Areas of Unrest

26 August 2001 - In Which the Red Sox Deprive Me of Sleep

QOTD: "Education which is simply intellectual taxidermy - the scoopiong out of the mind and the stuffing in of facts - that kind of education is worthless. The human mind is not a deepfreeze for storage; the human mind is a forge for production." - Rabbi Benzion C. Kaganoff

Reading: Tim Severin, Crusader

Listening to: Eric Bogle, Plain and Simple

This week featured two very early mornings, which is two too many. The first one I did to myself, as I chose to fly to Denver on a 6 a.m. flight on Tuesday, instead of going in on Monday evening. See, the Red Sox were in town and I didn't want to miss that. I wasn't sure if I had been to Edison Field, before. I had been to a game at Anaheim back before they renovated the stadium and turned it into a baseball only venue. Which is a big improvement - the multi-event arenas never satisfy me the same way, even though I grew up going to Shea Stadium, so I should be used to the concept. At any rate, I had to feel sorry for the handful of Angels fans, who were so vastly outnumbered Monday night. There was a family of four in front of me, visiting from Boston. The couple next to me were from Providence. The group behind me was from Maine. And so on. You 'd have to go to group speech therapy to hear so many dropped R's anywhere else in Southern California. I joked that it was like a New Englander's support group.

At any rate, I had tremendous fun. It helped, of course, that the Sox won. I also managed to find a better route to Anaheim than the one I'd used before, enabling me to get home in about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, even getting home at a decent hour only helps so far. I was hyper and couldn't sleep, so ended up staggering to the airport on under three hours of sleep. My meetings were frustrating and I really just wanted to sleep at the end of the day. But my colleagues had left a note suggesting dinner at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse and I figured I could be that sociable, since I needed to eat anyway. My afternoon meeting had run fairly late and I expected everyone to be in the middle of eating by the time I got there. So I was quite surprised that only Milo was there. Mary Joan showed up soon after, but the other three people who were supposed to come stood us up. I enjoyed the Thai green curry and some Russian caravan tea, but I was glad to get to the hotel and collapse for the night.

My early morning Thursday was due to the flying back from Colorado on Wednesday night. I was fortunate enough to get standby on the 5:00 flight, which was then delayed by weather. But, since the 6:00 I'd been booked on was listed as "delayed" with no estimated time, it was still worth suffering through a center seat. Thursday was a long day trip up to Sunnyvale. At least that meeting was a reasonably worthwile one.

Both Wednesday and Thursday nights, I drove home while the Sox were still playing the Angels and listened to the games on the radio. I probably should not listen to baseball while driving, though, as I get too emotional about it. Thursday's game was a bit more exciting than it needed to be, but turned out well.

I really made up for the sleep deprivation this weekend, not even really leaving my apartment (beyond taking out the trash and taking in the mail) on Saturday. I did manage some errand running today, but I sitll have tons more to do. One thing I have been doing is going through old paper journals. It's frightening to realize that even ten years ago I was complaining about the difficulty of getting world news. At the time, the Gulf war had delayed my hearing about the death of the king of Norway. I have no idea why I even cared about the Norwegian royal family, though the recent royal wedding there has a nice touch of modernity. (In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, the Crown Prince lived with his bride before marriage. But the bigger scandal is that she had an out-of-wedlock child from a past relationship.)