Monday, October 30, 2006

Eloise in Boston

Big cushy hotels are the perfect place to not feel terribly well. I've orbitted around this tower of a posh insulating bubble for the weekend, working perched up in the Heavenly Bed, stretching toes only blocks out the door, for a couple of lunches with friends, and a frustrating attempt to procure Advil Cold. I didn't realize I would be suspected of alchemizing crystal meth from 8 tablets of pseudoephedrine in the bathroom on this 32nd floor of the westin and forced to produce id, which I'd left in the room when I just grabbed 20 bucks. Both F and I are sick with some virus with an apparently endless parade of diverse symptoms... this being sick together thing is deeply intimate, fluid-bonding of a completely raw kind.

P keeps joking about Tales from the Dr's Girlfriend. I didn't see F speak yesterday, though apparently he was the hit of the meeting. Speaking to 4000 people is some level of self-presentation I've never contemplated... despite feeling like crap, I think he wowed them. Here I am, waking up with a "state of the art" speaker, and being Supportive GF at a fancy professionally plotting dinner with a species heretofore unknown to me, transplant surgeons.

Transplant surgeons are apparently driven people, creative and about as unsqueamish as you get. Dr. S emboddied this, tearing at her tbone with her teeth, fishing mushrooms out of the communal dish with casual but precise fingers. Hair flying and eyes a little small at the end of the meal, ripe with rich food and wine, she evangelized me and M about needing to have children, repeatedly thrusting a picture of her late-in-life son on her treo at us. When we protested that this wasn't in the cards, and F and R actually laid their vasectomies on the table as trump cards, she offered to perform some reversing tabletop microsurgery. Then she went off to hear some jazz.

Home this afternoon. After the aquarium. Will drag my viral-laden self back across the border to a loooooong sleep.

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