PTSD

Midwest Meanderings

Before I immerse myself into re-writing my PhD proposal (once again) I thought I'd write about how that conference went. While E took to the air, I went up (and down) by train.

Some thoughts, in random order:

The train journey: Being on the train for about 2 days out of 4 was actually rather fun. I've noticed this trend in other countries (well, not Denmark and Germany but Britain, Thailand, Australia, India and now the USA) that passengers in train compartments are quite talkative over the course of travel. On the journey up to Chicago, I had a marvellously friendly woman next to me who insisted on repeatedly calling me "girl" (first time ever) and invited me over to stay with her if I ever visited her town (which is also E's hometown, btw).

On the way back, I tried explaining what my dissertation was about (and its methodology) to the bloke sitting next to me in a quest to see what "everyday" folk (i.e. non academics) would make of it. In case yous are wondering if this is a normal occurrence (me voluntarily making conversation to strangers on a train), let me assure yous that it only came about after he'd discussed his entire life to date (filmmaker, snowboarder, lover of "good food", wants to go to Southeast Asia, was totally keen on this girl who recently ditched him) in the space of the 3 hours between Chicago and his hometown (again, he was from E's hometown). I've come to the conclusion that people from E's hometown are inexplicably very friendly.

The scenery: beautiful. Since it snowed between my going up and returning to DC, on the way back, the landscape was brown and dry-looking one way and covered in snow on my way back. If I were poetic or had the least bit of creativity, I'd paint yous a picture of how it was but I'm not and so I can't. I don't have a camera either so no photographs.

Madison and Chicago were extremely pretty too--Madison in a charming, "little Uni town" sort of way (with a well-organised city centre and a capitol building and signs advertising $3 pitchers of beer) and Chicago (or what I saw of it) in a gritty, tough and yet quirky type of way.

Highlight 1: waking up from a half-sleep in the middle of the night to see myself staring at gigantic animals made from lights (almost as tall as houses) outside E's hometown and,

Highlight 2: walking on water. Yes, well, I'm almost god-like. Okay, it was frozen water on a lake but I'd never walked on a frozen lake before. The sight of people actually sitting on upturned buckets and fishing at 7am on Sunday made me realise that if I'd had one-tenth of that attitude, I'd probably have finished my dissertation by now. I wonder if I'm really really nice and don't piss her off, E will take me ice-fishing one day?

The people: While the conference was rather low-key and we were the only ones who seemed to have taken its title seriously (our paper was about merging methodologies while the other papers were pretty much standard discourse analysis stuff), getting to meet other PhDs was okay. I'm also grateful to E for dragging me to become "social". If left to myself, I'd have gone off and drunk by myself in a corner of the pub but this fate was avoided by E insisting I join the discussion on 28 days later getting epidemiology wrong and Jason Statham in the Transporter and that fight.

So, the lot of the PhD student is similar most places, it seems: long hours, comps to muddle through, undergrads to educate and inform, dissertations to write. Some of us though get to write on the differences between Japanese and American horror films or on the characterisations of females in the TV show the Apprentice. Now, doesn't that seem like a lot more fun than terrorists in Nepal and Northern Ireland?

Highlight: having the people at the conference talk about quant stuff ("numbers") as though it was easy to do and qual stuff difficult. If you'd been through the classes at TUWSNBN, you'd realise that's not the attitude here at all. The opposite, in fact.

There were other highlights: the free concert in Chicago (and the strange metal sculpture thing in the park), the castle on the road to Madison, the excellent food (the chicken pot pie was the best I've had in years) which makes me wonder how E could ever leave such droolworthy foods to live here (though one can say that same thing about Thailand, I suppose) and getting away from DC for a few days.

I did manage to (almost) mess up our presentation: fiddling around with the 'net while E was doing her thing, forgetting to take along the handout sheet and, generally, panicking to the point of hyperventilation. Also, the blasted hotel not having the 'net was not fun (though E took it quite well after the first annoyance was over. Note the part about her being patient on my previous post)

So, that was the midwest. A marvellous place full of friendly folk, well-organised conferencing, ice-fishing (with tents! and upturned buckets!), yummy foods, wide open spaces and cheap alcohol.

Oh, yes, and how could I forget the accent? The men up there had this marvellous accent, which sounded almost singsong-like but in a soothing way. Lots of "hullo", "ok" and an up and down tone. I always thought the southern accent was the best but I'm now a convert to the Midwestern version. I think I'm crushing on that accent :-)

posted by Priya @ 5:05 PM