June 2006 Archives
My arm's sore. It's got five new holes in it: two in my left bicep, two in my right bicep, one on the inside of my arm. Vaccinations: hepatitis A, polio booster, flu booster, typhoid fever, blood work to determine if I can take a certain kind of malarial prophylaxis for when I get back.
Why the shots? The bugs in New Haven aren't that bad. It's time to share my news.
I'm going to spend the last 2/3 of the summer in Bangalore, India. I'll be a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research India, researching mobile phone sharing in the aspiring and emerging middle class. I'll be working in part with Jonathan Donner.
My interest in this comes from the thesis chapter I turned in at the end of spring semester. I'm thrilled that the possibility of doing my own research in the area will be a reality. I'll be in India from early July till late August. Woo hoo!
IDII class of 2006, congratulations. You guys kick ass. The world's going to be excited about you!
But it just kills me that I missed the final, final show and graduation at IDII. The school will be fully absorbed into the Domus Academy as of 30 June, ceasing to exist as we knew it (I still think of it as the dumbass academy, based on something Jeff Veen said a few years back, after mishearing the name). Most of all, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to visit the school once it moved to Milan. I had been close to the graduating students and wanted to see them together, as a group, another time. It even looked like a meeting might take me to London. But it wasn't going to happen.
I'm doing a web project with Questus that still needs my attention and thus, I couldn't leave the country. I'd hoped that I'd even make it to Europe to see my dad while he's still teaching in Edinburgh--last year, I met him in Malta and went diving with him, the year before, I met up with him and my stepmom, Carol, in York, England. That won't come together, either.
Okay. I have no reason to kvetch--I just miss something that mattered a lot to me and that soon will be no longer. Sigh.
There will be travel in a few weeks, but not to Europe. More on that soon--exciting news to follow.
It hit me like a wave.
I was at the local health food store, and picked up Imbibe magazine at the checkstand. It looked like something published on the West Coast, and indeed it was. Right inside the cover: the sweet faces of Eileen and Jeremy, the owners of Ritual.
Ritual was my favorite place in San Francisco. I was consistently there every day before I moved to New Haven. Jeremy and Eileen became my friends, and even gave me a Ritual mug and a few pounds of coffee. It was Ritual that I visited on my brief December visit, even when other people couldn't squeeze me into their schedules.
As I leafed through the article about Ritual, I recognized the faces sitting at the bar on the far end of the counter. There was Jeremiah, my hairdresser, sitting next to DaveL, who I used to hang out with at Ritual (and who became a good friend as a result). There was the red wall in the back, the windows.
The homesickness hit me like a wave. I've been here almost a year, and I've never gotten a wave of it like that. But a few strong images of the place I most loved at the end of my time in SF, and I was crying at the grocery store. Add to it the fact that I cry very, very rarely, and it's doubly surprising.
So I said, screw this. I'm flying the plane myself!
(Nah, but they gave a nice tour of the cockpit. And the hat kept sliding down my nose. You can't see the glass of white wine I was sipping. I figured it wasn't really legal.)
