A Good Airfare

The Amalfi Coast has been toward the top of our travel list since at least six years ago when I escorted a group of college students to Italy and spent several days in Amalfi (I only got the students to and from the airport in Rome; I was on my own for the rest of two weeks). The next year my wife and I traveled to Italy, mainly because she hadn’t been able to go with me the year before, but we only had ten days there and I (having been three times before) decided that Rome (the Forum, Vatican, Borghese Gallery) and Florence (the Uffizzi, Ponte Vecchio, David) were probably numbers one and two on the list of Italian cities in terms of history and art. But the Amalfi Coast is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, so it’s lingered near the top of our list.

So for the past several months I’ve been monitoring airfares to Rome or Naples, hoping to catch a slip in cost that would give us an advantage. And last week I hit on a rate at least $200 less per ticket on American Airlines (our preferred) than what I had been finding, and we bought it.

Just yesterday, though, American filed for bankruptcy. Curious as to how this might affect our Amalfi trip, I followed all the news stories I could find, and was comforted to learn that the bankruptcy would not disrupt flight schedules or frequent flier miles. But I wondered how airfares might have been affected, so I checked into the American online reservation site and was pleased (though not surprised) to find that the cost of our itinerary had almost doubled, from $1750 to $2500 (two fares plus taxes and fees). 

It’s an interesting pleasure. Part is the satisfaction of having regularly monitored airfares to finally find a decent fare (less actually than when I first went six years ago), and part in seeing that fare balloon up in just the next few days. No doubt I’ll be drilling all of those poor souls around us on the plane about how much their tickets cost. Or perhaps that might not be such a good idea. It might be best to just keep quiet and gloat in silence while I watch the in-flight movie.

Winter Approaches

The pond has iced over. It was 19° when I went for my walk this morning, overdressed as I usually am the first days out in frigid cold, testing the change. Winter is arriving, if not arrived. It’s my least favorite of the four seasons. The cold, the wind, the snow, the ice. What’s to like? I suppose Scotch. Scotch tastes better the colder it is outside, going down warmer than coffee or tea or chocolate, maybe warmer than a fire. But then what can beat a dram of Scotch next to a warm fire? On this side of winter, the next four months do not bode well. There will be snow to shovel, ice to break, batteries to jump. Winter covers the soul with a hard white blanket of bleak.

Habit in a Chair

Habit is a curious thing. I’m a creature of radical habit, so I guess I’m a curious thing as well. Maybe a radical curious thing. Three and a half years ago, I underwent knee replacement surgery, a procedure that realigned much of the way I live my life, at least on a mundane day-to-day level. I never did undergo any of the revelations or transformations that I’ve heard some people experience after major surgery (and, frankly, that I kind of hoped I would experience). I did, though, change the chair where I sit in our living room. I spent four days in the hospital after surgery, undergoing initial physical therapy, reading, watching TV, and being bored to the point of second-guessing the decision to be able to walk again without pain. The morphine helped, though. I came home to a week of lying in bed, when I wasn’t doing physical therapy or relearning how to go to the bathroom, surrounded by more reading, more TV, and at least the proximity of vodka. After about a week, I was able to make my way down the stairs on crutches to the living room, albeit for only more reading, more TV, and more vodka, though in a more open space than the confines of the bedroom. One of the numerous physical therapy exercises I endured was stretching my knee by wrapping a cloth around my foot and pulling the ball of my foot to give tension. This was best done sitting in our stuffed arm chair with ottoman. For years prior to my surgery, my chair was an antique Morris recliner that my father had rescued from the basement of a crazy neighbor who had been carted off to the loony bin. I had had it reupholstered once and the springs restrung once in the 20 years I sat in it for hours on a daily basis. But after my knee surgery, the physical therapy moved me to the stuffed arm chair with ottoman (and moved my wife from that chair to the couch). I worked through physical therapy for more than six months, at the end of which sitting in the stuffed arm chair had become my new habit. And three years later, I’m still here. The antique Morris recliner is still here too, but it’s a habit from the past. You can’t return to a former habit, no matter how long you had it or feel nostalgic for it, when you’ve acquired a new habit. Curious.

We Win, They Lose

They lost again today. “They” are the University of Iowa Hawkeye football team, my alma mater. They’re having a pretty mediocre year, at best, one week losing to the worst team in the Big Ten, the next week beating one of the best teams in the league. On Monday afternoons, a group of us geezers meet at George’s Buffet for drink and grumbling, as we do most afternoons, but on Mondays we spend much of our time going over the previous Saturday’s game, expressing our multitude of observations and opinions, the bulk of them as uninformed and oblivious as we can muster. But inevitably our confab will refer to the Hawkeyes either as “we” or “they” depending on whether the team won (“Why can’t we do that every week?,” Don will ask in frustration) or whether the team lost (“They looked like shit in a stopped-up crapper,” Bill will remark in frustration). And that’s probably the way most people use pronouns to refer to whatever teams in whatever sports they follow – winners are “we,” losers are “they.” We embrace linguistically our winning team, and spurn the losing team.

Veterans Days

I’m a fan of Veterans Day. We as a nation – and we as individuals – should honor the service of those among us who go into the military and do whatever they are assigned to do in defense of our country, whether that be a commissary clerk at Fort Riley or a Navy Seal in Kanduhar. Even when I disagree with many of the deployments across the world (most often), I respect that the military personnel – especially the grunts – are in no way responsible for that. I learned this firsthand when I taught for a University of Maryland program in Germany for the military and families. But I also learned about why most of those who “choose to serve” (in the parlance of Veterans Day) in our voluntary army do so. And it’s not patriotic duty, as you might think if you take in the memorials and furniture sale ads today. (If so, only 1% of the population answers the call of patriotic duty. That should give us pause.) No, most who go into the armed services (at least since the end of the draft 40 years ago) do so for financial reasons – either they can’t find a decent-paying job here in the U.S. or (as with my soldier-students) they seek an affordable path to a college degree. There were even some (a surprise to me) who were there because a judge had given them the choice between the military and jail. Yes, all military members deserve our thanks. But many also deserve our apology for putting them in the financial position of not really having a choice to serve.

Who & Whom

In my end comments on students’ papers, I typically address them by name in an attempt to pretend there is some sort of collegial connection between us when in truth we all know I’m the whip-cracking master and they’re the sniveling academic field hands: “Tiffany: Your paper raises some interesting ideas, though it would be stronger if it were written in a language even marginally approximating English,” or “Josh: I like your enthusiasm, but I don’t think you’re quite on the mark in contending that ‘The Waste Land’ is a meditation on a cistern.” But inevitably in any batch of papers there are a couple of students who fail to put their names in a header at the top of the paper and I end up having to address my end comments with “Whomever (I don’t know your name): . . .” I use “whomever” because it’s grammatically correct and since I teach an English class I cling to some obligation to follow the rules, despite my thinking that the who/whom distinction is archaic and silly and should be abandoned as soon as common sense can take root in usage. There’s no more reason for it than the distinction between “thee” and “thou” or “thine” and “thy.” Nobody’s going to be confused if you write (incorrectly by rule) “Bob is the jerk who I gave the floss to” or “Who can we count on to bring the booze?” There are more than enough worries in English usage than trying to keep track of when to use the subjective “who” (or “whoever”) and when to use the objective “whom” (or “whomever”). The simple “who” works without confusion in every instance, just as “you” works in every instance. Language should be as simple and clear as possible. Free whoever!

Kim & Kris Get Married. And Divorced. And Then Maybe Back Together.

I’ve been thinking about the pending divorce (and maybe reconciliation), after only 72 days of marriage, of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humpries, and what I’ve been thinking is who are these people and why should anyone care a rat’s ass? From what I read (and I try to read as little as possible about them) I gather that Kim is famous for, well, being famous. There might also be handbags and/or sunglasses involved, but those are accessories, and I can’t figure out what they’re accessories to. Something suspiciously circular about the whole business. Kris (an alliteratively convenient name for headline writers) is apparently a star professional basketball player for the Minnesota Whatever-they-are, but I’ve had absolutely no interest in professional basketball since long ago when it became a game played by giant mutants, running up and down the court, slamming the ball through the basket as if jamming a cantaloupe into a trashcan, with no subtlety, finesse, strategy, or anything else that makes a sport interesting. There is also, reportedly, a reality TV show that features this odd relationship, but I don’t watch reality shows; I have too much reality in my own life, thank you very much, I don’t need to check into anyone else’s. I suspect, though, that the key to understanding this most recent tumor on our cultural pancreas is the TV show. You just can’t help but think that the whole wedding and divorce and now attempted reconciliation are all part of a scripted plot line. Sweeps month is, after all, from October 28^th through November 24^th. And the divorce announcement came on October 31^st. Halloween. Coincidence?