american pants

My window is open and someone, somewhere is playing a cello.

When my complaint about a piece of art is “All the characters in this are horrible people,” I am generally not convinced to change my opinion by the observation that “yeah, but you’re SUPPOSED to think they’re horrible people.” So whatttttt? The art about horrible people that I DO like has the feature of giving me something to work with beyond “Sometimes people are horrible in this particular way.” There had better be something that makes it worth hanging out with horrible people, is what I’m saying. The world is too rich and delightful, and full of too many real horrible people, for me to need to waste time with fictional horrible people.

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Just now, while putting on pants, I got really happy that I’m here, putting on pants, while there used to be only primordial soup. Small victories, but also, you guys, VERY LARGE ONES. Respiration! Vertebrae!

i don’t really know what to do with this thought

but I like that all the men in Europe know how to drive stick.

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I’d felt for a long time that throwing all my clothes on the ground at the end of the day and never flossing were bad things that were having a bad effect on my quality of life, but these habits were so ingrained, had such sway over me in the way that only habits can, that the feeling&knowledge of their badness was not enough. Something would have to be done; extensive research on the power of habit would need to be leveraged before I could change. Or so I thought. One day, I just started putting my clothes away and flossing. And I still do. Sometimes I skip a day, but then I do them just fine the next day. Neither of these things is hard. Sometimes you just get sick of getting in your own way.

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cool hobby

The day after going to a club and not having fun, listening to the good songs from the club and pretending I’m at a club having fun.

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I would describe my communication style, and my problem-solving style, as “slightly deranged camp counselor.”

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Isn’t “my anaconda don’t want none unless you’ve got buns, hon” an example of…ASSonance?

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adventures i guess

Wednesday we had the day off from our conference to explore Copenhagen. I started my day with breakfast in a trendy cafe that only serves oatmeal, where I had an oat/barley/spelt porridge with plum jam served to me by a hot blonde with exquisite English (which is how I would describe most of the Danish people I met). After that I went wandering, and wandered into a pretty cemetery. Cemetery in Danish is “kirkegaard.” As I wandered around the kirkegaard, having lost where the exit was, whose grave should I come across but that of the philosopher Kirkegaard. Meta! Eventually I found my way out and continued to wend my way through the city, stopping on benches to read my book, on bridges to admire bodies of water, and on street corners to revolve slowly trying to figure out which way I meant to go.

All day I was having trouble thermoregulating. It was warm in the sun but there were piercing cold winds off the Baltic Sea. I kept putting on and taking off my fleece and feeling like an idiot. I woke up Thursday with a tickle in my throat. However for most of the day I didn’t notice, since Thursday happened to be the best day of the conference yet. I learned about the resilience of bacterial communities on a human tooth, and about cholera’s cryptic sister. I drank a hundred cups of conference tea, trying to ignore my throat.

That evening was the big conference party in a converted slaughterhouse downtown. Q: why are slaughterhouses and other meat-related things so often turned into hip event venues? I spent the evening talking to a an amazing older lady scientist about cholera and her work as a science ambassador, and then, after she left once the band started playing, unsuccessfully flirting with the world’s most perfect dude. I don’t want to talk about it.

Despite not drinking all that much, I spent the night retching and alternately shivering and burning in my bed. In the morning my coworker gave me tea and Advil, I slept through the plenary, and rallied enough to go to the final set of conference sessions. I learned about the bacteria inhabiting the guts of great apes. As I went back to my hotel my cell phone died. I bought a crepe and took it up to my room, looking at the window at the impossibly romantic nexus of canal and boats and twilit sky and strolling people and Friday-night music, and felt lonely and sorry for myself.

On Saturday I drifted in a haze, blowing truly impressive amounts of vividly colored mucus out of my head. On Saturday night I went to see Leonard Cohen perform in a park, which was beautiful and perfect and I’ll talk about separately. It rained intermittently. I could barely stand. I went straight to bed afterward and awoke with the type of cough that feels like someone is taking a saw to your throat. I had planned to stay in Denmark till Tuesday, moving into a hostel instead of conference housing, seeing more beaches, taking a train to Hamlet’s castle. Sunday morning I realized this was out of the question. I went to the train station, which was full of people with backpacks and a sense of adventure, or suitcases and a sense of purpose, or overnight bags and a rumpled postcoital glow. I ruefully thought of my youth, when I thought I would have adventure or purpose or sex instead of just luggage and a terrible cold. An agent of unsurpassed kindness at the ticket counter found me a big discount on a ticket for the overnight train and I almost wept with relief. There were three hours left until the train and it was raining outside, so I schlepped around the station, ate a McFlurry, read a book at a table in the corner of a crowded station cafe where I didn’t immediately realize that there was a pigeon sitting quietly between my suitcase wheels and my feet.

The train ride took 16 hours. I mostly napped and coughed. Now I’m home, I guess.

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