The Houston airport is an absolute wonder at 5.40 in the morning—ghostly quiet, deserted, just beginning to stir to life.  Though the circumstances surrounding getting here weren’t ideal, I’m awfully glad I got to see this.

Even better, the President’s Club opens at 5.30 am—I was the second person in—so there were coffee and bagels waiting for me.

There’s nothing else to report, really.  Except that I love this little computer so much that I’m inventing excuses to post.

Greetings from the twelfth circle of hell, one Dante missed on his little tour:  the airport at midnight.  I’m waiting for the red-eye to IAH, which is going to be a serious red-eye, as the stupid flight is only three hours long, but it’ll nonetheless be 6.30 5.40 am by the time I get there.

What makes this so hellish is not simply the fact of the red-eye, but that everything in the airport has closed down.  Everything, that is, excepting the four flights that all leave shortly after midnight.  Everything, that is, including the TSA.

Four plane loads of people were, when I arrived, being funneled through one security lane.  Everytime there was a problem, the entire thing ground to a halt.  The line inched forward for the first twenty minutes I was in it.

And then, just as I rounded the next-to-last switchback in the line, somebody had the genius notion that it might speed things up if they open a second lane!  In a matter of moments, the line went sweeping forward.  It was enough to make me think that my karma was on the upswing.  I chose my lane, knowing full well that I’d chosen incorrectly, because I always choose incorrectly.  There is no other way to choose.

I was a matter of inches from the table where I’d have unloaded laptop and shoes and all else, when the works ground to a screeching halt again.  The lane I was in, predictably, was snafu’d, and as I watched the folks I’d been just behind in line zipping through the other security checkpoint, one of the TSA guys hung the “closed” sign on our metal detector.  A cluster of other TSA guys stood squinting at the monitor.  And I’m thinking, why aren’t they just pulling the bag out and opening it, if they can’t figure out what’s in it?

One TSA guy turns to our lane and tells us to work in with the other lane.  Fortunately, another TSA guy simultaneously said, no, go to that lane, which had just opened.  And he even oversaw getting people into that lane in roughly the order they were in in the lane that had just closed.

As I finally, finally made it up to the table, and then toward the metal detector, the airport cops arrived.  A very, very pregnant woman, traveling with a child of about two, stood across the table from the police, trying not to cry.  On the table was her little boy’s carry-on bag, and the two toy guns he had in it.

Just now, about twenty minutes later, she passed me on her way to her gate; she seemed fine, if harried and late.  I’m really curious whether the cops confiscated the toy guns or not.  I feel for her—uncomfortably pregnant, traveling alone with a small child, speaking very little English—but I’m exasperated, too.  Who, in this day and age, would attempt to pass a gun-shaped object (much less a really awfully convincing one made of shiny metal with faux-wooden grips) through airport security?

We all made it through, though, and I’m now waiting for this flight, writing the first bit of anything on my fabulous new Powerbook, which did indeed show up as promised.  It was a hair-raising day, waiting to see if FedEx Ground was going to show or not, and they kept me hanging until the last possible minute.  But all’s well that ends well, both in package delivery and airport traversal.  Now if I can just sleep some on this flight…

[UPDATE, 5.56 am CDT:  Flight #1 got in significantly early, which is both good and bad.  On the down side, the snooze I was having got rudely interrupted sooner than I expected.  On the other hand, I’m now in the airport, sucking down the coffee and the free wireless.  This should be an interestingly delirious day.]

What do you get the Russian president and former KGB leader who has everything?  Perhaps a Super Bowl ring.

I’m not quite sure why I find this story riotously funny.  Perhaps I’m just imagining Putin putting forward the Winona Ryder defense.  But let this be a warning to you all:  don’t offer a world leader a test drive of your new sports car, for instance, if you actually expect to see it again.

In my stats of late, I’ve noticed a rash (read: 2) of folks whose path through the site appears to indicate that they’re trying unsuccessfully to comment.  It may be that they don’t want to leave email addresses (which my commenting system requires) or that the CAPTCHAs system is somehow eluding them.  But there might also be some kind of error that I oughta know about.  I recognize the irony of asking folks who can’t comment for comments, though, so if you’re trying to comment and failing, would you email me?  (See “contact” above.)

shelves
Originally uploaded by KF.

I found myself so discombobulated yesterday after the toe event that I couldn’t sit down and get back to work, and so instead went out and purchased and then mounted a fab new set of shelves above my home desk.  I had shelves like these (though much less nice ones) mounted above my desk in a couple of apartments in New York, and it took me a while to realize that all that searching around for some new desk configuration I’ve been doing over the last month or so was all about trying to replicate the feeling of those old workspaces.  So why not just go back to the wall-mounted shelves?  Much, much cheaper, much more flexible, and I feel like I’ve got a whole new office.

Honest to god, call me a wuss, but if there were any way I could opt never again to be in a room with people who are yelling, or in a tearful rage, I’d sign up PDQ.

As it is, I live with the fight-or-flight response produced by such confrontations for hours afterward.

And that’s when I’m not the object of the yelling or the raging.  Imagine what a wreck I become when I am.

BRHS stairwell
Originally uploaded by KF.

At last, some images from the class reunion.  I didn’t take many pictures of the people at the reunion, and swore to several that I wouldn’t post any pictures of them online.  So what’s here is largely a meditation on the disintegration of the school’s physical plant since 1984.

The reunion consisted of two events, a brown-bag picnic and self-guided tour of the school in the afternoon, and a party that night.  The party was terrific fun, if it did make clear to some of us our imminent fogey status (we spent much time complaining about how dark and loud it was, how we couldn’t read one another’s nametags and we couldn’t carry on a decent conversation.  Very sad).

The picnic was much weirder, much more uncomfortable.  No small part of this, for me, had to do with the sad shape that the school itself seems to be in.  The building is a gorgeous old behemoth, built during the 1920s, and always felt like a somewhat mythic place to go to school, right down to the “HIGH SCHOOL” inscribed in the marble over the front doors.  And as my pal Beth and I pulled into the parking lot, we both said, simultaneously, that the place hadn’t changed at all since we’d last been there.

BRHS exterior
Originally uploaded by KF.

This was not a good thing.

It was evident that the parking lot has not been repaved in years and years, for instance.  And very little upkeep has been done on the buildings, outside or in.  The seats in the auditorium, covered in already aging green velvet upholstery when we were students, are now twenty-one years older.  The paint in the hallways appears to be the same paint as in 1984, perhaps a layer or two thicker.  And the linoleum tile floors are, if anything, patched in more mismatched ways than before.

The whole thing was a bit heartbreaking, and evidence of the things that have gone wrong in the East Baton Rouge Parish school system.  When the system came under a federal consent decree mandating the desegregation of the parish’s schools, largely via forced busing, the result was massive white flight; a system that had been 70% white and 30% black in the late 1970s is now 75% black and 25% white.  And one of the results of this is that, for the last twenty years, whenever a new sales tax or bond issue to support public schools in Baton Rouge has come before the public for a vote, the measure has been defeated.

Baton Rouge High School was transformed into a magnet school in the late 1970s, and was, during my junior year, named a national School of Excellence.  The decrepitude into which the facilities have fallen, emblematic of the self-destruction of the entire school system, is devastating to see—and is unrelieved by the irony that, two years ago, the school was honored once again as a “No Child Left Behind” blue-ribbon institution.

Djever have one of those days where you get up at like seven o’clock in the morning and pull the sheets off your bed because they’re totally overdue to be washed, and you put them in the washer and then the dryer and go about your day, and then walk into your bedroom for the first time around say 9.30 at night and discover that there are no goddamned sheets on your bed?

I’m just saying.

Today has begun the summer’s intended mad spending of money.  There is, as with everything, an up side and a down side to these expenditures.  The up side is that it isn’t wholly my money I’ve been spending; I’ve got a collection of small grants that are supporting the purchase of some books, some software, and some equipment this summer, all in preparation both for the new media class I’m teaching in the fall and for the new project I’ll be working on in the spring.

Some of the money is mine, though.  The IT folks are about to replace my three-year-old college-owned Powerbook with a gorgeous, high-end G5 and a big-ass Cinema Display (the cost of which is heavily subsidized by one of those grants), so I’m replacing my home iMac (the original flat panel) with one of these.  So a little switcho-change-o here, from office portability and home desktop to home portability and office desktop.  Which only makes sense as I rarely work anywhere but my desk in the office, but I have a lovely wireless network in the house.  (This will also help me avoid those late-night runs to the office to pick up the Powerbook the night before a trip, after a last-minute decision that yes, maybe I will bring the computer after all.)

The down side is, of course, that all this ordering was done over these here internets, and that coupled with the knowledge that the charges will hit my credit card long before the reimbursement check hits my inbox leaves me feeling a bit like I’ve spent all this money for the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from looking at pictures of stuff you might like.  Internet shopping is mighty convenient, yes, but I do miss the instant gratification factor of walking out of the store with new toy in hand.

The other slight bummer is knowing that I waited a couple of days too long in ordering the Powerbook; I’m leaving town again on Thursday, and there’s only a snowball’s chance that the thing will be here before I go.  Ah, but it’ll be here on my return, and that will cut the end-of-trip bitterness just a bit.

There are more expenditures yet to come:  I haven’t ordered all of the software yet, and there are a few peripherals I need.  Oh yes, and one of these days I’m finally going to have to pay someone to come put blinds in my damn windows…

[UPDATE, 6.25.05, 6.07 pm:  Holy moly!  I placed the Powerbook order exactly three hours ago, and along with it ordered a new laptop sleeve and a networkable all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machine (there was a great rebate deal, and I have no home printer).  And I just got an email message saying that sleeve and printer have shipped!  On a Saturday!  Alas, though, no Powerbook:  I upgraded the RAM and the hard drive, and so there are probably a couple of days yet before that one hits the shipper.  Sigh.]

[UPDATE, 6.25.05, 9.03 pm:  Good gravy, I love these guys!  I just got home from dinner out to discover an email message, time stamped 6.49 pm today, precisely 3 hours and 45 minutes after the receipt of my order, telling me that my specially configured Powerbook has shipped.  Here’s hoping everybody else is half this efficient.  (I’m looking at you, FedEx Ground.)]

[UPDATE, 6.27.05, 7.34 am:  FedEx now has tracking info up, and estimates that delivery of these items will take place on Wednesday, which at least in theory puts me traveling this weekend with lovely new computer, one that I bet gets more than 40 minutes out of its battery...]