Blogging from the skies!

As I write this, we are cruising at an altitude of 31008ft above the Atlantic Ocean, approximately half-way between New York and Barbados. When I left DC this morning the sun was just beginning to rise, and when we took off from New York about four hours later, the skies were overcast and grey, with an outside temperature just above freezing. In Barbados, the pilot informs us, the temperature is holding steady at around 82°F under sunny skies. Can’t wait to touch down…!!

In other news, I’d forgotten how much I like airports. (Airplanes, not so much… I hate having to sit in the same stale space with a crowd of other people without being able to move for long periods of time. Of course this is only an issue with really long flights, like those to, oh, I don’t know, China, Taiwan, or Thailand – this trip is blissfully short by contrast! But I digress.) There’s something kind of neat about the independence of travel that is really manifest in the airport setting. I’m normally not much of a people-watcher, but I love observing my fellow Americans (and assorted foreigners) here. Caught between time zones and terminals, with the rest of our lives put mostly on hold, we are in a sort of collective suspended motion. We buy pretzels or trail mix; watch CNN on shared flat-panel screens; read books or flip through magazines; queue up on demand; trip over bags and suitcases; and together inhabit a transient space that is at once alien and oddly familiar.

I’ve been trying to put the finishing touches on the material I’ve prepared for my presentation. I’m really quite glad to be going on the second day. There’s a school of thought that would argue it would be better to get things over with by going early on the first day, but since this is my first conference EVER I think I’ll be glad of the opportunity to watch a bunch of others present first to get a sense of what is and isn’t appropriate, and even gladder to have the time to alter what I’ve prepared before I speak. For some reason I don’t feel all that nervous about it yet – maybe because, as situations go, this one is pretty low-risk. All I’m doing is presenting – for the first time – a paper that I wrote in my first semester of graduate school, at a conference that includes lots of non-philosophers who will almost certainly be tuning out anyway, with an audience composed entirely of people I’ve never met before and probably won’t meet again, most of whom actually live in Barbados or the UK. Besides, as I was joking to my friend Kyle yesterday, even if every possible thing goes wrong at the conference and I leave ashamed and humiliated – the next day I’ll wake up and still have an entire weekend to myself on a gorgeous tropical island that I’m not even paying for!!!

Just remind me to keep my receipts.