More visions of a possible future

Hotel2, originally uploaded by lesserajax.

The paper went particularly well yesterday--the Q & A was dynamic and thoughtful, and I only flubbed one response of ten or so. (Note to self: when you are asked a complicated question concerning a matter about which you know very little, and yet find the idea provocative, *don't* brainstorm a response in front of the audience; wait for the informal conversation afterward with a drink in your hand.) All in all, though, it really couldn't have gone better--my most important presentation to date.

Here's another photograph of the Eastern European hotel in which my swishy conference is being held; a friend of mine has also submitted a proposal, so I might have a companion in this mad endeavor (assuming that we both are accepted).

Swanky Digs

Hotel, originally uploaded by lesserajax.

I have a conference proposal due in, well let's see, thirty-four hours, and hounded by other priorities (I present my Big Paper tomorrow at the DC Institution), I thought that I'd silently let this deadline pass without my submission. That is, until I checked out the digs for the conference, which certainly could be worse; never having been to Eastern Europe, I must say that I was positively shocked. Needless to say, I'll definitely throw something together--the conference is right down my alley anyway.

UPDATE: Conference abstract: done; God bless those electronic winged monkeys that can send documents to all corners of the earth at one's slightest command.

Stained Glass Course

Now that my paper is in, I'm taking the day off to rest my half-crazy mind, but also to attend to a number of other things that desperately need attending to (laundry, grocery shoping, bills, etc.). As an adminstrator of sorts at one of the colleges here at the University, it's expected that I teach a short course in the Spring, and so I've decided to do something completely different and teach a stained glass class. The University doesn't offer such a course, and so there is no cache of equipment upon which to draw, and I have to set up a workshop in one of the common areas. This will be kind of cool, actually--I'll bring my laptop and iPod, and we'll rock out for the two-hour labs--but there's a lot of work to do in the meantime. I'm going to need

quarter-inch sheets of plywood to protect the tables;
five soldering irons
five home-made soldering-iron holders (from. . .what? double copper piping?)
five aluminum-handled brushes
five ceramic plates for flux gel
box of horseshoe nails
homemade light board (8' 2x4, bulb socket, electrical wire, switch, whiteboard)
five glass cutters
five sets of pliers
five sheets of plastic grating in movable drawers (wooden? plastic?)
Ten rolls of lead, ten rolls of copper, two bottles of flux (for starters)
Glass from Youghagheny Glass (road trip to PA!)

Damn; a lot to do here.

Also next week: formal presentation of paper at DC Institution, conference paper abstract for swishy conference in Eastern Europe. Well, no rest for the weary (or is that "wicked"?).

Muse Fatale

I've been writing basically non-stop for a week now, and my sleeping schedule is unbelievably messed up and still subject to worse change, I fear. Today I woke up at three in the afternoon after having worked through the night to eight-thirty, the latest but not last step in my total vampiric transformation. My, how the morning light seems ugly and fiercely unyielding when it comes at the end of the long night.

The paper for the Impressive DC Institution is going well, spectacularly well, even; I've been working on these ideas for so very, very long, descending into the coal mine every day, doing my work despite everything, canaries dying all around me, but now my muse has found me out. She's demanding, and intense, a little mad, and a denizen of the night, but she's mine, and I've got her for now.

The hardcopy of the paper is due at the end of the day tomorrow, but if I can help it, I will continue to ride this one out, even until I'm in tatters. This time I'm not letting go. For the first time in a long time I can honestly say: this is good work.

Insomnia (I)

My sleep schedule has always resisted the standard model of up at eight, down at midnight, ever since I was a kid. I remember staying up late at night reading under my covers by flashlight so as not to escape my mother's vigilant eye. When Dad saw the light, he would almost always pretend as if he hadn't--Dad had a liberal respect for individual choices like these--but Mom was more practical, and would get angry and snuff the light out, possibly because the duty of getting my lazy, sleep-deprived ass out of bed fell to her most mornings, an ugly assignment I still feel guilty for. But strangely, so many years later, I yet feel a sense of adolescent rebellion when midnight comes around, no matter how tired I am, a resistance to parental demand, to outside pressure, the pressure of the my responsibilities in the following day, who knows.

But that is not what I’m fighting against tonight; tonight, I’m fighting against the sleep pattern that had instituted itself over vacation—down at five in the morning, up at one—and am having a hell of a time wrenching it back to “normal.” Because of my late starts, I’ve been missing my early morning hikes, and this absolutely cannot be allowed to happen this semester; I have an important paper (30 pages) due in ten days, and then one (possibly two?) articles that I simply must get in the pipeline this spring, and these will not be able to happen unless I start cranking my metabolism at the start of the day (which I hope will be around seven-thirty). (I also feel so much more at home in my skin, more together, more thoughtful, and more dynamic when I start the day with a hike—speaking baldly, hiking helps me appreciate more of my life.)

Yet I’ve been unable to wrench my sleeping schedule out of this rut; tonight I forced myself to turn off my light (I just typed “life”—a Freudian slip here? Sound like I have sleep issues?) at midnight, and then woke up stark-raving wide-eyed awake at two-thirty. It’s now four, and I am as lucid, as vibrant, and as clear-headed as the rest of the world is at one in the afternoon; and when the alarm goes off at eight, no doubt I only will have been asleep for two hours, and I will crawl poisoned, bitter, and barely alive to blast the blearing noise out of my consciousness to return to sleep for another four hours, if all goes as it has been.

Or, I will somehow recognize in my impossibly anemic, poisoned, and psychically contorted state that the price of the life that I want is suffering, and I will drag myself into the bathroom, into yesterday’s clothes, the jeep, onto the mountain, over the trail, back to my apartment, into the shower and new clothes, and into a difficult, but more hopeful day.

The Frozen North

When we arrived up North to the cottage by one of the greatest of the Great Lakes, we were welcomed by eight inches of snow, snow that we had to shovel out of the driveways and off of the sidewalk for the week. The temperature dipped no lower than thirty-five, which slowly transformed the snow into an evermore transluscent foundation of ice. Later in the week, a couple of buddies and I went for a walk with some New Year's cigars (I prefer Honduran Padrones, but the Romeo and Julietas weren't bad) by the lake, and made our way across the thoroughly iced-over pier to the lighthouse that was pulsing intermittent bursts of green across the windy, white-capped, and slush-churning water. The wind was so bad that we were blown a foot leeward across the ice (and toward the water) for every three feet forward, but we were in good spirits, and it didn't seem all that dangerous. It seemed more dangerous after we had finished our cigars, the wind picked up, and the midnight sky showered marble-sized balls of rain down at us; returning across the pier, we were blown a foot toward the water every foot we progressed. One of us got into a bit of a spot, and had to be grabbed back to safety, but then we were all on shore, and the sky really opened up with sheets of (relatively) warm rain. One of the guys and I decided to run back to the cottage--I, for one, was not dressed for the rain, and was becoming cold and uncomfortable--and back home, there was coffee and scotch and sherry, and bathtowels enough, to return us back to the land of the living.