Archive for the 'Travel' Category

Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Bitching!

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 17, 2008
in Academia, NaBloPoMo and Travel
. 6 Comments

Today I got my first issue of this journal in the mail.  If you’re not familiar with it (and should really just thank dog that you’re not), it’s the publication of the big, big, huge association of language and literature scholars that I just had to join in order to properly go on the job market this year. Along with the exorbitant cost of membership I get a subscription to the journal.  When I found it in my mailbox today, I was understandably excited, both about seeing a real material return on that money and about the feeling of official professionalism it inspired.  I am very important now, see.

My excitement withered as soon as I noticed that this issue is not a regular issue, but rather the program for the big, big, huge upcoming conference. To give you an idea of how big the conference is, I will just tell you that this issue/program is 366 pages long.

[UPDATE: I am relieved (?) to tell you that the last 100 pages are advertisements. Still.]

And it weighs about a pound.

And it weighs about a pound.

I’m feeling significantly less excited now and more full of dread and discomfort.  I prefer, generally, not to be involved in giant events full of swarming people.  I can just imagine it now: millions upon millions of black-suit-clad academics with horn-rimmed glasses and loud shoes and tons of nervous energy*.  And the grad students! The eager grad students! I have never been able to stand eager, earnest grad-student types, even when I was a grad student myself.  It’s the eagerness. Witnessing someone else’s eagerness makes me almost as uncomfortable as those horrible Schadenfreude-inducing moments that are now such a staple of reality TV. Ugh.

At any rate, at least the conference this year is in one of my all-time favorite cities, and if, as I suspect will happen, I do not even get any interviews, I will be free to avoid all the scurrying little ants and go drink cappuccinos near that one bookstore I love so much.

*This sentence is proof of the theory that what we hate in others is merely the reflection of ourselves (or the echo of our loud shoes).

If Only the Unabomber Had Easy Access to Trader Joe’s

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on August 1, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink and Travel
. Closed

I am still alive, if only barely — and not that you should have been wondering, or anything; I just intended to be back here and posting ages ago.  I’ve been busy busy busy, and have had only approximately 47 things to tell you about, but I’ve just been too exhausted to bother with any of it.

The past ten days or so have felt like a month, and I can barely even remember now all of the things I had to say.  I can tell you that I had composed a delicious ranting bitchfest about the highway system in the middle of Big City, which assaulted me multiple times and in varied-yet-always-horrible situations lately, but as I was in the car and attempting to drive while composing this glorious screed, I did not actually write it down anywhere and thus it is now lost to the ether of tears and forgetting.

One little detail for you to cherish, however: the highway on-ramps in midtown were all closed off for repairs, which sent me on a brutal bumper-to-bumper venture into downtown, where I spent an hour looking for another way to get back on the highway.  An hour, people.  Much of said hour, by the way, was spent waiting through three or four (FOUR) cycles at each stoplight, because so many fellow motorists were being diverted from the highway and were clogging the narrow downtown streets.  Finally, resignedly, cursing, fists shaking, I had to drive back UPTOWN (as in THROUGH MIDTOWN, WHERE I HAD JUST FUCKING BEEN) to find the only ramp I knew wasn’t shut down. All of this for my beloved Trader Joe’s.

Which brings me to one good thing about Big City: it has a Trader Joe’s, an IKEA, and an H&M, all three of which businesses happily took money from me in the past week, and I happily gave it to them.  The glories of seven-dollar aviator sunglasses, four-dollar Italian Pinot grigio, and Swedish candle holders that were so cheap I was practically paid to take them — these are only some of the wonders of Big City and its many affordable, fashionable, imported goods.

All of the above is basically a microcosm of the past week and a half: lots of wonderful things that were completely worth the nuisances they entailed.  So I am exhausted from it all, but feeling mainly satisfied.  I had a great time visiting with my out-of-town friends, and we all enjoyed getting caught up on each other’s lives, drinking and smoking a little bit too much, and completely geeking out over Dr. Horrible.  Suomichris, for example, repeatedly woke me up in the morning with a rousing chorus of “Bad Horse, Bad Hoooooorse! He rides across the nation, the thoroughbred of sin….”  (And if you have seen the show, I challenge you not to get that song stuck in your head for at least forty-eight hours!)

When I got back to New Wye, the going-away festivities for my three friends were many and festive.  I hosted the big official party, where there was much wine, many mini-quiches (thank you, Trader Joe’s!), many sad toasts, some booty shaking, and lots of hugs.  It was a really good night, but I think the stress/excitement maaaaay have led me to drink a leeeetle too much of the wine, thereby leaving me gripping the sides of my mattress as I lay in bed later, trying desperately to keep myself from falling off the dangerously spinning planet.  How very collegiate and embarrassing of me.  It’s a good thing no one but the dog knows about this.  Well, and all of you.

We also had, among other get-togethers, our last night at pub trivia (which we won, hello!) and a night of dance- and fashion-based reality television, each event getting slightly smaller than the one before as people one-by-one left town.  In between all of this stuff I have also been dog sitting, helping people pack/move, and covering people’s classes.  While I am obviously more than happy to be able to see people as much as possible before they move, and also am happy to be able to help out with whatever odds and ends I can, I’m also just completely drained right now, which means I will be holing up in my apartment like the Unabomber until I once again achieve mental equilibrium.

I am a tad crazy that way.  Not necessarily letter-bomb crazy, but perhaps remote-mountain-cabin crazy.  I have to have my alone time on a regular basis or I get overloaded and off kilter.  Doesn’t that happen to you, too, or are you guys all the happiest-in-a-crowd social butterfly types? I’m not entirely anti-social — my calendar is always fairly tightly packed, in fact — but at heart I am a bit of a loner.  (Like Nietzsche, Gandalf, and Professor Moriarty, I am one of these — a cold-hearted, logical bitch.)  After a long day of work or socializing, I can’t go right to bed — not with the thoughts of the day still swirling around in my head.  If I try that, I’ll just wind up rehashing conversations and events, wondering how they would have gone if shaped slightly differently.  It’s not exactly l’esprit d’escalier, or at least not always — just a lot of retroactive analysis that usually is in no way useful and merely prevents me from falling asleep.  Instead of falling prey to this, I have to spend at least a couple of hours winding down: reading, writing, watching TV or movies, drinking wine and singing, manicures, or any number of other solo activities.  This is so essential to my sanity that even if I’ve stayed out so late I should by all standards get my ass to bed as soon as I get home, I’m still just constitutionally unable to.  This, as one might imagine, leads to too many late, late nights.  So that’s been happening lately, too.

At times like these, I need at least 24 hours alone to recuperate.  (Wow, I’m sounding so completely sane here, and not at all unbalanced.) (That was sarcastic.)  Tonight I have successfully gotten started on Mission: Lone Wolf, which has so far involved pajamas, The Decemberists, some bad romantic comedies (my absolute Achilles heel of taste), and a very nice dinner — the latter of which is also thanks to Trader Joe’s.  I think I will put away the computer and go fetch some of that four-dollar wine, come to think of it.  At this rate, that horribly stressful trip to Trader Joe’s is paying off more than I could have predicted.

Friends, Travel, Mischief

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on July 20, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink and Travel
. 3 Comments

It’s almost the end of July — almost the end of the summer. I kind of can’t believe it, mostly because in Zembla the summer doesn’t start until June 16th and doesn’t end until September 30th or thereabouts (this is just due to the differing schedules at Zembla University and Wordsmith). July just doesn’t feel like the end of anything for me. July should be a month spent in flip flops, working on my tan and sulking that I have nothing to do. The horrible knowledge that I will have to deal with school starting up again in about three weeks (THREE MOTHERFUCKING WEEKS) is, haha, mildly terrifying.

Another reason the end of the summer seems to be assaulting me with such force is that in about a week or so, half of my Very Good Friends from Wordsmith will be leaving town, moving far, far away where oodles of money and possible tenure and teaching and/or publishing glory await them. Out of the dozen or so people who got hired along with me, these six of us have become a very close group, and we’ve built a lot of fun memories in the past year. I am in complete denial that three of them will be gone so soon. (What? Leaving? LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.)

Their success is a truly happy thing, though: they’re all brilliant and talented, and it would be a travesty if they hadn’t been able to find such great positions, even in the admittedly slim job market. It also gives me hope for finding a similarly great job opportunity for myself in the next couple of years. Of course, it’s also incredibly good to have friends with good experiences on the (terrifying) job market who are always offering to help with practice job talks, mock interviews, and reading/reviewing articles. There’s a closeness and collegiality in this department that was sorely lacking among the many rank, festering assholes by whom I was surrounded in Zembla. Um, what? I never said that TO THEIR FACES.

So, anyway. Three of my good, good friends are leaving very soon, so we have been trying to spend as much time together as possible before that happens. Yesterday, we saddled up and rode out into the country in search of good barbeque, music, and general festivities. On the way we passed many a ramshackle house and many a herd of goats (also: donkeys, horses, and cows — this was the COUNTRY, people!). We found the barbeque and ate so much we declared ourselves pregnant with giant pig babies — man, can I tell you how much it hurts when those pig babies start kicking with their many little hooves?! — but wound up forgoing the music fest (too expensive) in favor of coming back to New Wye and spending the evening floating around the pool and drinking wine.

Tomorrow we are driving to the city in my friend B.’s sister’s minivan (we are just that fancy) to pick up my friend D. at the airport. She’s returning from a summer at home in Germany, and then she’ll be leaving town again in the next week for her new job. While in town we’ll visit the twin meccas of IKEA and H&M, and, although I plan not to spend any (much?) money, I am quite excited to admire their cheap and fashionable European-style wares.

There’s plenty of excitement afoot here in New Wye, but much of it is so bittersweet — knowing that these three women who have become such good friends to me over the last year are going to be gone so soon casts a bit of a shadow over the otherwise fun activities. If I think about it too much I’ll just start to get all misty, and we can’t have that, at least not yet.

In other fun friend news, the great Suomichris (grad school and Stupid Bank colleague from Zembla U.) will be visiting this part of the country next week! We’ll be hanging out with our mutual friend W., who lives in another college town a couple of hours away from me, and I can tell you that we will likely get pretty effing rowdy. I haven’t seen him since I returned to Zembla to defend my dissertation back in November, and haven’t seen W. since some time before that. I suppose it’s comforting to know that, despite cross-country moves (something to which all of us academics in the U.S. have to steel ourselves, like it or not), good friends can still find ways of coming together, and of not losing touch. This is a good thing.

In the midst of all this, I have got to be planning my curriculum for Fall Semester and getting my second article out to the Journal of Awesomeness, but I think I’ll find a way to clock the necessary hours at my desk in spite of all the plans that will take me out and about, across the region. If I can’t manage to nourish my friendships at the same time as my career, the career doesn’t really amount to much, does it?

So how do you find the balance between your friends/family and your job/school life?

Sand & Sea & Sky

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on June 5, 2008
in Books, Cheese Sandwich, Film and Travel
. 6 Comments

Just for fun, here is one of the places I wrote about in my Krakauer post. I didn’t include it there because I didn’t want it commingling with all the movie stills and catching some kind of Hollywood cooties.

One of those dogs is mine.

all i ever wanted

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on March 14, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Paedagogy and Travel
. 2 Comments

Ah, yes, it’s that time again: the time when chowderheads the country over make their way south for a week of binge drinking, casual sex, and flashing their tits at the “Girls Gone Wild” cameraman. That’s right; it’s Spring Break!

I plan on spending the first half of the break relaxifying with my friend C. There will be much playing with the baby and much talking and probably much sitting on her back deck and sipping whiskey drinks. I leave tomorrow, and I cannot wait.

When I get back, the town will still be blissfully, mercifully empty of students for a few more days, though I may not get to enjoy it that much: I will have several giant piles of crap awaiting my attention, and chief among them is a batch of freshman comp essays. That is enough to make me want to stab out my own eyes with a crayon, so I shall banish the thought and concentrate on the days of whiskey and relaxing in my future. Vacation, ho!