We have arrived at our intended destination. All went according to plane. Onto a plane quickly and easily. Flight departed on time and landed on time. Plane landed at the right airport. I actually slept a bit on the plane. You can’t count on all of those things, particularly the last one. But it happened — sleep, I mean — and now I am cured of jet lag.
I am a notoriously bad flier. I can feel jet lagged by staying in the same time zone. It also takes me a two or three days to feel like a human again after a trip begins (or ends). Some of this is surely about how much I sleep in the days leading up to a trip. Usually that’s not a lot, but I usually don’t sleep that much anyway. Then there’s the travel. The moving stuff around, making faces at the airport, dealing with luggage, the dehydration of the whole travel experience. The miracles of modern travel, whatever. And then I’m just not sleeping on a plane, even when you’re supposed to. Too much noise. Sleeping as you perceptibly move is a weird idea. I have stuff to read, or work to do. And there are movies and things. Then there’s that seat, which is not designed for someone with a spinal column. And always the guy in front of you. And the noise associated with the perceptible travel. Oh, I can make a lot of excuses for it all, but I’m just a lousy traveler. I just hope I can remain decent company.
And to stay awake the next day, which is today. This, Tuesday, Dé Máirt, or Purplasday or whatever day this actually is.
Never mind the when. You had to figure out the where. Here’s one more hint.
We walked around with friends, people from other states and from other countries as we all assembled and were trying to keep each other awake. I ran across one more hint on our pedestrian journey.
Later, we walked by this building and everyone pointed and laughed at this mural. I was too tired to understand the joke, so I took a photo so that I could figure it out later. I still have no idea why it was funny, but many smart people thought it was.
And we have successfully stayed awake on our first full day in Dublin. We are here to attend two conferences, which start tomorrow and Friday. I will be networking and presenting research and grading. I have a lot of that to do tomorrow. And that, somehow, will be how I bleed off the last of the jet lag.
You’ll have to guess. And this will take some doing. Here are all the hints you are getting. Look carefully, and maybe you’ll be able to figure this out from context clues.
We are going back to 2020!
Or at least dressing our faces that way, because germs, man. So you see a mask. And if you look near the top right corner there’s a hint. I’m wearing an overstuffed blue hint. Also there’s another hint covering my ears.
It’s a plane, yes, congratulations. But to where? You have until tomorrow to figure it out.
I had the weirdest dream this morning. But no one cares about your dreams. If you’re writing a blog, or someplace that’s not your own dream journal, or the Journal of Altered Conscious Mental, Emotional, and Sensory Experiences, no one will. This should be a lesson to you. Don’t write it out for others, because no one is reading about your dreams (and Freud isn’t coming along to analyze you in the comments.)
Simply do this instead. Point out you had a dream or dreams. This signals that you have not only slept recently, but done so to the extent that you could enter REM sleep. And then, share that you, too, are dismissive of the dreams, that you know that no one cares. And then, by definition, you are hip.
Not only are you hip, but you, my friend, are a dreamer.
And this is the sort of thing I normally charge $84.95 for down at the airport Ramada, where the lonely, bored, and vaguely motivated will fall all over themselves to see my latest slide decks.
No one cares about your slide decks. All the above? You can apply that to your presentations, too. Oh, sure, you put in a lot of work and they’re interesting, noteworthy, sometimes even compelling. But, and this is the key, they are those things in the moment, not in the re-telling.
Pick your spots.
No one cares about your spots.
Except for infectious disease specialists. Tell them everything. Do not charge them Ramada rates.
Here’s the view from the 6th floor almost-corner office. Not bad out there. Most of the streets on the way in were in great shape. Just one, screen by trees and hills and houses, looked a bit rough. At least for our commute. Quite a few people didn’t make it in today. Not everyone has the same snow experience. You can also see that, below, just by carefully observing which people have shoveled their sidewalks 48-plus hours after the snow stopped and who hasn’t.
In my Rituals and Traditions class today I tried to frame things so that we start thinking of these things more like a team, a league or a school, and not like a fan. I presented them with some research on rituals from a marketing perspective. (Rituals have staying power and create conditions where highly identified fans want to come back, take part, and come back again. Also, most of them spend more money on other stuff at the venue than the ticket price itself.) The lecture got us through about a decade of marketing of fandom research and a few more years on sports fan sociology. Also, I showed them the Aggie War Hymn at weddings, with which I made a point about things in, and out, of context.
And then I explained the song. It’s a song about hating your rivals. I explained the history of the song. J.V. “Pinky” Wilson wrote the song in a trench in France during World War I. He came home to College Station, finished his degree, and sang the song in a quarter. Some of the A&M yell leaders heard it, and convinced him to enter it into a campus song contest. It won, and since 1920 it has been an integral part of Texas A&M fandom. I mean, they sing it at weddings.
At which point I paused, and deadpanned, “White people weddings, man.”
Then I said, there are a lot of these videos on YouTube.
We also considered the shared affiliation of rituals, as in the example of the running of the Gumps. Look at that zeal! And the footspeed!
And then we considered what it means to be a part of 61,000 people singing to your favorite team.
I was also able to cite to them a study that told us some 98 percent of fans engage in sports rituals. Most of them have to do with wearing the team gear and colors, but that study broke out 15 other criteria, and quite a few make the cut for people.
On Thursday, my students’ surveys will be completed. We’re asking questions of our study body. Hopefully some of the information will be help to our class as we try to help find and or develop things our athletic department might work on.
In Criticism, we discussed baseball, beginning with this story about one of the Phillies recent relievers. As a young man he caused a terrible car accident that killed one man, badly injured a teenager and almost derailed his own life. But then one of the truly selfless and remarkable things about humanity happens. It’s a terrific story.
I asked the group what they would like to know at the end of the story. What’s not here that’d you like to see in a followup. Someone said they’d like to see what happened if the pitcher and the family met. Just you wait for Thursday.
We also talked about a museum piece — meaning copy from the Smithsonian — about Jackie Robinson. It didn’t really fit the bill, but we were able to discuss why, and also story curation and, again, what’s not in this piece. What wasn’t there was what Robinson did after he walked away from baseball, and that’s every bit, or more as important, as his time with the Dodgers.
In the evening, as the day is getting later everything felt sunny and cheery, even if it was cold, and it looks like Hoth.
We’re right at the point where 12 hours of the day is in daylight. Right at the point where it seems we might make it once again. Right at the moment that should have happened two weeks ago, but will take place three or four weeks from now: it’ll finally feel like winter is behind us.
Since it isn’t, I rode in the basement this evening. I’ve been suffering through the little riding I’ve done of late. Everything got out of whack around the holidays and my cardio slipped and nothing has helped and it just felt like a big chore — a big painful chore.
But this brief ride, for the first time in a long while, things finally felt good. I don’t know why it seemed to click back into place, physically or mentally, but it was about time. Also, Spain. And I went up a hill prominent enough that it got its own little graphic in the heads up display.
I’m sure that’s useful for climbers, so that they might time their exertion to perfection. But it does something else for the rest of us.
Anyway, 30-some minutes over a lumpy area of Tossa de Mar, with two little Cat 5 climbs according to the profile, way off in the northeast of Spain. I hope I get a few more rides in a row that feel as decent as this one.
All of our recycling sits in the garage. It waits there, impatiently, until my own impatience tells me to do something with the leaning tower of cardboard I’m assembling. Fortunately, I don’t have to make the trip too often these days. I think I go about once every three weeks. And Saturday was that time. Get that stuff out of the garage so we can walk around a little easier, and not have it threaten to bury me, a fine coating of paperboard and other, heavier, recyclable products. So I backed out the car, put two bins — one large and one small — of our mixed recyclables, and all of the deconstructed cardboard. Drove it all over to the inconvenience center. It’s a fine place, about seven miles away, and they take all of these things and more. Also, they’re not terrible strict, so long as you arrive before they close and back your vehicle into the unloading area. These are the rules and you must follow them.
If you do not, you will incur his wrath.
That bear has been sitting there for … a while. The gentleman that manages this facility for the county is seldom in his little office here, too much work to do around the site, but that bear never misses a shift. There’s a story with this guy. He was fished out of, or saved from, one of the waste bins and now he has this role. I hope he is well compensated.
Did you notice the sky in that photo? Here’s another Saturday view. It was about 50 degrees that day. I did the recycling in a t-shirt. No way, I thought, is it going to snow as predicted. And they predicted a lot. All evidence before hand to the contrary.
Sunday was not bright and blue, but gray and chilly. I watched the men’s Olympic hockey gold medal game. That was fun. Then, at the end, a few of the guys brought Johnny Gaudreau’s sweater onto the ice.
That’s touching. Gold medalists are skating a sweater with Johnny Gaudreau’s name on it.
Gaudreau, and his brother Matt, were killed by a drunken motorist while riding bikes in August 2024.
We did some research on local cycling attitudes immediately after they were killed. I presented it to the city and at an academic conference. We were able to help create a little something useful from it. I try not to forget that the day before they were killed, I was out on a ride, just one road over, at about the same time of the early evening.
The man that killed them is still in jail, awaiting trial. He has a procedural hearing later this week on one element of his case. He has a wife and two children, and so the impact here is widely felt. Johnny had a wife and two kids. They were expecting their third. Matt and his wife were expecting their first. The brothers were back in town because their sister was supposed to be married the very next day. There’s absolutely nothing but sadness around this story, and it’s a widely known bit of business. There were a lot of dusty eyes at that gesture.
After the players got their medals, they all skated to center ice for a group photo. And then two of them held up a finger, a wait-a-sec finger, and skated away. Soon they came back, two children in tow. Those are two of Johnny Gaudreau’s children.
Meanwhile, as the weather loomed, people stopped to add things to the ghost bikes memorial where they were killed. Someone shimmied up that pole and mounted an American flag. Everyone seems to agree he should have been with the team, winning and celebrating with the boys. But for a guy that had too much to drink, was angry, driving aggressively and did all of this in one horribly impulsive, accidental moment.
I’ve been told the memorial continued to grow throughout the afternoon.
And then, later, the snow came. I went to the basement to turn a few miles over on my bike. There was a bit of dust out on the cooler spots in the yard. When I came up an hour later, we had an event. And then the winds came, gusting up to about 40 mph.
It looked like this around dinner time, and every weather model projected snow through about noon today. That it was 50 degrees Saturday meant nothing at all come Sunday night. Sunday night, it was this.
Monday morning, after the traditional chocolate chip pancakes required of a snow day, it looked like this in the driveway, which takes the both of us about an hour to clean.
We had about 14 inches of snow. Mostly light and fluffy, and easily maneuverable by shovel. Perhaps a bit less so by snow blower. The better news is that was the drier variety, and the sun was out to do its work. A fair amount of it melted down today. Unlike the last snow and ice storm that was historic for its staying power, the evidence of this storm, historic for being a blizzard, should all be gone by next weekend.
This snow and ice is never going to melt. Mostly because it has nowhere to go. The conditions have not been conducive to condensation, which would hurry the process along. Instead, the air has been cold, unceasingly, and relentlessly dry. Oh, you can see some rooftops now, asphalt shingles darkened by the moisture that has sat on them for almost three weeks now, but that’s just false hope. It’s nothing but this from here on in.
Those hours of sleet we had last month seemed like a lovely thing at the time. We had all the groceries we needed, no travel planned and I’d pulled out every light source and battery we own as a therapeutic just-in-case. We never lost power. You could get out and drive again on the bigger roads on the third and fourth day — if you could get to those bigger roads.
Mostly, it’s just boring. Going outside is nice. Looking out the window and seeing grass and trees and things is nice. Instead, I just stare through curtains and blinds, thinking about the things you can’t do.
It’s never about the things I should be doing, which is weird.
Today I did class prep for tomorrow’s classes.
It occurred to me when I was wrapping that up that this was a unique day of class prep. I always spend at least the day before building or finishing and polishing the next day’s classwork. Today was the first time I have ever not had to build it all out from scratch. Ever? Ever. Two classes tomorrow, and I didn’t have to start all over to get ready. I spent my time reviewing notes from previous lectures that I am going to use tomorrow. First time ever.
The first class I taught was in … what? In 2009?
The really nice thing is that next Monday/Tuesday this will happen again. Twice in a row! But then the streak ends. Still, this is nice, and the way it should be more often. One day it will be, perhaps. We’ll see. We don’t know that, but we’ll see.
I’ve never liked “we’ll see,” but it is an inescapable sentence.
We drove over the river this evening. Parked in a parking deck. Walked a few blocks to where we were going. Shivered part of the way, because I did not carry a coat, because I didn’t realize all of that. But, hey, that’s my fault and no one else’s. Anyway, it was warm where we were going. And they had a restroom and food, and also the evening’s entertainment.
We walked into this little comedy club, which was some slightly larger room behind an empty bar. Probably the joint sat 100, 120 people. Cozy little place. Unless you were sitting right at the back of the room you probably felt like you were sitting right at the stage. It felt both dusty, but clean. And a little shopworn. Three long steps would get you across the stage and the back wall was a faded old cityscape mural.
It made me think, as comedy clubs always do, about how comedians in my hometown would brag about our venue when they played there. The Stardome was one of the best in the country, they’d say. In my very limited experience, they were right! Also, that place has a real menu. This place offered three sandwiches, three pizzas and drinks. They didn’t have a drink minimum, they had an item minimum. Extortionate so-and-sos. But I choose to think that means all of the money from tickets goes to the performers, which is a nice thought.
We saw Kristen Key this evening. She got her break from one of those comedy variety reality show things, but we discovered her on Instagram a few years ago. This was the first time she was in the same city we were in at the same time, and so of course we went. (She was also at the concert last night, and now I think she’s following us.)
Her Instagram feed is full of clips of her Q&A period, but here’s a set piece from another show, which we saw this evening.
The questions she got during this show were … not good. Someone was looking for love. Someone else’s relative is a huge fan but couldn’t make it because of a medical procedure. A third person was looking for some sort of dating advice she could share. Someone asked about her favorite song from last night’s Brandi Carlile concert. And someone asked what her favorite Winter Olympic sport is and why is not curling. She said her favorite sport was curling.
She got the standing ovation in the little club at the end, and got a little teary about it. And then she was standing out front to meet people as they left, spending several minutes with anyone that asked, which was nice. She mad a video for the person who couldn’t be there because of health reasons. We talked with her for a moment, and she, of course, told us to come back the next time she’s in town, and we will, especially since I just thought I should ask her to record an outgoing voicemail message for me.
