On conferences and chaos

This past week has been busy and just a little chaotic. On Wednesday, I left the bucolic splendor of State College for the urban delights of New York City and the annual meeting of composition scholars that is the 4Cs (Conference of College Composition and Communication--although the last C in the title has been more or less irrelevant for several decades now). My graduate advisor was the conference chair, which meant that she's been more than usually busy for the last few months. I actually enjoyed the conference--some of the panels I attended were quite interesting and helped me think a little more about my dissertation project. Other panels, on the other hand, were less worthy of the time I spent there--I can't understand why so many scholars (some of them quite well respected) seem constitutionally incapable of limiting their remarks to the time given them, or to articulate a clear point in a twenty-minute paper. Anyway, most of you are probably less than interested in further diatribes on this particular topic, so I'll desist. My own presentation was Thursday morning after opening remarks--we had a pretty small crowd (most of whom knew at least one of the presenters; Keith Gibson, for those of you at Penn State who remember him, was in the audience. It was fun to see him again), but we had a good discussion after the panel. (Following which, I got sucked into the energetic wake of one of my professors and found myself one of two lone grad students at a moderately expensive Italian restaurant for lunch. Luckily, I had a baby-sitting gig--yes, babysitting [one of our professors and his wife have 10 month-old twins--and they were on the same panel, so they needed some help]--that afternoon that paid for my lunch!)

I also enjoyed wandering around downtown New York between some of the sessions (my roommate, Catherine Pavia, and I decided to ditch the conference on Saturday morning and spent the time wandering through New York's fashion district and up 5th Avenue, looking at shops). Friday evening, I went with Catherine and a handful of PSU grad students to the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), which was free at the time. I'm not a big fan of modern art, but they had several nice pieces, including Van Gogh's Starry Night, Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans, some Roy Lichtenstein pieces, and, my personal favorite, Andrew Wyeth's, Christina's World. We also found time to go to several nice restaurants--Wednesday night I went with a group of grad students to a Cuban restaurant; Thursday night we found ourselves at a Mexican restaurant (coincidentally right next door to the Cuban restaurant from the night before); and Friday night we had some wonderful Indian food. The last probably constituted one of the highlights from the visit for me: not only was the food good, but the company was excellent (two of my good friends from the program, Matt Newcomb and Cory Holding--the same two people that I spent most of the time with during my campus visit to Penn State six years ago).

Here's a picture of me in New York--the only picture I took the whole time I was there! I'm not a big fan of pictures of myself, and the older I get, the less interested I am in taking pictures of buildings and other inanimate objects.



I'm sorry if this blog seems to be all about me! But for the first time since Andrew was born, my life didn't significantly intertwine with Dan and Andrew's. Dan stayed behind in State College and watched Andrew, who didn't seem to mind my absence much (aside from deciding that 5 am was his new wakeup time). I don't think they did a whole lot, since there's not much to do when you're homebound with a toddler. At any rate, Dan's not around to give me his input, as he left this afternoon for a conference in Chicago (for those of you keeping score, we had less than 24 hours together before he had to leave!)

Of course, we also have the obligatory pictures of Andrew. Here, he's getting the worse of his horsey ride (he's finally figuring out how to get on and off by himself, but the dismount isn't always too smooth!)



We think that Andrew's hair is developing a little curl. I'm not sure how clearly you can see it in this picture, but he's developing a funny little ducktail right at the nape of his neck.


Finally, a picture of Andrew "puzzling" (which mostly means he takes the puzzles apart. He hasn't progressed to actually putting the pieces back together).


Andrew was officially 15 months old yesterday. I take him to the doctor for his check up tomorrow, so we'll find out how his recent spate of milk guzzling has affected his weigh! (Dan told me that he figures Andrew drinks around 40 oz of milk a day! No wonder we're going through milk like there's no tomorrow--I thought that stage was still at least a dozen years away . . .)