This happened to me again last night. Same intersection, except from the opposite direction; I was turning left across traffic into the side street that leads to my neighborhood, gauging whether the gap between the vehicles was enough to get across, and completely did not see the pedestrian crossing that side street, and came within inches of hitting him. Literally: he started running in mid-cross and just made it.

I don’t want to over-justify this — had I hit him, I’d have been wholly responsible — but I’m haunted enough that I feel I need to point out a few mitigating factors. Most importantly, that intersection is seriously dark, with no corner streetlights, and no painted crosswalk. And the guy was wearing black, head-to-toe, so even if I’d been on high pedestrian alert (which admittedly I was not; this isn’t a heavily walked route, especially at night), I’m not sure I’d have been able to pick him out.

The irony is that the police department is on this very corner. So at least if I’d hit the guy, they wouldn’t have had to go far out of their way to arrest me.

Anyhow: I’ve made my confession, and I promise to be much more pedestrian-aware going through that intersection, at all hours. And pedestrian guy, if you’re out there, I’m really, really sorry for no doubt having made your life flash before your eyes.

But Claremont PD: could we maybe do something about lighting that intersection a bit better, so nobody gets inadvertently clobbered?

I’m not sure where October went, much less the first two-thirds of November. Actually, I do know where it went: to three conferences in five weeks, with an added surprise family trip in the mix as well.

There’s lots of stuff going on, perhaps needless to say, and I’m hoping to write about it in the coming few days. Let this serve as a placeholder and a reminder that I’m still here. (If only a reminder to myself.)

This semester has thus far not gone according to plan. We’re on the cusp of what is technically the fourth week of classes, and I’ve been in the classroom precisely twice: once on Wednesday, September 2, for the first day introduction and syllabus discussion, and once on Monday, September 7, for an actual teaching day. I had a meeting in New York starting on Thursday of that week, and so had already cancelled classes for Wednesday the 9th, building that absence into my class schedules.

What I hadn’t counted on was developing a cough about 30 seconds after I finished teaching on the 2nd, as noted in my last post. This cough started as what I assumed was irritation from all the smoke in the air from the Station Fire to our west, and then turned into the dry tickle-in-your-throat cough produced by post-nasal drip. Which is what it still was on the 9th, as I headed for New York.

By the time I got to New York, though, the cough had begun to turn — no longer dry but wet and awful, a racking, nasty cough accompanied by an octave-plus drop in my voice which left me sounding like a long-term pack-a-day smoker. I assumed that the cough had turned into a bronchial infection, and when I continued getting worse on Friday, I called my doctor back home and wheedled my way into an appointment on Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday, though, as I made my way through the subway, Penn Station, the NJ Transit train, the AirTrain, the Newark airport, the Houston airport, and so on, it started to become clear that Something was Wrong. My voice was almost shot, my cough was getting worse and worse, and I was exhausted, easily winded when walking, and just generally felt like crap. I got home that night, expecting to spend all day Sunday in bed assessing whether or not I could teach on Monday.

Sunday morning I woke up with all of the same symptoms as Saturday, plus the addition of horrible abdominal cramps, cramps which started just under my ribcage and twisted down through my muscles and organs without — well, without producing any of the expected resolutions involved in abdominal cramps. It was at this point that I started thinking, okay, what if this bronchial infection has turned into pneumonia, and what if it’s spreading into some more systemic infection?

I live alone right now. And so I had to get myself to the urgent care place while I knew that I was in reasonable shape to drive myself there, and to drive myself back. So I set about the process of getting permission to go to the urgent care place: I called my doctor’s office and left a message with the answering service, who paged the on-call doctor, who called me and said yes, she was worried that this was turning into pneumonia, too, and that I should go to the ER or to urgent care.

Nothing is simple, of course: the medical group that I’m assigned to under my HMO is in a dispute with the nearest hospital, which is now refusing to provide service to us based on the HMO’s refusal to pay a sufficient percentage of what it owes them. And I’ve never been to the next-nearest hospital — honestly don’t even know where it is, and didn’t feel like this was the moment to try to find out. So I ruled out the ER and started trying to figure out if a nearby urgent care place accepts my insurance; happily, they did, so I was on the way.

On one level, it turned out to be a good choice: Sunday around noon, the only patients in there were me, one guy with a lower-leg injury, and one guy trying to get a vaccination of some sort. So they took me right back, were able to do a chest x-ray then and there, did a pretty thorough examination, and wound up both giving me a prescription for antibiotics and high-end cough syrup and swabbing me for H1N1.

Here’s the downside, though; as of this morning, nearly a full week later, I still didn’t know the outcome of that test. The lab picked the test up on Monday, and I was told I’d have the results by Thursday, but I’d called every day since then to no avail. One key difference between “urgent” and “emergent” is, I guess, the speed of the lab results.

In the interim, though, I basically operated under the assumption that this was in fact H1N1. The antibiotics helped some of my symptoms very quickly, but not all of them, by any means. And the more I saw about H1N1’s onset — dry cough, followed by a brief period of feeling better, followed by wet cough and a sudden turn into feeling much, much worse — the more familiar it all sounded.

But I just got the results — 11 am, Saturday — and they’re negative. Which means I’m back to assuming that this is bronchitis, probably of a viral kind, since the antibiotics helped but did not entirely clear up the problems. And I think I may have bruised a rib with all the coughing, as one spot on my rib cage has just been killing me since yesterday.

When it might be swine flu, my course of action was clear: stay home and away from everyone until the coughing goes away. But now… it’s not swine flu, and the coughing’s not going away. Is the course of action the same? I was able to manage staying home last week — how, exactly, I’ll discuss in the next post — but I’m not sure I can do it again.

The semester started here just shy of a week ago, but because my classes fall on Monday and Wednesday, today’s my first real day of teaching. Labor Day. Usually (where “usually” = about 4 out of 10 years) classes here start the day after Labor Day; when they start the week before, we still start on Tuesday, and then teach on Labor Day. Which continues to make no sense to me at all.

I wouldn’t even mind that so much — I’m really fired up about my classes, which include a seminar on Marxism and Cultural Studies that I haven’t gotten to teach in several years, and a new class on television authorship; I’ve got piles of work ahead of me, but it ought to be great fun — except for the fact that I managed to get about two hours of sleep last night due to the stupid cough I’ve developed from the lousy air quality out here in the wake of the fires to our west.

The annoying part is that I’m actually getting better, just as I’m feeling worse. Last Wednesday afternoon, just after classes ended, I suddenly felt as though I’d chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes, and my lungs griped and complained for several days after. Now, my lungs feel more or less fine, but that incessant tickle deep in the back of my throat has set in, probably a sign of healing tissue or something, but it’s driving me batty. It will not let you not cough, though coughing of course aggravates it. It will wake you up out of a dead sleep to make sure you know you need to cough. And no combination of cough drops and throat sprays will calm it down.

This is not what I want to be thinking about right now, but the combination of non-stop coughing and lack of sleep have me unable to contemplate much else.

The good news is that I’ve gotten my exercise today: after dragging the suitcase to the train station, and up and down the various flights of stairs between its entrance and the entrance to the airport, I was sent by the monitors to the far end of the airport to check in, only to find that in fact I needed the near end of the airport after all. And then, after the appointed wait, I walked the half-mile to the gate, only to find that my flight’s been delayed by an hour and a half, so I’ve now walked the half-mile back to the lounge.

The other good news is that my 4.5 hour layover in Houston is now something more like a 3 hour layover. (Though bizarrely the Continental website is saying we’ll only be 15 minutes late, which will be something of a feat!) And the other other good news is that I’ve still got room to spare, in the event of further delays.

And there’s plenty of coffee, and hot and cold running internet. So I guess it’s all good news from here.

I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as usual, will take me to Houston, but then from there, I’m on first to Amsterdam and then to Trondheim, Norway, where I’m serving as first opponent on a dissertation defense. Last night, I went back into Jill’s archives to remind myself of what this process is like; it sounds like it ought to be a fascinating experience.

And that’s aside from the fact that it’s taking place in Norway. Unfortunately, given the time and the distance, I won’t be able to pop in on folks I know there, but I hope to see a little bit of the place.

And to relax some. Given that I just wrapped the draft of the book up on Friday, this trip is pretty much what constitutes my summer vacation, and I intend to make the most of it. I have a tiny bit of work with me, but 80% of the reading I have with me is for nothing but fun.

More from the other side.

One of the best things I’ve been asked to do at Pomona College so far was getting to introduce Walter Cronkite before his commencement address a few years ago. He was extraordinarily kind and gentle when I met him, beginning to slow down a bit perhaps, but still brave enough to take on the Bush administration in a speech that caused at least a couple of irate parents to storm out of the ceremony. This was the introduction I gave him then; I still think every bit of it (and then some) was deserved.

—–

President Oxtoby, friends, colleagues, and graduating seniors:

I want to begin today with two admittedly polemical statements: first, that the institution most singularly influential in the history of the late-twentieth century United States is television, and second, that the individual most singularly influential in the history of that medium is Walter Cronkite.

Mr. Cronkite began his career in journalism as a campus correspondent at The Houston Post during high school and his freshman year at the University of Texas. He also worked as a sports announcer for a local radio station in Oklahoma City and joined the United Press in 1937. Mr. Cronkite became a correspondent to CBS News in July 1950, and became the anchor of the CBS Evening News on April 16, 1962. When, on March 6, 1981, he stepped down as anchorman and managing editor after nearly 19 years in that role, Mr. Cronkite became a Special Correspondent for CBS News, which he remains to this day.

What that listing of dates and jobs doesn’t tell you, however, is what Mr. Cronkite accomplished during his distinguished career on-screen: He brought an exacting sense of professional standards to broadcast journalism, insisting that reporting be “fast, accurate, and unbiased.” That said, he was also unafraid to add an editorial perspective when necessary, to take a principled position and stand by it. As such, Mr. Cronkite is thought of by many today as the man who brought an end to the Vietnam War. On February 27, 1968, CBS aired a special broadcast, “Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite,” at the close of which he added the following statement:

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion… it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” As legend has it, President Johnson, who was watching the broadcast, then turned off his set and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Mr. Cronkite could always be counted upon to speak for middle America; in 1972, a national poll was conducted in which voters were questioned about their levels of trust for various politicians (including Nixon, McGovern, and “the average senator”). Walter Cronkite, the write-in candidate, bested them all, and came thereafter to be known as “the most trusted man in America.”

Mr. Cronkite has received innumerable other awards and honors, from his peers in the fields of journalism and broadcasting, from universities and colleges, from national organizations. But perhaps no other honor is quite so telling as this: so synonymous with broadcast journalism has Mr. Cronkite become world-wide, that he has entered two languages as a common noun; in both Sweden and Holland, news anchors are known as “cronkiters.”

Mr. President, on behalf of the Board of Trustees and the Faculty of Pomona College, it is my great pleasure to present to you Walter Cronkite, for the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Thankfully, other folks are doing a much better job of responding to this horror than I can right now, so I’ll just direct you their way, except to say a quiet thank you for a life of extraordinary courage, and a small prayer of hope that this act of terrorism might be recognized for what it is.

[Update, 2.29 pm: Holy effing crap. This is what I'm talking about: "[Randall] Terry said he was now concerned that the Obama administration ‘will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions.’” Am I wrong in interpreting “our most effective rhetoric and actions” as acts specifically designed to terrorize?]

Soon, at least.

It’s been a heck of a week: long flight into Boston on Monday, followed by looooong cab ride out to Norwood just after midnight Tuesday morning; phenomenal symposium on the future of everything Tuesday; train back up to Boston, followed by lunch with an editor, a glass of wine with a colleague, and dinner with a former student on Wednesday; the American Literature Association (which I’d link to, but man, they really need a new website, as this one doesn’t so much load as download — literally, it’s a bunch of Word documents) starting Thursday, including my own panel yesterday, sponsored by the Digital Americanists, on the peer review of digital scholarship. And, of course, a round of dinners and such with old friends.

It’s been amazing, but I’m exhausted, and looking forward to today’s long flights home, during which I hope to get the summer started, for real. Here’s wishing all of you a lovely Memorial Day weekend, and hoping that your summers begin well, as well…

Today marks the first time I’ve sat in the terminal waiting two and a half hours for the sun to melt the ice off the wings of my airplane, because my Southern California airport doesn’t need de-icing equipment.

I offered to go out there with a hairdryer, but they wouldn’t take me up on it.

And, of course, by the time we landed I had nine minutes to make my connection. On which the gate agent closed the door just as I ran up, and wouldn’t reopen it.

So now I’m in Houston, waiting for the next flight, which thank god and Fiorello LaGuardia is only an hour and a half later.

The whole thing makes me super happy that I woke R. up at 4 am to make sure I got to the airport on time.