the ocean

Friday morning I got up at 4:30 to drive downstate to a board of trustees meeting for my undergraduate institution. I don't recommend doing this. While it's true that Chicago traffic is light at that hour of the morning, it is also insane. People drive at speeds that I can only assume result from a hope to meet Doc Brown back in 1955 and weave back and forth like they think it's Mario Kart. It's also very dark at that hour, which leads me to imagine deer waiting to leap out in front of the Prius on every shoulder along the way. And many Taco Bells do not open until at least 9, leaving very little hope for a sustaining AM Crunchwrap along the way. I barely arrived on time, hungry, disheveled, and frankly kind of dumb. Perfect timing for someone to hand me a microphone and ask for my thoughts on strategic planning.

I made it through the day, though I do think my enjoyment of the student production of Elf: The Musical might have been enhanced had I not been on hour 15 of my day at its outset. It was a really high quality production with strong performances, but I found myself acutely aware that I've seen the movie at least a dozen times. Also that my butt hurt from sitting for so many hours straight. I ended up going straight back to my hotel after Christmas was saved to immediately pass out and have stress dreams about work. Tis the season!

There's a special kind of madness that comes with moving, in that there will inevitably be one or two items that you know you moved but cannot find. You check the same god-forsaken spots in your new place over and over again -- the file cabinet, the drawer in the front credenza, the closet in the office -- and still come up empty handed. You brainstorm other unlikely spots where you might have put them (could you maybe have tucked them into the toaster for safekeeping?) to no avail. And you question the basic reality of concepts like "things" and "existing," for surely there is a larger metaphysical solution; it could not simply be that you are becoming absent minded as you age. 

I mention this because there have been several such incidents in connection with our recent move, if you can imagine such a thing. For the most part, they only dealt with items that we could easily do without or replace, such as photo reprints or the little plastic things that people sometimes use to hold corn. And so they remained unsolved mysteries, at least until I randomly stumble upon some duplicate hot shots of our trip to Park City stuck behind the storage shelving as I'm hauling out the Casio keyboard for light entertainment at my retirement party. But this week I could not find some work papers that I actually needed, and so a frenzied two-day search commenced. The good news, I guess, is that I did eventually find them in a file folder I'd somehow mislabeled (what could "Fergie Bat Mitzvah" even be referring to?). The bad news is that, once located, they were of course no where near as helpful as I'd imagined them to be. This is the secret to brilliance, I think: lose everything you write and allow it to exist only in your memory.