Why I Love My (Extended) Family

I'm staying with my grandparents for a few days to work on my thesis. Not only does my grandpa keep two full thermoses of decaf and regular coffee in the kitchen at all times, but yesterday, we had boxed red wine and waffles for dinner, and then talked about UFOs and the Bible and whether Condoleeza Rice is evil or tragic.

I think this explains a lot.

Why I Love My Family

"It's not just that you faked an email from me. It's that now everyone thinks I don't know how to spell 'migraine.'"

- Mom, chewing out my younger brother at the breakfast table this morning

Back in the 701

- My mom is on a health food kick, which means that we have a fridge full of mangoes and soy milk. For someone who subsists entirely on the same grocery list of muesli, soup, and bulk vegetables for eight weeks at a time, this is amazing. I just ate so much Life with soy milk that I'm in pain and it feels awesome.
- We have a new labradoodle named Lucy, and I feel like I should dislike her because a) she's a designer dog, b) she replaced Elliott, my dog who I've had since the fourth grade, and c) I hate change. But I have to admit that she's kind of pretty fucking cute.
- I got my driver's license renewed. I don't look like a serial killer on my license anymore, but instead I look like I spent a night in a Holiday Inn in Queens without a razor, shaving cream, my contacts, or hair product. I figure that if I ever get pulled over for anything serious, I'll probably look about that terrible anyway.
- My sister somehow grew up over the past year. She's almost as tall as me, and it appears that she's better at algebra than I am.
- I just spent an hour dorking out in my library (by which I mean my closet, which contains zero clothes) over all the books I have to read over the next twenty days because they won't fit in my suitcases. Who's up for binge-reading Habermas? Nobody? Fine.
- I'm already out of things to do in Fargo without Brady, Natalia, Megan, David, or anyone else around. I think I'm going to hole up at my grandparent's cabin in rural Minnesota tomorrow afternoon and stay until Kelly's concert on Sunday, and will hopefully get a ton of work done in the absence of cell service and broadband internet. Just me, grandma, grandpa, and Habermas. It's like a postmodern Nativity!

This Episode Brought to You By British Airways, JFK, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Space-Time Continuum

The upside to bombastic end-of-term parties with friends and watching both seasons of Pushing Daisies and being all cute by cooking banana pancakes from scratch for dinner while listening to Jack Johnson's Banana Pancakes on a loop is that all of these things are categorically wonderful. The downside is sleep debt, especially when it catches up with you the morning of a transatlantic flight. I kind of overslept my alarm by two hours this morning. (It wouldn't have been so bad, but I had to write my letter of intent to request a funding extention for a doctorate and that's not something you want to do under extreme duress. In retrospect, I don't remember writing an address on the outside of the envelope before putting it in the mail. That worries me a little.)

So I raced to Heathrow and made my flight, which was pretty uneventful (with the possible exception of finally watching Mamma Mia, which is the oddest, trippiest film I've seen all year - and not really in a good way, but in a disturbing, what-was-everyone-involved-with-this-possibly-thinking kind of way. Coming from me, that's a very strong statement.) But then we arrived at JFK and sat. And sat. And sat. And I had already sort of figured that ninety minutes wasn't that much time to get through immigration and customs, take the train from Terminal 7 to Terminal 4, recheck my bags and get my boarding pass, go through security, and catch my flight to Minneapolis, but forty-five minutes definitely wasn't enough. You might remember that this happened at JFK last year, and I made a deal with the ticket agent and promised to sprint through the airport and I awesomely made my flight. This year, the ticket agent shook his head really sadly and sent me back to Terminal 7 with a boarding pass for tomorrow morning in my fist.

I'd have liked to stay in Oxford for another week or so, but if I'm going to leave, I'd much rather actually make it back to Fargo than be stuck in an airport Holiday Inn in Queens. I was exhausted and kind of cranky, but the two staffers at the British Airways counter were so friendly that I consciously decided to flash a megawatt smile and not take them down with me. (When I got there, one of them was like, "this'll just take a minute if you want to go outside and smoke or anything," and then the other chastised her for encouraging me to smoke. And it somehow ended with me promising not to start smoking because she was the kind of person you couldn't argue with.) They looked at my boarding pass and were like, "Fargo! New York is a long way from Minnesota," and I was like, ...that is both true and false? and then they talked about other cities they knew in Minnesota, and mentioned the Mall of America and Mary Tyler Moore and I almost asked if they wanted to have a sleepover at the hotel we were booking.

And I don't know if it was because I told them to have a nice night or what, but as I was leaving, Pamela was like, "hold up, Ryan, you get dinner!" and I got a dinner voucher for my hotel. And it was $38.

So after standing out in the freezing cold with my bags and catching a shuttle, I ended up at the Holiday Inn, which is like a mini-vacation to the early 1980s. I do get free wifi, though, so I abused that for a bit before racking up a $36 dinner bill courtesy of British Airways. (It sounds more impressive than it was, since my Cajun salmon salad was $17 and the sorbet that I convinced them to put in a styrofoam cup so I could eat it in bed while watching Lifetime was $9. Everything about this scenario is amazing, except the shuttle that I have to take at 5:30 for my flight to Minneapolis at 8. Ick.)

Ryan, Out!

"We all have ways of coping. I use sex and awesomeness."
- Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

This week has been insanely busy - not so much in actual commitments, but in terms of pulling books from the library, writing up chapters and papers, and scheduling last-minute cups of coffee with people that I probably should have taken care of in, oh, the first seven weeks of the term. But it's suddenly done, which means that I'm just obsessing about all the books I can't carry back to the US and trying to find a vegetarian entree recipe that is both a) impressive and b) very difficult to fuck up for a potluck on Sunday. (Accidentally food poisoning somebody's entire house is not the best way to make a good impression, apparently.)

Also, I guess I'm flying back to Fargo in like T minus 48 hours? I'm in denial and trying to convince myself that this is not actually true, which is why I'll probably start packing at midnight on Sunday. (I plan to yell "Ryan, out!" as many times as possible until then.)

Best Day Ever, Worst Day Ever

Within five minutes of each other, I got two text messages:

- The Nouvelle Vague show on December 7th is postponed indefinitely.
- I don't have chlamydia.

I'm going to go ahead and say I come out ahead on this one.

Where Are They Now?

Just before I left for Oxford, I had dinner with Susan Rice, two scholars from her year from North and South Dakota (represent!), and a couple of the other scholars from my year. A little over a year later, she was just picked as Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, and I'm up in my freezing turret wrapped in two sweaters with my hair sticking up on one side of my head, running on four hours of sleep, six cups of coffee, and a looping Liz Phair playlist while trying to finish this chapter on transnational social movements. As much as I'm a catastrophe right now, I guess it's not every day that I scan the headlines in the New York Times after an all-nighter and see a story that's like, see? if you kick ass and take names, you can be like Susan Rice when you grow up.

(Or you can be like John Bolton and throw staplers at people and still be UN ambassador, I guess, but I'm trying to channel this productively. And I don't own a stapler.)