Occam's razor

So, sometimes lethargy (as documented below) has a spiritual or intellectual basis. But sometimes it just means that you're getting sick again, and the reason you're so tired is because your body is fighting something. For the third time this year.

Last Friday I was chatting with the chair of a department that is not mine (located in another state, even) and he had a cold and was coughing and sneezing with not so much mouth coverage. And I wanted to say to him, "Didn't your mother teach you anything? Please cover your mouth when you cough." But I did not. And now I believe I am paying the consequences. Oh well.

Sometimes

I wonder why I feel so lethargic and tired. Like yesterday. Yesterday it was hard to get it in gear just to get to the farmer's market, which I love, and buy piles of delicious vegetables (there's something about carrots with their tops on that's just so cute -- I think maybe because I feel like Bugs Bunny when eating them) (with slightly less buck teeth). And then I felt tired thinking about looking up recipes to use them in ways that aren't just straightforward baking (beets, squash), stir-frying with garlic and sesame oil (bok choy, pea shoots, om choi), or tossing in a risotto (chard, spinach, leeks, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, etc.). I used to know how to cook. Maybe I can relearn.

In any case, I was musing on my last month or so, and realized that one explanation for my apparent lethargy might be the fact that in the last five weeks I have traveled at minimum overnight to, in order: Palm Springs, San Francisco, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and New York. Three of these trips were work-related, and involved lots of prep time and shmoozing and also being generally nice to people in a kind of intellectual way, which does end up a bit wearing. And if not for airline ineptitude, I would have snuck a Chicago in there as well. And I had houseguests twice (the kind you clean for). So I guess maybe I'm entitled to be a bit tired after all. I'm giving a final today, which should be three hours of utter boredom -- I wonder how bad it would be if I brought my laptop and tried to do some e-mail catch up while my TAs did the serious proctoring. Those three hours will look like nothing by the time we hit Wednesday, which will be the all-day grading fest at my house, catered by Trader Joe's and the Chinese "bistro" on the corner. Nothing is more vomit-inducing than grading, I think. Well, except for Russian vodka.

We try again

So tomorrow I'm headed to an airport once more to try and fly far away. This time, though, it's a different

• time
• airport
• airline
• destination
• weather system (this time just 48 and rainy. Meh).

So maybe I'll actually take off the ground? And land in a different place? I'm giving a talk on the other end of this one. In front of some people with some pull. So wish me luck! For all of it, really.

Inadvertent symbolism

First off, here's the inadvertently symbolic moment.
Now for some contextualization and decoding.

I took this picture on Friday at around 3 pm. "But [Pangea]," you say, "weren't you supposed to be on a plane most of the way to Chicago on Friday at 3 pm? Why were you instead apparently on some garbage-laden and seaweed-strewn California beach?"

A good question! In brief, I was brutally failed by my usual airline of choice, one on which I have 4 free domestic flights coming to me with frequent flier miles, the one on which I was supposed to be flying. The short version, in which I will minimize my feelings of impotent rage, is that at 5 am on Friday I got an e-mail saying that my original 11:22 flight was canceled due to mechanical issues (although I suspect that they were just undersold and moved everyone to the next flight, which was then at 100%). So I was rebooked on the 12:45, and boarded at 12:15 and we were delayed leaving the gate due to baggage loading and then pulled out a ways and sat for a while as they tried to determine the small mechanical discrepancy and as I was now in a middle seat (I always take the aisle, but rebooking left me no choice) I got to hear sad complaints from the guy to my right and woman to my left, both of whom had just flown in from Sydney and had also been scheduled on the 11:22 and were very sad about having their journeys extended. Businessman to the right had also been bumped out of first class, so was especially pissy. It was decided we would return to the gate, and uniformed mechanics started popping in and out of the plane.

What I surely *should* have done at this point was called the airline and rebooked on the next flight. But I was trying to stay zen-ish, deep breathing and not focusing on the passage of time, and so when all the deadheading airline employees got up and prepared to get off the plane, thus alerting me to the fact that that plane was not going anywhere, it was already 2:05 and the next plane had left. To switch to the 4 pm flight, my outsourced friend told me, would require giving up my seat on this one, and I still had hopes that the plane I was on would take off sooner than the 4 pm. How little did I know, because at 2:30 they took the plane out of service, and everyone rushed over to the customer service desk to get on the 4 pm and I meanwhile decided to get the hell out of there and salvage some of the day. Because the whole point of flying in on Friday was to maximize socializing, once more, with dinner with some and drinks with others and getting in to my host's place after midnight and then having a blank early morning there seemed pointless.

So I rebooked on the 7 am and called a friend who lives not far from the airport in Manhattan Beach, who was just putting on clothes and headed out to lunch and I said, "wait for me! And come with me to the beach!" This is one of the reasons why I don't check bags, and one airport shuttle (delayed) and $1 in long-term parking and one slightly slow highway journey later, I found myself with a belly full of fish taco and strolling on the beach. Where I encountered my crushed yet still smiling balloon friend, with the ominous shadow of the failed trip looming over him, and pinned to the ground when he was meant to be flying, but still resiliently trying to put a good face on it even while somewhat deflated. See -- just like me!

Late Friday night I decided to cancel my Chicago trip -- it was going to be less than 36 hours, if all planes took off and landed when they were supposed to. Which is ok if you're flying an hour or two, but not 4+. And I'm headed out again super-early Thursday to give a talk in New York. And I realized that this weekend's Chicago snow might have caused problems getting me back to LA in time to teach on Monday. So I guess it's ok in some respects that I ended up not going. But I'm pretty bummed out about it, and yesterday's repeat day at the beach, spent watching birdies and reading and napping, only partly made up for all the seeing of old friends that I'm not doing even as I type (big brunch/shower thing that I'm missing on the South Side). At least I finally get to go back again to the Hollywood Farmer's Market and get more Swiss chard -- I've been thwarted one way or another for the last four weeks.

By the way, yesterday I checked the status of all the late morning and afternoon flights for my not-so-beloved airline, and that 12:45 flight didn't take off until 7:30 pm and the 4 pm flight I was going to rebook onto didn't take off until 8:28 pm so it's good that I got the hell out of there!

I'm so not ready

When Colliculus sent out his Evite a few weeks ago inviting people to his big birthday nutty cook-off, I thought, "well, isn't that what frequent flier miles are for?" Parties in places where I used to live trigger my love of efficiency and maximizing of time -- not only can I visit and see my friends, but I can see many of them at one time in one place. So I got my ticket, and I'm headed on in later today.

What I forgot in terms of Chicago, especially now that I live in weather near-paradise, is that it is unbelievably terribly horribly cold there for much of the year. Including March. Especially March. As in it will be 50 degrees colder when I get off the plane than when I got in it. And, um, it turns out I don't even have real gloves here. I don't even know where to *buy* real gloves now that one of mine turns out to be missing. But I'd better figure out where to go and get some en route, or else I think I might get frostbite. Seriously. My dream of walking around in 15 degree weather (yes, Farenheit, Maloney) actually woke me up right now! I should probably head back to bed.

I forget who said it

and apparently it wasn't Mae West, who I originally thought, but anyway, someone once said something along the lines of: either you can keep a diary or you can have a life to write about. So too with the last week or so, which has involved two parental visits (and related cleaning and entertainment) with an aunt and uncle thrown in for one of them; two trips to SoCal universities involving talks with prominent people in the audience and shmoozing with colleagues; teaching, office hours, complainy students, questions on Assignment 2 ("is blue ink only ok?" the latest); a "Sundance reunion" party at a fancy hotel bar in Santa Monica (I was just the arm candy), and like 20 other things that don't spring to mind at the moment but certainly took up my time and energy.

Now I have the dilemma I frequently have, which is: work at home or work at a cafe? The cafe I can walk to has undrinkable iced tea, but free internet. And plenty of handsome men to look at, but none who might be oriented towards me, so to speak. A cafe I can bike to has more straight guys and better drinks, but the intertron is paid access only and expensive to boot. Pros of being at home include being able to stay in house clothes -- today a camisole, hoodie, and kind of baggy hiking pants, plus lots of kitties. Pros of being out include not being in my freaking house working, which is something I do kind of a lot of. And with the pay internet being so annoying that I refuse to do it, being able to focus on the work I have to do without being distracted by, say, blog entries. What to do, what to do...