1. The return flight was a lot easier than the flight out, even if I only had twelve minutes in Chicago to pee, buy overpriced cheese popcorn, and drag my bumpity-bumpity rolly with its cargo of laptop and freshly purchased get-your-shit-together books and maps of Budapest from one terminal to another. Bastards. And they were showing The Incredibles on the second leg of the trip; how cool is that?
2. In the Disney film Atlantis, if you watch carefully near the beginning when Milo is talking to his mysterious benefactor in the latter's palatial mansion, you will note that there are two coelecanths in the aquarium behind the two men.
What's weird about this--well, where do I start?--is that coelecanths can't survive at sea level. They're deep-water. So either that's one special darn tank, or someone at the dream factory was having a little fun. They're also swimming pretty actively back and forth past each other, which is inconsistent with the behavior submariners have noted. Namely that coelecanths don't do much of anything except hang pretty still in their little caves.
But it's pretty neat nonetheless.
3. The whole Boston trip, while it had some up moments (a riotous dinner with family and friends that led someone at another table to come over and ask how we knew each other) and probably did me some good professionally (the reading was recorded for posterity and will be available as streaming video on WGBH's site; I'll post when that goes up), feels like it may have been more frustrating than it was worth. I got off to a bad start before I even got there, and once I was there it was just one damn thing after another. Awkwardness, technical difficulties, a ghost tour that failed to materialize (sorry, couldn't stop myself) even after I'd bought the tickets online, blah blah blah. I'm glad I got to see the people I went to see, and meet some interesting new ones, but I've come out of the experience feeling no more rested than I did going in, and that had been the point.
I think from here on out I stick to spring-summer-fall in Boston. Because it was bitterly cold, which helped nothing. Fourteen years away from my Midwestern roots have left me mewling and soft on the matter of warmth.
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