About Ramblings of a Hopeless Khowaga
Welcome to my Web site. My name is Chris, and I’ll be your host. I\'m an opinionated, snarky, gay academic with a predilection for the history, the Arab world, languages, photography, food, and music. I live in Austin, Texas. You can read more about me, learn 100 random things about me, and if you’re wondering what the heck a khowaga is, click here. Feel free to browse, read, and leave comments!
Well! I just came back from delivering Natalie to the airport and noticed the flurry of comments on my last post, including those from my friend Michael, who is very clearly going to Hell.
Fortunately, just as I was despairing about how to respond in such a way as to guide the Sinners to Righteousness, I discovered a video message from Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian™!
God Bless You, Betty Bowers!
It’s official. I’m over the swine flu thing.
I don’t mean that I contracted the illness and recovered. I mean that I’m over the non-stop media frenzy over the disease in which not a single one of the media outlets is actually reporting what anyone with half a brain can tell: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT’S ACTUALLY GOING ON.
Cue, for example, the jumble of headlines I saw this morning on my way into the office. The New York Times was reporting that the virus appears to be slowing down. USA Today, however, screamed that the World Health Organization was moving the pandemic level up another number. “It’s a 5! It’s almost a 6! That’s the highest number there is! They might have to invent a 7 just for this disease!”
Several of the more sensible (cue finger quotes) outlets are beginning to run the story that the hysteria about swine flu might just be far worse than the disease itself.
I had a real wall-banger moment the other day when I saw that Israeli politician Yakov Litzman suggested that the name “swine flu” was inappropriate because of the swine=not kosher connection (a couple of the more politically correct news orgs ran headlines, “Is the name ‘swine flu’ offensive to Jews and Muslims?”), and suggested instead that the flu be named the “Mexican flu.” Because it’s apparently better to offend Mexicans than Jews or Muslims.
(For the record, the Jews and Muslims that I work with were all rolling their eyes over that one. “It’s not like you’re impure if you catch the disease just because it’s named for a pig!”)
Even better is this little ditty from Qatar Airways:
Qatar Airways requires that all operating crew wear masks on flights from the United States – namely daily services from New York, Washington DC and Houston.
The airline has taken additional mandatory measures for all 1,100 flight deck and 3,400 cabin crew to be vaccinated against influenza to limit the risk of contamination to passengers and staff. The flu vaccine is a protective measure and only protects against a certain strain of flu, not swine flu, which is at the centre of the current health concerns.
Passengers on Qatar Airways’ flights originating from the US to Doha are being issued with masks upon boarding and advised to wear them inflight. In addition, all Qatar Airways’ customer contact staff in the United States and at Doha International Airport are required to wear masks.
Seriously. How about giving all of the passengers little bottles of Purell and towlettes to wipe themselves down with, given the number of surfaces on your standard airliner that test positive for fecal bacteria?
None of this is to belittle the illness itself–the cousin of a friend of mine was among the first fatalities in Mexico City, and the family has been quarantined by the Ministry of Health. There are people out there dying from it. If as much attention were being paid to the treatment of the disease as to, say, semantincs and hokey “preventative measures,” the pandemic could be nearly over.
It’s like the entire world is waiting for The Stand to happen in real life. (Which leads me to another riff: Considering that he’s pretty much the epitome of pop culture, Stephen King is really bad at inventing pop culture in his own novels. In The Stand, for example, the popular name given to the strand of the superflu that wipes out humanity is “Captain Trips” — oh, no! The Captain and Tenille are killing everyone! — and one of the main characters has a top 40 hit called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” Yes, the book was originally written in the 70s, but I have a hard time imagining that any of this was culturally relevant even then.)
Another friend announced that she was retiring to her bedroom with a bottle of wine and planned to watch all 8 hours of the miniseries in order to dodge the flu. I don’t know if it’ll work as a preventative, but it will answer the question, “Whatever happened to Corin Nemec?”
I spent the last few days at a conference of my peers, and I probably should be more careful about what I’m going to say, but I don’t want to.
I have a busy month – I will be traveling or working part of every weekend between now and the first weekend in March, and this was the first salvo. On Sunday, I flew up to an unnamed city in the north. It doesn’t particularly matter which one it was: as usual, these meetings are held in suburban areas populated by office buildings and chain restaurants. Except for the trip to and from the airport (which took exactly five minutes and that only because we missed all of the traffic lights), I didn’t go farther than two blocks from the hotel at any point on this trip.
Here’s the way these things work. You arrive and are escorted to conference registration. In this case, there was no pre-registration, so for two days we were all walking around with hand-written nametags in a myriad of fluorescent (and frequently unreadable) colors. Someone in the sponsoring office, a federal agency not known for its sense of humor, had apparently decided to exhibit some personality by buying the pastel colored pack of Sharpie markers. Note to anyone in the conference planning business: these colors don’t go so well on nametags.
One of the major north/south divides that I have recognized since I moved to Texas from DC has to do with formal attire. I now chafe at the notion of having to wear a necktie like a ten year old boy in a clip-on. Northern men love them. Southern men? Well, we like not wearing neckties when we can get away with it, and we’re all in favor of considering a nice pair of jeans “formal attire.” Up north, that doesn’t go over so well.
And so …
I am firmly of the belief — and in a moment of levity, I actually put this on the evaluation form — that there should be a minimal IQ requirement to attend conferences. Perhaps that’s a bit extreme. I think maybe the requirement should be there only if you actually plan to ask a question.
For example: it was revealed that — and, sit down folks, this one’s a shocker — Congress wants to determine whether the money it’s offering up in student aid for foreign language study is actually encouraging students to take jobs where they have to use the foreign language skills that they developed with that aid. The way some people in the plenary session carried on about this, you’d have thought that Congress wanted to take a sample of each student’s DNA so that they could track their movements by satellite for the rest of their natural life:
*hand goes up*
“Um, so am I to understand that you want us to keep track of these students just because we give them a federally funded scholarship? Have you considered the privacy violations? I don’t know if, ethically, I want to be part of this,” said the concerned woman in the front row.
The rest of us rolled our eyes. You see, what Congress wants is aggregate data: 45% of graduates found relevant employment, 55% did not, or something like that. There’s no privacy violations in aggregate data. And, furthermore, we all mumbled to each other, if she didn’t want to be part of it, the rest of us would be more than happy to sacrifice ourselves by taking the money she didn’t want anymore.
Also, we’ve been required to track this stuff for the past fifty years.
Anyway. I flew back late last night straight into office drama — my favorite. I had that sort of strange energy today where I was kind of hoping that problem child would engage me directly (all of the drama took place over e-mail), but alas. The problem child didn’t try to engage me. I had to be all diplomatic and stuff. Jeez.
I hope your week is going well!
Hello from Seoul, South Korea, where the local time is nearly 5 pm. And when it’s 5 pm in Seoul, it’s 1967 in Austin, or something like that. Who can keep track?
I won’t go into the agony of the second half of the flight last night … for long. Suffice it to say that the stomach troubles of the previous evening re-asserted themselves an hour or two after I drafted the previous blog post and I spent the last half of the flight wondering whether I could put a permanent end to the whole ordeal by flushing myself down the toilet in the lavatory.
I was feeling better by the time we (finally!) landed at Incheon International Airport, at which point the entire flight crew knew who I was, and a registered nurse traveling in first class had been consulted about my “condition.” To be perfectly honest, three days of nerves and being pressurized for 24 hours was probably more of a cause than anything else, but … I should remember to send a nice note to United, especially since I didn’t get the name of a single one of the flight attendants who came by regularly to check on me.
My brother came to meet us at the airport, which was a grandiose gesture on his part. The “new” (opened in 2001) international airport in Seoul is actually located nearly 50 km west of the city center on a reclaimed island in the Yellow Sea, and it’s not particularly convenient to anywhere except the port city of Incheon. He rode back with us on the airport limo (basically a motorcoach with wide seats) to our hotel, which is somewhat close to where he and my sister in law (who has the flu and hasn’t yet made an appearance) live, although isn’t terribly convenient to most of the tourist sites in Seoul. It is, as I’ve discovered, within range of several wireless signals that I can pirate in order to avoid paying the 8,000 won/hour the hotel charges to use theirs (that’s about $6).
Although it was late (for us – around 9:30 pm), we had a quick meal at a place across the street called “Food Cafe,” where his recommendation of a local dish called ttuk dug, basically broth with mild vegetables and pressed rice cakes, went over very well with my tortured stomach. Although I looked longingly at the dumplings going around the table, I decided to play it safe given the all-too-recent memories of my tortured maiden trans-Pacific crossing.
Today we’ve been easing in, sticking close to the hotel. Lee took us to the mall, where we ate at the food court (and yes, my internal travel snob has choked on that one several times). On the other hand, I can’t say with much honesty that I’d have been up for a heftier day of intensive sightseeing anyway – we’re all still walking zombies. This 15 hour time change, plus the bewildering fact that we all think it should be Tuesday when it is, in fact, Wednesday, is wreaking havoc on all of us, so a day of milling about and easing into it isn’t the worst thing ever.
It is now probably the time when I should check in with the parental units to begin planning the rest of Family Vacation: Korea Edition. More later!
Even before I got home the other day, I’d already sent warning messages to the office: I will not be in tomorrow. The dripping sinus syndrome that was with me as I drove out of town on Monday, thus prompting me to stop as I drove past a supermarket in Oak Hill so that I could buy those 1000 mg tablets of Vitamin C in hopes of preventing the inevitable, broke into a full fledged cold on Wednesday morning.
I woke up with a sore throat (fun, considering that I had to talk for five hours straight), which gave me Deep Sexy Voice. On the flip side, though, I had to tell an audience to let me know if I wasn’t talking loud enough for the first time in my life. I managed to get through the workshop and drive back home to find Ray attempting to get the house clean before I arrived (I had originally estimated my return about an hour later). And yes, Thursday, I stayed home from work.
Since we’re pretty bad about keeping the cupboard stocked with medicine proactively, I had to venture out to a local SprawlGreenVS Pharmacy in order to get ‘real’ medicine, and discovered that the latest pointless product enhancement is that they’re flavoring capsules now so that us poor folk don’t have to get the unpleasant bitter chalky taste of dissolving capsules before we can swallow ‘em whole with the beverage of our choice. Frankly, for medicine that’s supposed to work against congestion, you’d think they could flavor it with wasabi paste.
I should probably know by now that I am absolutely horrible as a patient. I’m impatient. I can’t deal with being immobile and helpless, and I overextend myself and at some point I do something stupid that sends me into a relapse. This time, it was Natalie’s birthday party last night. I had one … OK, four … glasses of wine too many because I felt pretty decent and today I’m paying for it. I’m already wondering if there’s a way that I can gracefully get out of work tomorrow.
I’m tired of being sick already. 
uch:
