Virtually Home

Moments ago, I experienced a tragic data loss in transferring photos from my iPhone to my computer. I guess nothing better was to be expected, since the trip started off with my forgetting my camera -- an unforgivable failure. The photos posted here are the few that survived iPhoto's latest travesty. They may or may not be misrepresenting the order of events. For instance, the picture at left was taken on the flight home. Ahem. We, on analyzing the forecast for Thanksgiving Day, decided to skip town early and, when I had succeeded in attending the appointments I'd made for my "two" days in Tulsa, we all converged on the airport and took off for Florida. The way out of town was bumpy, and we were cutting through alternating clouds and clear sky all the way up to 10,000 feet. Each time we broke through the clouds, we were surrounded by towers of cloud. It was cavernous. Water streaming over the windshield and the wings from the condensation in the clouds. I couldn...

I hate Thursdays. Kind of a lot, actually. I usually have class and work from 8 to 5, mostly non-stop, with a couple of minutes to scramble on or off campus and find time to eat. And, in addition to that, I have anatomy lecture with my least favorite professor (ever) immediately followed by three hours of anatomy lab, after which I have to come home and bathe assiduously in order not to smell like dead shark. But then today, as I was leaving my lecture and headed to the dark basement room where we cut up housecats, something wonderful happened. I looked across the South Oval and noticed a bunch of people lined up on the edge of the bike lane, looking at something. I assumed it had something to do with the preachers that have been there the last couple of weeks, but there was no preacher in evidence. And then I noticed the huge bird standing in the grass. There was a juvenile red-tail hawk, standing atop the fat red squirrel he had evidently just slain, and looking quite confused as...

I live in a red state. A very red state. A state so red that I feel something very like despair when I consider its redness. Every single county -- even the "liberal" ones -- voted for McCain/Palin last election cycle. Oklahoma was the only state in which every county voted the same way. So when I go to vote, I never expect that vote to mean anything. My polling place is an Episcopalian church, which offends me at its most basic level. While I suppose it is nice that the church donates its space and the volunteer time of their little old ladies, I can't help but be astounded that we allow such an obvious, if symbolic, breach of the separation of Church of State. And so I grit my teeth and I hand my ID to the little old ladies who probably have no sinister plot to guilt people into making conservative decisions. Probably. (On a side note, I didn't realize until I was voting that I wasn't required to show identification in order to vote. This was the only measu...

Saturday was less a music festival and more a Monsters of Folk festival. For me, anyway. I skipped out on seeing a number of minor bands that I didn't mind missing in order to stand in line at MOF's autograph table. We were near the end of the line where they cut it off, and I was nervous that I would be the first one NOT to meet the band (which is what had happened at the venue the night before) but it all worked out. The guys were all surprisingly nice, and I got to have a (brief) conversation with each of them. Afterward, Cliff and I contemplated the decision between seeing half of Broken Bells' set, and being ideally placed for Monsters of Folk's set. As obsessive as this sounds, we chose Monsters of Folk. If it had been The Shins instead of Broken Bells, I think my decision would have gone the other way. I dreamed recently that I got to go back to ACL and see all the bands I didn't see when I was busy seeing other bands. It was excellent, but turned out to b...

 Last Wednesday night, the Mountain Goats played a show in Oklahoma City at the UCO Performance Lab on their way down to Austin. I anticipated getting to see them at the festival -- this was destined to end in heartbreak. However, I had the good sense to buy a ticket for the OKC show anyway, and I was rewarded with a brilliant set of my old favorites. John Darnielle puts on an amazing show. I was worried that it would be a low-energy set, since most of his songs are written for the acoustic guitar. I was pleased to be wrong. He's accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, neither of whom do any talking, but appear to be into it. John's stage banter is pretty fabulous -- stories about inadvertently inviting a troop of tweakers into one's small apartment and having them destroy your antique maple-top desk by imprinting it with their tweaker poetry, for example. You can tell he loves his work -- he smiles while he plays, in that uncontainable way, and he plays barefoot. At...

I've been meaning to get this blog up and running again, but wasn't sure what direction it should go. And frankly, I'm still not sure. It's definitely no longer a chronicle of my time abroad, since I'm back in Oklahoma, where things are much the same as they were when I left them. Everything is different and the same. I've been missing my friends in Bordeaux like crazy, which is not alleviated by the photos posted by another OU student currently living in my apartment on Rue du Loup. I miss life in France in a lot of ways, and I feel like I'm living abroad sort of vicariously by meeting a lot of exchange students. I'm participating in a program that matches students studying abroad with students interested in cultural exchange. My student is Japanese, and we've so far had a lot of fun together. I envy the newness of everything she's getting to do, and the linguistic strides she's making. I teach her as much slang as I can work into the conv...

On my last night in Bordeaux, I did some hurried packing and cleaning and I went down to Dick Turpin's for my last open mic night with some friends. I stayed until a little after closing time, and went upstairs to try to catch a bit of sleep before I had to wake up at 4 a.m. to catch a taxi. I had fitful dreams and I woke up every hour, panicked that I'd missed my flight. I didn't miss my flight. I had four hours of layover in Paris and then the transatlantic to New Jersey. From the moment I got off the plane, everything was shiny and efficient. I had a Dr. Pepper, and some cheap Chinese food. Life was grand, if a little strange. People were wearing t-shirts and tennis shoes and there were entirely too many people who had bleached their hair blond. And then I got stuck in Newark because Continental purposefully overbooked their flight to Tulsa. They put me up in a hotel room and I spent the night and entire next day watching the Discovery channel and hanging around in the...