time in the program at the average for students entering without an MS (seven years*).

I still want a dining room table. And possibly another cat,** because I have not done enough damage to my marital prospects with all this graduate education.

I’ll be back in Madison in a week.*** It’s a little weird to consider, having spent a year away in places with TRAINS and many sources of Indian food, but at least they got a Trader Joe’s, and I miss my friends there. I’m feeling more positive about it this week than I have pretty much since last September, which I suppose could be a last-ditch self-preservation trick of my subconscious, but you know, whatever, I’m willing to just think I’m content if necessary. I’m looking forward to the farmers’ market, and having my cats again (and a vet who I trust at the UW vet school), and half-price cocktails at the Opus (the Cha Cha Cha matches my hair, and as we have recently learned, is a vital source of antioxidants by virtue of containing berries in its alcohol). I’m looking forward to classes (yes, finishing them especially) and being a TA.

I’m also looking forward to buying a commuter-road bike. Any recommendations on where to buy a new bike in Madison? Preferred retailers, etc.? I sold my 10-year-old mountain bike on craigslist this weekend,**** so this week I am riding my absent housemate’s commuter-road bike. I feel as if I have gone from a comfortable, well-bred mule to a high-strung Arabian warhorse, but this is probably largely due to the bicycle frame being too big for me, even with the seat all the way down. I still don’t want another mountain bike; even the good ones are too heavy for my needs. I do, however, anticipate that I will probably have to paint the new bike myself if I want it to suit me.

—

*Mention this figure to a student in the hard sciences and watch them recoil in horror, but I sort of like the symbolism of it–v. folkloric. About the length of time you’d expect to spend, say, in the thrall of an evil witch+ or asleep inside a pearl at the bottom of an ocean of dragon spit.

+Not to imply anything about my advisors. No! Really! Please let me graduate.

I know it’s because a lot of the early literature focuses on them, which makes sense because they were actually a new and vibrant online community when the early research was being done, but at this point I don’t think they’re terribly relevant unless you’re trying to explain the difference between hard core internet geezers and everyone else, which hardly anyone ever is.

So anyway, I got back from ASA and I’m tired because my internal clock thinks it’s midnight and the margaritas from happy hour at Compadres to celebrate my triumphant return have worn off.**

I met a lot of cool people doing interesting work, and I thought that our presentation on third places in virtual worlds went quite well, especially when you consider that it took place at 8:30 in the morning on the first full day of the conference. A more substantive post may or may not follow in the next few days; please recall that I now have 10 days to pack all my shit and move back to Wisconsin. And there’s a poster presentation at PARC in there somewhere, too.

—

*Year chosen because that’s the year I started playing MUDs, but I was sort of late. And they didn’t really take off at my junior high, although I did inspire a few fellow orc slayers.

**After the conference, I felt it was best to gradually reduce the alcohol consumption rather than abruptly cutting it off.

So it took me 90 minutes to bike into work today, but I think I can shave off some time tomorrow by not going 6.2 miles out of my way.*

First I forgot my cell phone. That cost me about a mile, but the real problem was when I forgot that Arastradero doesn’t start until after you cross El Camino, and failed to turn left on Charleston. Because I had written down directions for myself off the Gmaps Pedometer route I plotted over a map of bike lanes in the area, I was TOTALLY SURE that I was not supposed to turn left on Charleston, despite the niggling doubt in my mind as I sped through intersection after intersection with no sign of Arastradero. This is the peril of documents,** even ones that we ought to know are not exactly 100% reliable given that we created them yesterday and are notoriously bad at navigation in general. They just seem so authoritative. Oops.

So I didn’t lift any weights when I got in as I’d originally planned; just showered and changed and came upstairs to my office. At least I know how to get from home to work now, and am in good enough shape that I can handle a 6.2 mile detour.

As you may have gathered, I am safely in California–mostly moved in, even, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of my friends Greg and Stevie, who let me ship my many, many belongings to their apartment, helped me get my luggage and packages from my motel to my summer lodgings, and even took me in to the bike shop to get my bike reassembled this weekend. The house where I’m renting a room is pretty nice, and has pretty much everything I could ask for in the kitchen; I’ve already been baking up a storm. I’m hoping to finish organizing all my crap this week, so that my room doesn’t look so much like a dozen boxes of clothing, jewelry, and office supplies exploded in there. And I’m also planning to actually update again; I know everyone will be so pleased.

AMAZING CALIFORNIA DISCOVERY: There is a box karaoke place in Cupertino*** that has Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain”**** in their catalog. This is like the holy fucking grail of karaoke for me; now I just need to find “Season of the Witch” and “When U Were Mine.”

And Stevie even took the best karaoke photo ever, as a bonus.

BEDSPREAD UPDATE: So Stevie took me to Target to pick up all the random stuff I still needed despite having shipped a dozen boxes of my crap to California, and I got a new bedspread to replace the one that, you may recall, I jettisoned in Boston because I hated it. At first I wasn’t seeing anything that really appealed to me in Target Housewares, but then I realized it was probably because I was looking in the adult bedding section. In the children’s section I found a comforter in PINK CAMOUFLAGE. Naturally I pounced on it. Now no one can sneak up on me when I’m sleeping! It is, after all, when I am at my most vulnerable.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COMMENTERS: If at any time you ever posted a comment here and it never showed up, it’s because it got lost in comment spam. I had like 10,000 of the freaking things and just mass deleted them all, so I’m sorry if I accidentally trashed any legitimate comments along with the rest. I’ve just enabled a special spam-busting plugin that will hopefully solve this problem, though.

—

*Yes, that pretty much doubled the length of the ride.

****No one ever knows this song. Belinda Carlisle is probably best known for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and possibly “Circle in the Sand”; at least these are the two songs you can expect to find at every karaoke joint. They NEVER have “Summer Rain,” except in Cupertino. Lyrics here.

Seriously. I counted, and I have moved five times in the last twelve months. It is FUCKING CRAZY.

Right now I am bleaching the shower. I have to do this every time I move, because I am basically a big reddish pink contaminant, and lately I keep getting these unbelievably bitchtastic landlords as if to punish me for the SAINTLY landlord I had for two years in Madison (Bruce at SRM; he is awesome).

A friend is giving me a ride to the airport tomorrow, thank god; I spent today running around doing last-minute errands–like shipping my bike, which as it turned out really shouldn’t have been a last-minute errand, but it’s done.*

So: I fly to San Francisco tomorrow. It’s a direct flight, which I guess is sort of nice, except it means I’m in the air for six hours and I don’t have an aisle seat and I have to get up every 45 minutes or so for a little turn around the cabin, lest I get a blood clot and die. The last time I tried to use this little factoid to maneuver the old guy in the aisle seat into switching with me, he just made a face at me and told me to get over myself. So at least I didn’t have to feel bad about making him get up every 45 minutes.

I will be wearing my anti-clotting prescription pantyhose, and taking aspirin, and possibly drinking heavily. I picked up four trashy paperback thrillers at the library sale table today for a grand total of $1,** so at least I don’t have to pay airport bookstore prices like I did on the way back from Chicago***–$35 I paid for TWO BOOKS, although I admit one of them was a hardback. It was the only thing that looked good to me. The books from the library sale should be better than staring at the back of a fellow passenger’s head for six hours, anyway.

Then a friend is picking me up at the SF airport, and I’m hanging out with her and her fiance (with whom I went to junior high, so I actually knew him first) over the weekend, and heading down to Palo Alto on Monday, where I have a motel room for the four nights until I can move into the room I’m renting in Mountain View. I start work on Tuesday. Oh, this whirlwind life I lead.

So you can understand why I may well not post for another ten days. But eventually there will be pictures of the Bay Area to make up for it.****

—

*Let’s just say it’s probably a good thing I was wearing that wonder bra when I set out to talk the bike shop guy into packing my bike in an afternoon instead of, like, three days.

****And also of my empty Boston apartment, in case at any point in the future I need evidence that I did not, in fact, wreck the joint.

I’m still in the process of unpacking all my crap, and the landlady is still in the process of finishing my kitchen. There’s a lot of good furniture, however (I rented it furnished), and most importantly, my apartment is equidistant from a) a library and b) a liquor store.

And when I say “equidistant,” I mean, “two blocks in either direction.”

Hannah sure wasn’t kidding when she said it was the scariest building on the block, but I’d say it is a fine place to settle.

Tomorrow I am going to MIT to fill out the paperwork for my visiting student ID, which I assume will allow me to use the gym as well as various more scholarly facilities. I’m a little nervous about it because I have to take the bus and it’s not that I mind buses–hell, I love mass transit of all kinds–but I am very, very bad at following directions, figuring out the way to a place, and for that matter, figuring out where the hell I am at any given moment. My sense of direction, or more specifically my complete lack of one, is the stuff of legend.

Fortunately (?) the only way that the transit website trip planner will show me how to get from here to there without transferring requires me to leave at 9:00 am, and my appointment is not until noon. I figure I can wander around and try to get my bearings around the campus and still have time to actually find the relevant building.

I am fully planning to post photos of the new apartment, but you’ll have to wait until I have everything put away and decorated. So far I’ve put up only a few items: my Hello Kitty white board on the fridge, my frippy bunny painting in the kitchen, my photo montage/bulletin board in the hall, my photo montage/mirror in the bedroom, and the Scary Child in the living room.

Nothing says “home” like the Scary Child.

Written mid-afternoon; posted from the motel in Harrisburg, PA*

—

What makes Legba so difficult to medicate, aside from the fact that he is near 20 pounds of solid muscle, is his absolute terror of almost everything. When you try to give him, say, a tranquilizer, he is 20 pounds of solid muscle fighting for his life. As Dad discovered at 6:15 this morning.

So he didn’t get a tranquilizer. It was touch and go there for a few minutes whether we were going to be able to get him out of my parents’ basement, but fortunately I’d had the foresight not to feed him for over 12 hours, so he was eventually lured out from the depths of a pile of boxes and plywood with chicken ‘n’ cheese flavored moist treats.

Even then it was a damn good thing that one of my cat carriers has a top-loading option. A 20-pound cat in near-seizures of terror sticks out in many and ever-shifting directions, and is difficult to push into a carrier through the front.

Pandora, however, is the real problem cat when it comes to traveling, and we were able to pill her with little difficulty. She only weighs about 12 pounds and much of it is pudge. She once yowled for five and a half hours straight while being transported in the car, and she only stopped because we reached our destination. Not the kind of traveling companion you want on a two-day drive from Missouri to Boston.

So we got tranquilizers from the vet, along with a wonderful pill gun contraption for sticking them down kitty throats–Pandora might be easier to restrain than Legba, but she’s still pretty bad about taking pills, so it’s nice we had the pill gun. It’s been 7.5 hours on the road now and nary a peep. Legba’s made a little noise, but not that much. He doesn’t have Pandora’s persistance.

(Bart isn’t much for vehicular yowling anyway, but I figured he’d be happier sedated, and he’s the easiest to medicate of the three.)

So we’re currently in Ohio. It’s grey. We stop every 90 minutes so that I can walk around and not get a blood clot (I am also wearing my prescription compression pantyhose.) We’re listening to Freakonomics on CD, which I kept meaning to read all last year, so that’s improving.

—

Motel update: Miraculously, none of the cats went to the bathroom in their carriers in 15 hours in the car (yes, we drove 15 hours–we’re hoping to get into Boston with some daylight left tomorrow). We’ve let them out to wander around as they please. Legba is still hiding inside one of the carriers, but at least he ate. Pandora is rolling around on the bed demonstrating how adorable she is. I feel sort of bad about not putting my laptop away and petting her for three hours as she so clearly feels is her due.

I owe a special thanks to Deborah Carr for her recommendation of travel litterboxes. They are great.

—

*There’s a song by Josh Ritter called “Harrisburg” that I absolutely love. It is perfect for singing mournfully when you’ve been drinking.

The good news: Unlike at least 95% of US airports, the Las Vegas airport does, in fact, have free wireless access.

The bad news: This is particularly relevant to me now that I am stranded at the Las Vegas airport until midnight.

Basically, America West dicked me out of making my connecting flight by running 35 minutes late and never issuing me a boarding pass for my American Airlines connection, which meant that when I arrived in Las Vegas, they were already putting standby passengers on the flight and there was no way in hell to get my boarding pass, even though I had IMMEDIATELY tried to check in at one of the automated stations–or as immediately as possible, since the gate agent who the flight attendants assured me would be able to tell me where to go to make my connecting AA flight just stared at me blankly and said, “Well, you’ll have to go back through security… I don’t know.”

The moral of the story is FUCK AMERICA WEST. Do not fly them. The American Airlines people were very nice and it is not their fault that the only thing available was an 11:45 flight through Chicago that will deposit me in St. Louis at 8 am tomorrow, with a real possibility of me falling asleep on the plane, getting a blood clot, and dying.

Don’t worry, I will ask the flight attendant to wake me. And I plan to drink heavily as a preventative measure. (Alcohol is a blood thinner! It is medicinal!)

Also, I have only been here for an hour, and I have already won $13.75. I have a system.

Oops. I went a week without updating.

I’ve been BUSY, okay? I discovered episodes of Daria on YouTube, and in less than an hour I will be leaving my rented rooms forever, taking a bus to the CalTrain station, taking CalTrain to Santa Clara, and then taking another bus to the San Jose “International” Airport.*

Last night I shipped most of my stuff to my parents’ house in Missouri and my storage unit in Boston. The FedEx Kinko’s on California is open 24 hours, and at 9:30 the employees are starting to get a little punchy. I was greeted with, “You must have spent some time in BOLIVIA. …You know, when you spend time in Bolivia, you come back colorful?”

When I came out here, I shipped five big plastic tubs of stuff. One of the tubs got pretty banged up in transit, so I didn’t ship it back. In addition to my four remaining tubs, I shipped a liquor box (full of books), a standard-sized paper box, the box my full-size memory foam mattress pad came in, and, uh… five 20″x20″x20″ FedEx boxes. One of them weighed 50 pounds.**

Where does all this crap COME from, a person might wonder. I mean, there were some things I bought here that I probably should have just shipped from home, since work was paying: a backrest pillow, hangers, that mattress pad, a crockpot, some dishes… On the other hand, hangers are bulky to ship and cheap to buy. And I’m shipping all that stuff on to Boston, so I’ll be using it again.

And there were Christmas presents. God, were there Christmas presents. I made one last run into the city with Katherine on Saturday, and picked up a few things I’d been meaning to get. I also visited an H&M for the first time. They put one in Madison right when I left for California, and if they had them in Tokyo, I didn’t know about it–on a related note, for like the first six months I lived in Tokyo, I thought Tower Records was a Japanese chain, because I’d never seen one before. Now they are going out of business, and they sell DVDs and books as well as CDs, so I encourage you to seek out your local store, if you’ve got one, for some discounted loot. And you can marvel at how 40% off $18.99 is kind of like a reasonable price for a CD. No wonder they’re going out of business. Anyway.

Still. My ability to accumulate stuff–oh, there were also those two Palo Alto public library sales I attended–is kind of ridiculous. The thought of what I could do in a semester in Boston with an entire apartment to fill is a bit daunting. I bet they have H&M there, too. Oh, for the first couple of weeks, with the memory of having to clear out this place AND my Madison apartment still fresh in my mind, I’ll be cautious. I’ll avoid garage sales.*** But as the weeks wear on, and I forget about the horrors of packing and moving…

Of course, I’ll have my cats. They’re bound to destroy a few things. God, I miss the little fuckers. Homeward!

One last picture of the yard for my rented rooms:

You may note that my landlady did, in fact, get rid of that toilet. No one is more surprised than I. Well, possibly Katherine.

—

*It is the dinkiest little airport you can imagine. It’s like if Madison’s airport was “international.” Apparently they have flights to Mexico.

***Which reminds me, I am leaving a nightstand for the landlady to deal with, because it was $2 at a yard sale my first week here and it is made out of particle ROCK or something; it weighs a ton. I definitely wasn’t shipping it.