Day 2 has not gone, shall we say, as well as day 1 did. This is primarily due to the fact that I woke up at 2 am, a bit sick and completely unable to go back to sleep. (Yes, the time stamp on the last post is accurate.) Focus is not high this morning, and the chances for gym action are pretty much nil. That said, I did manage to do a bit more tinkering with drafting the new article, and am hopeful that I’ll be able to move it a little further forward tomorrow.

The spring semester doesn’t start until tomorrow, but today’s the first day of the new regime: I got up early, I’m sitting at the computer for half an hour of focused writing (though I’ll admit that I did sneak a peek at my email, but didn’t actually respond to any of it), and later this morning I’m going to the gym. The essence of the new regime is pretty simple: I’m laying off of some of the bad-for-me stuff that I’ve been doing, and trying to build in more good-for-me stuff.

The good news is that, if I stick to it, it’ll likely take; I tend to respond well to discipline, and can really get into the swing of it once it’s in place. The bad news is that when my discipline breaks down, I have a tendency to go totally off the rails, wallowing in a way that progressively undermines everything that makes me feel good about myself in a long-range sense, in favor of things that will make me feel good right now.

So: this morning I turn over a new leaf. Somehow that metaphor has lost something in the digital, as I’ve got neither a calendar page nor a journal page to turn. But nonetheless: a new semester, a new regime, and a new blog post to mark the moment.

I’m utterly flabbergasted by this story, from the afternoon update of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

MIT Student Sporting Circuit-Board Artwork Is Arrested in Airport Bomb Scare

Police officers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint this morning when they thought she was carrying a bomb into Logan International Airport, The Boston Globe reported.

The student, 19-year-old Star Simpson, walked into the airport at 8 a.m. with a circuit board affixed to the front of her sweatshirt. The circuit board displayed green LED lights and trailed wires running to a 9-volt battery. When an airport employee asked her about it, she did not respond, the Globe said. Police officers wielding machine guns quickly surrounded her. They determined that her prop was harmless, but arrested her for possessing a hoax device and for disturbing the peace.

The back of Ms. Simpson’s sweatshirt said, in gold handwritten letters, “socket to me” and “Course VI,” the nickname for the program in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, the Globe reported. She told the police that her garment was an art project.

“I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student,” Ms. Simpson says on her MIT Web site. “I love to build things, and I love crazy ideas.”

Law-enforcement authorities weren’t too crazy about her latest idea. “I’m shocked and appalled that somebody would wear this type of device to an airport,” Maj. Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police told the Globe. “Thankfully because she followed our instructions,” he said, “she ended up in our cell instead of a morgue.” —Sara Lipka

Thankfully? My assumption is that Ms. Simpson is the one who is meant, in this statement, to be thankful, displaying an appropriate level of gratitude for not having been shot for wearing a sweatshirt with flashing lights on it. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether a battery-operated sweatshirt constitutes a “hoax device,” and therefore whether Ms. Simpson should have ended up in that cell at all (though I’m compelled to ask whether my grandmother would be arrested for disturbing the peace if she attempted to enter Logan Airport while wearing her Christmas sweatshirt on which Rudolph’s nose blinks). What I really want to know is in what universe would an actual bomb-carrying terrorist go through airport security with a prominently displayed, flashing-lighted circuit board attached to his or her chest?

That this story exists at all seems to me prima facie evidence that “they hate us for our freedom” is cynical, disingenuous nonsense. Perhaps they, whoever they are, hate us because our state apparatus is willing to shoot its own citizens for wearing a piece of blinking circuitry, which, if you ask me, is pretty much the opposite of freedom, thanks.

Seriously: forget April.

September hereabouts brings together the end of summer (as in the always-insane beginning of the fall semester, in which the red [i.e., meetings] takes over my iCal) with the onset of the worst of summer (as in temperatures verging on 110 degrees). Fortunately, the heat wave of the first week of classes didn’t last long, and things are actually quite nice now, weather-wise. But I am just barely hanging on in terms of keeping up with the deadlines that are coming fast and furious, keeping my classes up to speed, keeping a handle on my physical well-being. Already, two weeks into the semester, I’m waking up exhausted every single morning.

I should know by now that this is just the way things are, that the semester always starts more painfully than I expect, but somehow I keep thinking to myself that this year will be different, that I’ll be better organized, that I’ll be able to keep up with the projects I started over the summer, that — imagine this — I’ll still have thoughts interesting enough to bother with blogging. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened this year, but I’m trying to remain positive: perhaps the second half of September will be better, once the end of summer is really met by the onset of fall.

What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during the three frenetic weeks of travel that followed. But now I’ve been home for over a week, and I’ve managed one lousy little post in that time. And even managed to fail to link to the key item in that post.

But it’s not just my own blog I’ve been ignoring; I’ve got an alarming number of unread posts in my news reader. Something’s keeping me out of my usual mode of web activity. Maybe it’s my panic at the impending semester, and how much I’ve still got to do before I’m ready to roll. Maybe it’s my painful awareness of the number of my summer tasks that are still unfinished, and that need to be wrapped up ASAP. But maybe, too, it’s just the joy that I’ve taken in being offline these last few days, puttering around the condo and making the physical space in which I live feel like home again.

Whatever the cause, I’m hoping the silence doesn’t last long. In fact, here’s this, partially designed to keep me from feeling too comfortable in the long pause.

A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.

One apparently lost, and then merely destroyed suitcase. One two-and-a-half-hour airport delay.

Two days, fourteen interviews. Nine more tomorrow.

Ass? Kicked, thanks.

We left the flat this morning at 9, headed into the various queues that make up pretty much the entirety of the CDG experience. The taxi was fine, the airport was fine, the boarding was fine. And the first flight was fine: 10 hours, CDG to IAH, during which I ate some and read some and dozed some and generally pouted a lot.

The flight, it turns out, was our pilot’s last; upon his arrival at IAH, he was officially retired, after 29 years of flying for Continental (and some unspecified number of years in the USAF before that). It was really quite sweet — there were “a salute to your pilot!” flyers on each seat as we boarded, detailing his career, the flight service manager made an announcement early on congratulating the pilot on beginning his last flight (producing round of applause number one), and the pilot himself, as we began our descent, in addition to the usual weather and time of arrival announcements, thanked the Continental customers, the crew and the rest of his colleagues, and his family, several members of whom were on the flight (prompting round of applause number two). Just before touchdown, the flight service manager fired up the P.A. again to say, “okay, folks, here comes the captain’s final landing as the pilot of a commercial airliner,” which was followed by the absolute gentlest touch-down I think I’ve experienced (followed by round of applause number three). And then there was the end: it’s apparently an IAH tradition that, when a pilot retires, the plane is flanked and hosed down by two Houston firetrucks as it pulls into the gate. This, of course, produced the last round of applause, which rolled gradually down the length of the plane. It was pretty cool, and quite dramatic, and I did my best to squelch my kneejerk SoCal “my god, the water!” response.

We’ve got three more hours to kill in IAH, alas, and by the time we get to ONT, it’ll be after eight in the morning in Paris, almost a full 24 hours since heading out. The worst of it, though, is that just now, sitting here, I got the “TripNotes” email from Continental about the flight that I’m taking on Friday, the very thought of which just makes me want to curl up in a small ball and exercise every ounce of my earthly rights as a being protected by the law of gravity.

It’s raining again! And it looks like it’s going to rain all day!

First off, there are still two full weeks left, plus a full day of packing. And the longest time I’ve spent here before was two weeks, so it’s just like that trip all over again.

Secondly, I’ve begun thinking to myself of things that I will actually kinda look forward to upon getting back home. Not in an ugly-American, everything in Europe is so old kind of way, but in a you know, I guess things here aren’t all bad kind of way.

Like a shower I can turn around in without bumping into something. A plumbing system that allows someone to flush the toilet while someone else is in said shower without said someone else getting alternately scalded and then frozen. A bed so big it deserves its own zip code.

Then there’s the stuff that I just need to get back to: like my gym, and a predominantly vegetable-oriented diet. Mostly because I’ll be bringing back some unwanted extra baggage home with me.

But I’m in no hurry. I’m really hoping that these turn out to be two very, very long weeks.

R. and I have been back at work this week after our weekend of picnics, and I’ve been attempting to knock some smallish tasks off the to-do list. The article that I was at work on last week is fully drafted, and is out to some folks for comment. I’ve been feeling a bit off my game this week, though, productivity-wise. At the beginning of the week, that was fine, as I was able to look back over the summer to that point and marvel a bit at what I’d managed to get done. And I still had three weeks left in Paris, so I knew there was more to come.

Somehow it feels different now; I’ve got just barely more than two weeks remaining, and time feels very, very pressing. Not least because the month of August is going to be sheer insanity: I get back home late on the night of the 7th, have two days to handle all the life stuff that needs handling, and then am on a plane headed to a conference in a major eastern metropolis, where I’ll be conducting interviews. (I decline to name this major eastern metropolis, as every moment of my time that will not be spent conducting interviews is already spoken for, and at the moment I cannot bear the guilt of having to say no to friendly social invitations.) I am currently scheduled to return home on the 14th (though it’s conceivable that a meeting will delay that return by a day), where I will have as much as a day to put life back in order again, before my mother shows up for a visit, on the 16th. She’ll be hanging out with me until the 19th, which will be great, as we have all manner of fun girly plans involving shopping and spas. Immediately after she takes off, though, I have a meeting that I have to fly off to, either back east or in NoCal, depending, and from which I’ll either get home on the 21st or the 22nd, depending. And then the 23rd is a Very Significant Day with a Big Round Number attached to it, and some portion of that weekend will be spent celebrating said event. And then the week of the 26th through the 30th, I have jury duty, which thank god, is of the phone-in kind, but knowing what needs to be accomplished that week, I’ll no doubt get called in and placed on the trial of the century. Because classes start the following Tuesday, and then summer will really be Over.

What this means, though, if you look back and add it all up, is that my summer effectively ends when I get in the cab here, taking me to CDG on my way home. Which means I’ve got just over two weeks to finish up the vast majority of the work I’d intended to do this summer. And given that, I’m not ecstatic about the progress I’ve made. I’ve drafted an article that I hadn’t really expected to write, which is great (assuming the article isn’t plagued by idiocy, which remains to be seen). And I’m on the cusp of finishing the last of the work for the second edition of the anthology of which I’m on the editorial board. And I’ve done a fair bit of research, and I’ve made some pretty significant (I think) advances in my thinking toward my New Big Project, which turns out to be further along than I thought it was (I think). And there have been some significant advances in the world of MediaCommons, which moves steadily toward a broader launch.

But there’s so much left undone: I have another article that I’d hoped to write, and I’d hoped to end the summer with a full-on outline of the New Big Project. I have a manifesto that I’m supposed to be writing with a colleague that’s made alarmingly little progress. I have two big events that I’m supposed to be planning for next academic year, one for my department for the spring, and one, alarmingly enough, for my program for the fall, and I’ve done very little on either, in no small part out of heel-dragging, both because I don’t want to be doing school-related administrative stuff during the very very few weeks of my one and only goddamned summer, and particularly the kind of administrative stuff I most despise (anything related to event planning, alas). One of my classes still needs some work before it’ll be ready to go. And, more than anything, I need to get myself into some kind of headspace where I’m willing to let go of this summer, willing to return to the office, willing to let meetings and other requirements intrude into what has been the blissfully empty calendar of my time here in Paris. And that project has not yet even begun.