Ok, so I started writing this late last night and got as far as uploading the picutres before I realized how past my bedtime it was. I am now no longer flying to London tomorrow: I am flying to London today! I am currently in LAX, bogarting wifi from Air France, which is very very slow because I am obviously not actually in the Air France first class lounge. However, this is a major improvement over what normally happens when I’m stuck in this airport for hours which is this: I turn on my computer hoping that there has been a miraculous miracle and that LAX has free wifi all of a sudden (because charging for wifi at an airport should probably be illegal). Instead, it is like, $7, which I totally resent, and so I try to steal wifi from somewhere, which usually results in me being able to connect to the Air New Zealand wifi but not actually use it because they give all of their customers a secret code and are mean and don’t share. But today, some of the stars are aligned correctly, or something, so god bless Air France for their unsecured network.
Anyhow, things are not as wonderful as they could be because there is NOT A SINGLE COPY OF VANITY FAIR ANYWHERE IN TERMINAL 2. Vanity Fair is the only magazine I ever want to read on an airplane: it has just enough actual, good, politically-oriented journalism and just enough complete and utter fluff (ie: celebrities and dresses) to be perfect airplane fodder. The New Yorker has too many words, Vogue has too much Anna Wintour, Vanity Fair manages to hit the happy medium between them (unless there’s a Christopher Hitchens column, but even then, there’s nothing quite like feeling some righteous anger regarding an idiotic blowhard who should never have been given any sort of media mouthpiece). But not today, alas.
ANYHOW! Back to last night we go!
…
Presently: I’m feeling rather future-oriented. Tomorrow I fly to London! What happens there will shape the future of…my dissertation.
Pastly: I cleaned out my camera’s memory cards and found all kinds of photos of past adventures, presented here for your enjoyment and edification, after the jump!
Back in March, Aaron and I went to San Diego and we stopped en route at the fabled North Woods Inn, home of potatoes with cheesebutter (cheesebutter is not actually all one word but I think it is far better if we spell it that way). Cheesebutter is orange. Cheesebutter is unnatural. Cheesebutter is PURE GENIUS because as it melts into your potato, it delivers cheese deep down into its innards. CHEESEBUTTER, LONG MAY IT REIGN!!
And we went to the zoo, where we saw pandas, who were mostly boring:
However, there was excellent interpretive panda art:
Aaron creepily propositioned some zebras. We won’t speak of this again.
I learned the truth about why we never poke leopards (hint: it’s because they bite).
And then in – April? May? I can’t remember – we went on a class field trip into the desert, to the Integratron, an acoustically-perfect dome built by an aerospace engineer who wanted to use his acoustically perfect dome to harness the earth’s energy and contact the mothership or something something something, and which is now owned by a bunch of hippies so you can go there and have a sound bath which we did. Thank goodness for graduate school, which continues provides me with experiences that will surely prove fruitful and productive to both my professional and individual growth. Anyhow, this field trip entailed driving four hours into the part of the desert populated mostly by hippies, libertarians, and hippie libertarians.
But also we stopped at Cactus Mart! Where you can dig your own cactus!
And we had lunch at a place that had this glorious velvet Clint Eastwood!
And the Integratron was pretty neat.
But most importantly, it had a wonderful library of things about space, where I learned SO MUCH.
And Sam found a Bene Gesserit outpost.
THE END! Stay tuned for adventures in the UK!