I am probably five minutes away from sunstroke, though I don't know it yet. I am also in the wrong part of St. Louis, but that's very clear.
Three hours' sleep on a redeye flight will turn anyone into a sourpuss, so I shouldn't be complaining, especially since this conference was organized long-distance and via volunteer work (and my flight was, amazingly, paid for by my university). But it's overcast, it's in the low nineties, and it feels like there are wet cloths strapped to your arms. Metrolink has somehow broken down, forcing the already grumpy passengers to keep switching trains. Everything is farther than I thought, forcing me to walk a mile in noontime heat from the station to the Missouri Historical Society Library. (The STL Art Museum is a wonder, though, even if you have to slog through a lot of golf course to see it.) The UMSL shuttle never arrives, and so I end up in a maze of wrought-iron fences and dead ends and playgrounds and libraries before I get to my dorm.
For an indigent Cal State faculty member like me, the dorm was perfect: it was dirt cheap, it was one (free) shuttle bus ride away from the conference (as opposed to a taxicab ride away), and all I had to do was to share the bathroom. Indeed, I had it better than others, who have to live the real dorm life in one of the other dorms (I had an "apartment"), complete, I suspect, with boomboxes at 2 a.m. and potsmoke fog in the corridors.
Well, I got what I paid for. The place is clean and livable enough; aside from problems with my keys, it would have been just fine. The trouble was, there were few amenities to speak of: no toiletries, no garbage cans, no phones, no toilet paper, no shower curtain -- almost all of the things you don't pack unless you're going camping.
This would have been all fine if it weren't for the fact that there was nothing around. (The nearest place to eat -- closed for breakfast, unfortunately -- was a restaurant half a mile away, which I do recommend if you're ever in STL: the Breakaway Cafe, on Natural Bridge Road.) The nearest convenience store-type place was in such a decrepit neighborhood about a mile away, full of check-cashing places and liquor stores with bars on the windows and boarded-up buildings. I walked there anyway, and when I mentioned this to the RAs they all said in unison, "No! Don't go there!" (But I really wanted some Church's Chicken!)
Right now, at least, I'm alone: I don't have to talk about my work when I'm sorely lacking sleep, I don't have to think of recent New Yorker articles I read so I can cleverly slip them into conversation. I can sit in my boxers and type this on my Palm Pilot with my door open, and I can complain like an ingrate.
So I don't know what's up with St. Louis. I know there's a downtown, with the arch and all, and the Library was spectacular (photocopied some cool pictures of the Philippine rez too), but I haven't seen the arch yet. Maybe tomorrow after I go through the Post-Dispatch from 1904.
(The people, though, are exceptionally friendly: the numerous people on Metrolink, the bus drivers, the waitresses -- I'm not sure you see people go out of their way like this in SF, for instance.)
But at least I'm alone. I'm alone, as well, to immerse myself in hot water and lounge around in the bathtub. But then I remember that T. Coraghessan Boyle story in the summer fiction issue about him swimming in an (unknown to him) filthy pool at night. So I get out quickly.
Posted by the wily filipino at July 24, 2004 09:56 PM