Post Conference Haze

Jonathan came out of his room to ask me to check Rebecca’s forehead. He was worried because she had fallen asleep faster than usual and “I just don’t know how I’d go on if something happened to her” They are such an old married couple…... His anxiety probably came from Eli’s current illness which involves an overnight fever of 104.4 followed by a day time with motrin fever of 101 and a kid that has more energy than the rest of us combined. Since he puked the second we put him back in his crib we let him sleep with us but since he insists on sleeping with the lights on and literally kicked his father out of bed I at least didn’t sleep all that well last night. His two throats, located on either side of belly button hurt, and he announced to the doctor “I am not sick you do not check my ears” (Since the AMS 75h birthday gala kept me up quite late Saturday night that makes for two nights of very little sleep and that I am definitely too old for. Despite the pig flu quite a few musicologists were wiling to share my flask of high quality cognac. The flask says “mommy’s first Chanukah”)

I had planned to write about the fun filled American musicological society meeting in Philadelphia but I’m afraid most of my thoughts could be taken the wrong way so I’ll keep them out of cyberspace. And since I got home I’ve been attempting to juggle schedules to accommodate the above mentioned illness and the babysitters impending trip—note to self do not teach on the same day as husband ever again. Nevertheless One of my favorite moments at the conference involved walking to the elevator very slowly with a nice guy who retired from Duke 20 years ago and has been a member of the AMS for over sixty years. He informed me hat my very white colleague who gave a fine paper on Haydn’s Scottish songs “orates like Obama” and that we have “a nice looking young faculty up at UVa.” I seem incapable of remembering the guys name but heard from said colleague that he wrote an article on the French horn fifty years ago that was so definitive that no one will ever have to write on the French horn again. As always I appreciated the uncanny ability of many scholars to ask questions that in fact had nothing interrogative about them but simply involved restating their own articles and books. I managed this year to insult only two people and at least one of them was almost deliberate. The inability to read name tags every so often gets me in some sticky situations since I inevitably end up saying something slightly catty about someone I’m standing next to. I try never to speak in elevators about anything but the weather and the quality of the food.

I can not find on my computer the abstract I wrote for the conference I’m going to in Rome in two weeks. This whole conference has me quite nervous. I’m hoping the missing abstract gives me a viable excuse to simply write what I’m thinking about now instead of what I told them I was thinking about two weeks ago. I’m attempting to have those thoughts relate to fireworks fountains and castrati and not to fevers, babysitters, and piles of mail.