The Anti-Climax

The eagle has landed. It is 45 degrees in Grand Rapids, MI, with a foreboding overcast sky and drizzles. I keep thinking that I'm on a break and will be heading back to Boston in a week or so, but my 56 pound suitcase would imply otherwise. I think I've sucessfully ground the cartilage between my vertebrae into a fine dust after dragging it along with a 30 pound (?) backpack and my guitar from Worcester to Boston to Detroit to Grand Rapids. Thank goodness I've been lifting weights this semester...

After much procrastination, a leisurely late lunch and an unintentional nap, I began packing up my room at school yesterday around 4:00pm. I have a sub-letter living there over the summer. It's amazing how you can erase all evidence of your having lived in place in a matter of a few hours when you are a destitute grad student and own virtually nothing. I took the 10:15pm bus into Beantown and crashed at my friend Preeti's in the middle of the night. I would have gotten there sooner, had my friendly Haitian cab driver not gotten so wrapped up in talking politics with me that he overshot her house by roughly a mile. I shouldn't have provoked him by asking so many questions about socioeconomic stratification in Port Au Prince...

After entrusting my beloved guitar "Pixie" to the neanderthals at the Northwest Airlines baggage counter, I tried reading some Escobar on the plane (I don't know why school reading is always so much more appealing when you DON'T have to do it), but only made it through four theoretically-dense pages before falling sound asleep. Mom and Dad greeted me at the GRR airport and took me out for some outstanding Japanese food. They were eager to talk about the logistics of my upcoming India trip, but I just wanted to pass out from exhaustion into my bowl of delicious miso soup...

Now I am trying to let it all sink in. My extended family is coming over tonight and tomorrow, I still have final grades to calculate for my students, I have to pack, get an India visa, IRB approval, and...aaaaaahhhh! Maybe I'll just go watch some digital cable. Hey, yeah, cable! I haven't seen a full TV show in almost four months!

Some day I will win an award for my procrastinatory excellence.

salud,

TKP