chicago '08

Hugsband and I have been running around and doing a lot of stuff these days. we threw a kickass brunch on memorial day, we both started playing in a softball league on tuesday, Hugsband took his students to manhattan to see hairspray on wednesday, and we spent thursday through saturday in montréal. phew! the highlight of brunch (besides my sweet potato and zucchini frittata) was the game of catch that followed. a couple of the other psych fellows, Hugsband and I were excited to throw the ball around in preparation for our first game against "internal medicine". I am somewhat over-confident in my team's ability to win. the other teams just sound so amazingly dorky that there's no way they can compete. sure, we're called the "dreamers", which is a lame Freud reference, but the team from cognitive neuroscience calls themselves "the field potentials". that name is so geeky that if you merely understand the reference, you're a dork. pharmacology, on the other hand, may pose a real threat. there's a real chance that their players have access to performance enhancing drugs.

we drove to my autism conference in canada. the frustrating thing about québec is that every time I am there, I get all jazzed up to use my french. as soon as the store clerk or waiter or hotel concierge hears his beloved language butchered with a chicago-area accent, however, he starts speaking english to me. I mean, really! how am I supposed to learn? I need practice. I took 5 semesters of french in college taught by a native parisienne who earned her doctorate at the sorbonne, yet I still speak with the accent of my terrible teacher from bradley, illinois. ("bone jur, lah claaaaas.") the drive home from montréal was particularly nice. on an impulse, we stopped at a roadside hummingbird/butterfly zoo just outside the city. it turned out to be a small but beautiful place to spend an hour. then, in vermont, I had a great pizza (vidalia onion/cheddar/broccoli/garlic/no sauce), and we went to the ben & jerry's factory.