I actually bought TAMPAX in TAMPA — a thrilliing experience. I remember thinking, throughout my childhood, wouldn’t it be embarassing to live in a place whose name evoked the most famous feminine hygiene brand?

The coexistence of horrible modern architecture with natural beauty (bottlebrush and bouganvailleas) — warring with each other for affect.

Friendly conference attendees, dutiful and somehow abject with name-badge and bag that read “Daring to Lead.” One woman from Birmingham, Alabama, who sat next to me on the shuttle bus, had lived in Cairo for two years. She wore tiny pyramid earrings; we discussed belly dance. You see, what a great profession ESL is! You can get out of Alabama if you want to! Now she’s back home, doing good,working on literacy projects. She told me about a very cool-sounding film festival there.

Caught a cold from the air-conditioning — brr — ironic — I had got through the whole winter in NYC without getting sick.

The bad fashion of schoolteachers: short sleeved no-iron suits, calico sundresses, sensible shoes, poly poly poly. Not much color.

A cocktail party on the 42nd floor of the Bank of America building. Piano player, little dance floor, h’ors d’oeuvres: bacon-wrapped scallops, stuffed mushrooms. I felt like I was at the White House.

I learned a little about teaching academic writing. Swooped through the room of textbooks, schmoozed and chit-chatted.

You can’t get rich teaching ESL, but it is a lovely profession… many odd, dedicated, sweet people…

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Back in New York, aware of people talking ostentatiously on the train. One young woman talking about how her agent wanted her to submit her jokes and sketches to SNL. She was large, wearing khakis. She held a man about two-thirds her size on her lap.

No sooner had she gotten off when a couple of young women sit next to me and start talking LOUDLY: “Oh yeah, he’s like, a really, like, great writer. His stories are like really weird though. I knew him when I was at Columbia.” “Wow that’s like totally AWESOME.” Blahblah. What’s the deal? They were supposed to be writers. Why did they talk like VALLEY GIRLS? With that rising intonation? When they went to Columbia?

I shivered profoundly at hearing the language so inanely mangled. By “writers.”

I’ve been known to count the number of “likes” emitted by teenage girls in conversation — then, just when I’m about to get off the train I tell them: “Did you know that you just said ‘like’ 43 times in 6 minutes?”

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