I’m having a lot of fun in New Orleans at 4C’s. It’s a fascinating city and experience.
Our workshop went exceedingly well yesterday. I would have loved for it to go on forever. We wound up having a great dialogue about a variety of things: what it’s like to be out as a teacher, what it’s like to be queer in academia, what role queer theory might have in composition studies (if at all?), working with students, constraints of location (institutional restraints on curriculum and regional and institutional constraints on queerness), whether the word “queer” was erasing lesbian and gay man experience, among other topics.
I went to a few great sessions this morning, and one not so great one. I’ve hung out in the French Quarter quite a bit, which I adore. Additionally, I’ve gotten some work done, since at least this trip I remembered my laptop’s power cord. Last week in Pennsylvania, I forgot the cord, so I wound up not getting much work done while out of town. Unfortunately, a co-presenter of mine forgot his power cord; it seems that this is a curse of our new, digital lives: we have more crap to remember to bring with us, and we depend on it more than we might have before.
But I went ahead and took a cab Best Buy and bought a spare. Probably good to have a spare, even if I had to pay $40 in roundtrip cab fare to get it!
I really should make a list of all these things and check them off when I travel.
The trick will be to remember to bring my cell phone cord back home, unlike when I was at MLA two years ago!
I thought I had signed up for your workshop, but I’d signed up for the afternoon one instead. Everyone there was talking with great enthusiasm about how terrific your morning session had been. Just thought you’d like to know.
Glad you got a new cord Nels. I thought about it when I was cordless in Pittsburgh, but a mac cord is around 70-100 dollars, and I didn’t want to spend that. Or, rather, I couldn’t at that time. But glad you got it (even with the cab ride fare — eek).
Thanks, Joanna. That’s nice to hear. I wanted to go to the afternoon session, but I also needed a chance to eat and catch up with a friend, so I went that route instead.