Post Alumnos, Ergo Propter Alumnos

Home safe. Alumni Weekend was brilliant, for ever so many reasons. I'll write more when I'm not sliding sideways off my chair, but in the course of just one evening:

• I watched asphalt burning in the rain beneath a 13,000-volt shower of sparks;
  
• I taught a roomful of people to make Play-Doh kill;
  
• I monopolized All The Cute Girls on the not-quite-collapsible snuggle-couch;
  
• I finally saw the lost MST3K short Assignment: Venezuela (thank you so much, musingsylph!);
  
• I turned purple;
  
• I brainstormed live-action RoboRally ideas with some geeks of high quality; and
  
• I sent a minor earthquake through the coordinate space of Josh Smith Numbers.

Most importantly, I made new friends, and spent quality time with many old ones. Thank you, everyone who helped make it brilliant. :)=

AW: Friday

One thing SWAPA is better for than LJ is the lengthy travelogue. I'll hit the highlights here, and divide them up by day; if you want more details...well, join SWAPA.

I was awakened at 8:45 a.m. on Friday by a call from USAirways. A recorded voice told me my 12:30 flight had been cancelled (because of, I later found out, a labor dispute). There was a second flight at 3:30 p.m., they told me...and another at 10:30 a.m, less than two hours away. The former was oversold, because everyone on the 12:30 flight had been bumped forward. Since I fly standby, this meant I had to get dressed, drive forty minutes to the airport, and make it through security in the subsequent ninety minutes. So I turned on the William Tell Overture in my head, Kendra drove eighty all the way to the airport, and I made it with five minutes to spare. The flight was fine, though I was keyed up and sleepy; my body turns into a sensitive accelerometer at such times: "We're slowing down. Why? Why are we dropping? Are the engines supposed to be revving like that?"

Riding SEPTA from Philly, I found myself getting nostalgic as the train passed the rusting pylons, the empty yards of weeds and graffiti, the blackened stone. I used to find them depressing, back when I rode SEPTA every day to work, but now I think of them as uniquely Philadelphian; there's a queer solid beauty in a factory with broken windows and buckling walls, or a mountain of rusting car bodies. I bought a cheesesteak at Renato's and a pack of butterscotch Krimpets at the Co-op, then ate them under the weeping hemlock behind Sharples. My iPod chose to play America and The Power, both of which hold strong Swarthmore associations for me; I watched alumni arriving in twos and threes and fives.

There were plenty of people to hang out with in Wharton (the dorm where the SWILfolk lived), and after a nap in my dorm room I had a fine time shooting the breeze with people who actually understand my references and see the world through similar eyes; there are so few people like that in my Ann Arboreal life. The nicest surprise was musingsylph, aka Arcadia, whom I really hadn't known before this weekend but found to be unfailingly nifty and quiet and impish. (She will probably blush and dissemble when she reads this.) My introduction to her came when someone else invited me to tousle her newly close-cropped burgundy hair, and after that I found myself unaccountably pleased whenever I glanced up and noticed her sitting and smiling, like a cat with a secret, on the sidelines.

For some reason that still eludes me, all of the female people took off together at dinnertime, penis-bearers having been pointedly uninvited; we leftovers moved to the Women's Resource Center (ironically, I now notice), where Jimmosk was unloading bag after bag of the $170.00 of snack food he'd bought for the weekend. The WRC is now dominated by a huge red U-shaped sculpture, which may or may not have been designed for use as an extraordinarily unstable teeter-totter; that is the purpose some of us put it to, regardless. Peter W. and zorblak were the first guinea pigs, and nearly went flying; later, rose_garden and Rachel S. engaged in wildly alarming acrobatics that both of them, somehow, survived.

I took a long walk with Megan P.-M., and, as she puts it, we continued our semi-annual tradition of not having an affair. I've had an angstless crush on her forever, and she seems to find me passable, but as she's irrevocably married to a good friend of mine I restrict myself to flirting. (*sigh*) I scolded her for failing to write to me at all in 2004, despite her New Year's resolution to do so, but somehow I can't stay mad at her.

I intend to game at these get-togethers, but somehow it always seems there's somebody I need to catch up with or take a walk with or give a backrub to. In this case, I was happy to encounter Aaron B-R-O-C-K-E-T-T (with child, and looking a bit like Kevin Kline) and Mark Kernighan; I plopped myself down next to MyS for a while, and confirmed that I'll see her a bunch next month at Pinewoods; and closed the night with a long and lovely talk with showergrrl back at the dorm. I was very happy to finally meet her in person; she is giggly and open-hearted and multiply pierced, and she has newly purple hair which has turned her neck and fingers and ears as purple as a Farscape alien's, and she wears the most beguiling zippered, plunging, fishnetty sorts of things. We were up 'til 4 a.m., and I finally had a chance to use the pickup line "I bet your outfit makes a lot of noise in the dryer."

Hm. Methinks this is lengthy anyway. Ah well.