14 March 2006

Night of the Living Dead Anthropologists

I am now back in sunny, yet flooded Tempe (we had a day of rain while I was in the frozen North and everyone's yard is holding an inch of water), and have so far spent my Spring Break feebly sipping Emergen-C mixed with juice while lying in bed reading Patrick O'Brian novels or lying on the fold-out couch watching Lord of the Rings, although the latter is pretty unfulfilling because I only have the first two and I find The Two Towers a bit of a downer to end on. I apparently caught some kind of respiratory virus in Anchorage, which made the last several days of the conference I attended there both miserable (attending sessions with head propped against wall, attempting to blow nose unobtrusively, yet necessarily every two minutes) and hilarious (see above, RE: attending conference as walking dead; also, swapping over-the-counter remedies with fellow zombie-anthropologists because about one-third of the conference appeared to have the same disease). But the following unmitigated great things happened in Anchorage besides my catching the plague:

1. I got to see my lovely friend Mikie, and meet her fantastic new husband and their adorable huskies--the uncle of one husky is the star dog of "Eight Below", I am told. Since she lives so far away, we only get to see each other every two years or so, so this really meant a lot to me.

2. I reached a new extreme in caffeine addiction early in the week, when I had a double mocha with lunch, then ordered a large drip coffee to go before we left the restaurant. In my defense, I was only maintaining consciousness through chemistry that day, as I had been up late completing my computer simulation homework (very nearly the best program EVER! thank you very much).

3. I did my first conference presentation ("Nutrition and the Paleopathology of Infectious Disease", if anyone cares). My advisor told me several times how happy she was with it, and several people came up to me later in the conference to tell me it was "brilliant" (in the spirit of full disclosure, this was meant in the British sense of "great", not the American sense of "extraordinarily smart") and ask more about it. One spoke to me about it and asked for the written version while I was en route to the coffee cart, and when I finished trading information with him and turned to order my coffee, the lady working there commented in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way that "he was pretty good-looking--for an Australian". Are they not normally a good-looking people? I did not think that was the case.

1 comment:

Cari said...

I'd say the Australians are at least better looking than the Irish.