Being a part of it

I arrived in New York this evening and suddenly everything seems a lot better. My back is still hurting, but somehow it doesn't seem quite so bad now, even if I am still walking like Elvis probably did as he made that final trip to the bathroom.

The day started in a trying manner. I lent my laptop to my boss for his presentation, and carefully turned off my google mail notifications, but didn't realise that that didn't include chat, so in the middle of his talk a little bubble popped up from a friend asking how things were - was I in a session? It got a big laugh but I felt rather foolish. Then I had to abandon the laptop for the last of the six papers so I could hear an old friend down the hall, and when I got back it turned out that during the questions it had started playing my screensaver, random pictures from my hard drive, starting of course with Figaro the cat in the bidet. So I suppose I at least made my contribution to the mild conference humour. My own paper was OK, I think. I talked about the sorts of things you could get undergraduates thinking about with these materials -- things like "how do you edit an unfixed text", etc.

The flight from Kalamazoo to Chicago was packed with people who are Names. It occurred to me that if it crashed a large proportion of my acquaintance would always say of my death "she was in the same plane as X" and how annoying that would be, like the people in the same crash as the Big Bopper, who don't even get their death to themselves. I spent the entire waiting period and most of the flight talking to someone who stands out as eccentric even among medievalists, and is not viewed by everyone as harmless. I long ago devised a strategy with her where I just let myself go and outwierd her, feeling no shame about being both odd and passive-aggressively self-aggrandising -- consequently I quite enjoy her company, and she probably considers me a terrible pest. It was a bit wearing though.

I cheered up when we were flying over a little green figure on a small island, because it seemed pretty certain to be the statue of liberty. Manhattan was looking like a carefully-made replica. I took a taxi from the airport and the driver made me shut my eyes as we were coming over the bridge, and then open them when the whole city was visible, by this time night-lit and sparkly. He said that his friends made him do that when he first came to the city. (They also took him to a gay bar, apparently -- he didn't offer me that option.) It seems very silly to be here somehow, when it's so clearly a place from stories: as if you suddenly found yourself walking around Combray, or Barchester, or the Land of Lost Content. Also it all looks slightly smaller. The man who runs this guest house is very nice, in a camp way. He told me where to get good pizza, and I also picked up an amazing slice of cheesecake. It was creamy and fluffy at the same time, and tasted slightly of vanilla; it was utterly the best cheese cake I have ever tasted. If I lived here it would probably be the cheese cake which would kill me, even though after dark the streets are a little scary, with people shouting oddly, and someone dancing on one of the subway vents where the steam comes up.