Spanish Steps.  Piazza Venezia.  Trevi Fountain.  Via del Corso.

Villa Borghese.  Borghese Gallery.  Via del Corso.

Palatine Hill.  Colosseo.  Foro Romano.  Piazza Venezia.  Via del Corso.

Via Appia Antica.  Catacombs.  Pantheon.  Via del Corso.

Vatican City.  Vatican Museum.  Sistine Chapel.  Saint Peter’s Basilica.  Via del Corso.

Sorrento.  Positano.  Pompeii.

And on the seventh day, they rested.

Every time I think I’ve got it beat, it comes back and kicks me in the ass.  Several trips back, I was unable to sleep the first night I arrived in Europe.  The next trip, I slept like a rock that first night, and thought, “heh, that wasn’t bad.” And then proceeded to be unable to sleep the second night.

This time, I made it all the way to night three before experiencing a complete and total sleep breakdown.  I lay awake all night last night, and am being run around like a crazy person today.  This does not bode well for family harmony.

Things otherwise have been lovely so far.  Apologies for having a brain incapable of substance today; I’ll hope for both consciousness enough and time to post properly soon…

Ah, Italia.  Life is good, if the Internet access ain’t exactly easy.  I’ll post more when there’s not a line waiting for the business center’s computer; for the moment, suffice it to say, so far, so good.  I think today’s schedule includes the Colisseum and the Forum.  And a lethal combination of espresso and prosecco, fortunately spaced out over the course of the day…

Actually, my head spins in a light breeze, at this point.  But this was nonetheless annoying:

Remember that I took the red-eye to Houston to meet up with my parents, and that the three of us were then going to fly here (oh, yes, I’m here; my itinerary hasn’t changed) to Newark to meet up with my sister, so that the four of us could go on to Rome together?  I got a call from my stepfather at 5.45 this morning, as I was sitting in the IAH President’s Club:  their flight was delayed, and there was an enormous line at the ticket counter, so he didn’t have any more information than that.  They already had a too-tight connection in Houston, so they told me to go on to Newark, and that they’d catch up with me here.

I had three hours to wait, though, and free wifi, so I scoped out the situation for them.  Their flight was apparently delayed by an hour, from 7.00 am to 8.00 am.  Stated reason?  Mandatory crew rest.  (Which does make me, right this moment, want to ask about the status of mandatory passenger rest, but I digress.) The delay would cause their flight to get into IAH 15 minutes after our flight to EWR had left, but there are two more IAH-EWR flights after that one that would still get them here in plenty of time for our flight to Rome.

My stepfather calls me back again about half an hour later, and tells me that they’re now driving to New Orleans, where they’ll hop a direct flight to EWR, and get in here forty-five minutes after me.  Apparently the ticket agent had to work pretty hard even to make that happen—those two IAH-EWR flights must have been completely full, because apparently her initial solution to the problem was to put them on the same flight out tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Did I mention that the purpose of this trip is that it’s my mother’s 60th birthday present?  And because apparently the airline’s schedule got screwed up last night, and the crew got into BTR too late, and now they must be forced to rest just a bit longer, she’s supposed to give up one-seventh of that trip?

Not bloody likely.

I shouldn’t have worried, though; my stepfather’s mighty hard to say no to.  They should be here any minute, and then all will proceed as it ought.

So, now that I think about it, this was hardly a momentous shift.  I guess the key point here, again, is me, lack of sleep, and a resulting state in which I’m even easier to confuse than usual. 

Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep making me dopey.  Or perhaps it’s the head-spinning shifts in travel plans going on by cell phone right now.* One way or another, I’m prompted to a bit of the kind of self-revelation that I’m not ordinarily prone to.  But it’s a question that has fascinated me since grad school when, well before I ever read any David Lodge, I brought it up with my drinking buddies.  Not that I want to get into an extended round of Humiliation or anything, but:

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve never read?  The thing you really ought to have read years ago.  Perhaps you’ve read so much about it that you’ve gotten away with just referring to it when you’ve needed to, and have never been required to plumb its depths.  Perhaps you started it and intended to finish it, but never quite did.  Or perhaps, unaccountably, you just put it off for years.  Perhaps you finally read it this year, or this summer, or perhaps you’re working on it right now.

Me?  Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy.  The situation is a little bit of all of the above:  I read the first chapter years ago, and always meant to come back to it, but just kept putting it off.  In part because I could:  Ong’s gotten such thorough treatment by so many scholars that I always felt like I’d read it, even though I hadn’t.  But the text is key enough that I’ve got to teach it in my new media theory class in the fall, and so I’m finally reading it, for real.

You?  Make up pseudonyms, if you like, if you don’t want to be associated with your embarrassing gaps.

—–

*More on this shortly.

Way east.  I’m back in the airport—my wonderful little airport, with the free wifi (though it’s behaving like free wifi, I’m afraid—flashing on and off, four bars, no bars, three bars, one bar, three bars, like a little strobe in my menu bar).  Waiting for the red eye.  And man, are my eyes going to be red.

What of July 15 I’m going to experience will take place in the air, and in the airports.  Arrival at IAH at 5.30 am, where I’ll spend just over three hours waiting for my parents.  The three of us will get on a plane for Newark, where we’ll spend another three-plus hours waiting for my sister.  And then the four of us will board a plane for Rome, where it will be July 16 when we arrive.

Two nights on planes.  I’m a little alarmed about it, but my parents have promised to pump me full of Ambien once we take off from Newark, and given that I almost certainly won’t sleep tonight, I’ll hopefully zonk out tomorrow night.

I’m hoping for nearby wifi in Rome, and if it’s there, you’ll hear from me.  The batteries in the camera are fully charged, and the little powerhouse Powerbook is at the ready.

In the meantime, I’ll probably wind up posting from IAH and EWR, just to pass the time…

I’ve been on the hunt for some time now for a more adequate tasks manager, something that would enable me to combine the benefits of the digital with the clarity of print-on-paper lists.  None of the to-do type things I’ve used have really been adequate, for whatever reason:  the tasks aspect of something like iCal or Entourage or Palm Desktop is generally much too constrained; on the positive side, it can link particular tasks to particular days, but the notions of categorizing and prioritizing that these packages use don’t really work for me.  (For them to work, I’d need something much more multi-dimensional, something that allows you to indicate both the urgency and the importance of any given task.  And I’d need a much more fluid set of categories to work with.  iCal is the worst offender, in this regard; I still despise the whole “calendars” instead of “categories” model that the program uses, and to have to associate tasks only with particular calendars is just nuts.)

I’ve poked at a number of other organizing-type software packages, such as StickyBrain and Backpack, but all have seemed more unwieldy than helpful.  I wanted something clean but flexible, something that wouldn’t demand high levels of input from me but would just shut up and do what I wanted.

(I attempted to try Burnout Menu as well, but the demo insisted, upon first being fired up, that I had been using it for 28 days, and that I had to buy a license to continue.  The license is super cheap, but I was much too annoyed about the failed demo to fork over cash sight unseen.  Top that off with the fact that an email to their support address has gone unanswered for two days, and I’m just not biting.)

Anyhow, after GZombie’s post about Scott’s recent use of OmniOutliner, I got a bit curious.  My new Powerbook came with OO pre-installed, but I’d never fired it up, being completely uncertain what I’d use it for.  I started it up, and here’s the first thing I saw:

That little tickbox next to the open text field is, indeed, a tickbox.  Meaning that perhaps this software could be good not just for outlining things that need to get written, but also for organizing all the to-do crap littering my head.  And here’s the genius part:  because you can create nested lists, and because those nested lists are collapsible, you can set your list up such that you can only see the portion of your tasks that you’re willing or able to work on at any given moment.  For instance, I’m at home right now, so I can open my list like this:

I’ve only started tinkering with this, so I’m not sure in the long run how I’m going to like it, but at the moment, I’m sold.

A moment of true confessions:  I’m an obsessive stats watcher.  I love knowing who’s coming in and out of here, and how long they’re sticking around.  And I’m a bit obsessed, in a weird audience-research sort of way, with seeing what posts draw a crowd and what posts don’t, and with speculating about why.  It’s utterly meaningless, as I (thankfully) don’t actually use that information to change what’s going on around here.  It’s just amusing, is all, and I’m not quite sure why I find it so.

But, disclaimers aside, a bit of stats watching from the last few days:

I knew that the stuff with Tribble was going to cause something of an uptick, as the academic blogging world went to code orange, but I wasn’t expecting this much of a surge.  Nor was I expecting it to linger.  But I’m still most surprised here by the short-lived Taibbi frenzy.  It’s pretty much passed today—things seem pretty normal—but it was weird last night to catch the zeitgeist at work.

[P.S.:  Green = page loads; blue = unique visitors; orange = returning visitors.  Just FYI.]

Did either Mike or Matt Taibbi just do something nefarious or something?  Because in the last, say, four hours, I’ve had what can only be called a bajillion hits off various searches for some combination of the father/son team.  Seriously:  of my last 100 hits, 54 have come from such searches.  And they’re almost all from different IP addresses, and different locations.  What gives?

To do tomorrow:

___ Get up.

___ Kick ass.

(Thanks to Shhh, and of course to Eddy, for this reminder, which I use whenever I need a little extra motivation in the ass-kicking department.)