It’s for those days when you are supposed to be flying to Milan to give a talk, and you are connecting and when you are checking in to your connecting flight and you pull out your passport thinking wistfully about how much you love your wife for thoughtfully packing your passport for you and just generally breathing in the beautiful life you have to be able to take a little time away to fly to Milan, meet people, give a talk, do a little work on your laptop which is tucked away in your suitcase because you are getting on a redeye and you plan to sleep on the plane, you’ll get that work done while you are in your hotel in Milan, or maybe you won’t because you might just stroll the city and enjoy a little solitude, putting out of your mind the hundreds of job market letters of recommendation that you have to submit online to hundreds of distinct websites each with their own password amounting to about 3 hours of work just logging in, figuring out what to click, copying and pasting passwords, etc and also taking the opportunity to just let your mind wander and think abiut whatever, sorry hordes of coauthors whom I have left in the lurch I know I am already a maddeningly irresponsible partner but please permit me a couple more days after all I am in Europe and for all you know I don’t have Internet access or I am scheduled to be meeting with people all day long and wouldn’t have time to correct thirty pages of typos or rewrite the introduction for the third time because after being rejected at journals 1 and 2 we better write it in the way that journal 3’s referees are going to like; and anyway I need a little escape to get over the sting of those rejections and this time to myself in a faraway European city is just what the doctor ordered and that brings an extra smile to my face as I open up my passport to show to the friendly TSA agent and that smile and it’s associated feeling of intoxication explains why it’s the TSA agent who is the first to notice that the picture on the passport is of my lovely wife and not me.
And my passport is back home in chicago, and I am not getting on this plane and I am not going to Milan today and the only time I am going to be having by myself is stuck in this airport trying to figure out how I am going to get that passport to me from Chicago and all the while fighting back the relentless thoughts of what a ridiculous life I am living, flying to Europe for two days just to give a pointless talk wasting all this time while my students still don’t have their application letters uploaded and all those papers need to be revised and I am sure my coauthors think I am a useless primadonna, and after these recent rejections I know I will never have a top 5 publication again and I won’t even be getting any work done because my laptop is soon going to fly without me to Milan,
It’s for those days, you know those days, it’s for those days that you are so thankful that your connection was through Newark airport and Manhattan Penn Station is a 30 minute train ride away, and you have that favorite little hotel on midtown which has a room for $129 and so what you don’t have any clothes and you will have to buy a toothbrush for what like $30 at a pharmacy in the middle of manhattan but to make up for all of that when you wake up in the morning you will get your stroll and ok it’s smelly New York but look Milan was going to be smelly too you were just fantasizing that stroll anyway and 1 block into that stroll you stumble onto Cafe M, a tiny cafe’/bakery on 32nd and 5th avenue where the coffee is lovingly made one at a time the croissants are the best you have ever had, certainly in the US and arguably rivaling even Paris, beautiful oneofakind people come in and out as you sit each with their own unique beautiful lives and you can sit and enjoy that coffee and croissant and listen in on their lives as they pass through 5 minutes at a time and what better life can one person have than to sample the uncanny diversity of life and where else can you get such a sample as in New York City.
(blogged from my phone)
20 comments
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November 21, 2011 at 12:10 pm
Mom
Wow what a story! Just like you to always look at the cup as 1/2 full! That is what this mom loves about you!
November 21, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Anita Mac
Oh no! Quel horreur.
I was once given a boarding pass by the ticket agent that had someone else’s name, so I feel your pain! Luckily it was a domestic flight with another one an hour later as I missed my flight! Oh…the joys of travel.
(mind you, I love travel and just have to live with the airport hubbabaloo!,
November 21, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Matt
I love you so much.
November 21, 2011 at 3:32 pm
jeff
Me too
November 21, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Marciano
Watch out Leopold Bloom!
November 21, 2011 at 9:09 pm
davidbackus
Hard to compete with Mom, but the NYU (mostly macro) crowd will be having a beer tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5:30 at Amity Hall, 80 West 3rd, downstairs. Introduce yourself and we’ll buy you a beer for the Sargent story.
November 22, 2011 at 11:21 am
jeff
I wish I could have come. I was able to get on a Monday flight and I made it to Milan Tuesday morning barely in time for the talk.
November 21, 2011 at 9:29 pm
Susan A.
At least you make me feel better about not finishing my letters yet. 🙂
Once Guido let his passport expire en route to give 3 days of lectures in Barcelona, which was supposed to fund us bringing the rest of the family for vacation in Paris with his parents. I had to book him roundtrip to LA to get documents from Dutch consulate; Dutch consulate appointment; connecting flights on different airlines to get to Barcelona only one day late; and then rebook flights to Paris + new flight to be with the rest of the family going home. (Lesson: don’t put all your flights on one ticket!) I did it all for $2000 and wanted a travel agent commission after that!
Let us know how you manage to get your passport.
November 22, 2011 at 11:23 am
jeff
Hey Susan A.
Jennie brought the passport to Ohare and they put it on a plane to EWR in time for me to pick it up and fly through Munich to Milan. I got here just in time to give the talk.
Ps I need your letters! Times a wastin!!
March 8, 2013 at 4:44 pm
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November 21, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Anonymous
More top five journal articles should be written in such fine, stream-of-conscious prose. Is this a new efficient direction for the genre? Marciano, don’t you mean Molly Bloom? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Bloom%27s_soliloquy. What a great passage of literature.
November 21, 2011 at 9:35 pm
baltimoregon
More top five journal articles should be written in such fine, stream-of-conscious prose. Is this a new efficient direction for the genre? Marciano, don’t you mean Molly Bloom? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Bloom%27s_soliloquy. What a great passage of literature.
November 22, 2011 at 2:31 am
Emilio Calvano
Does this mean today’s seminar is canceled? It’s for those days, you know those days, it’s for those days that you are so thankful that your speaker forgot his passport in Chicago and the fashion district is a 20 minute walk from Bocconi…
November 22, 2011 at 11:24 am
jeff
I am sorry to have disappointed you. The fashion district will still be there tomorrow and I will be enroute back to Chicago (fingers crossed)
November 22, 2011 at 3:47 am
Sandeep Baliga
When are you revising our paper? I’m sure you can use LATEX on an iPhone with the appropriate app. Get on with it.
November 22, 2011 at 4:25 am
@mdryall
The app is Tex Touch. Just trying to be helpful :))
November 22, 2011 at 7:45 am
Joshua Gans
Hasn’t anyone worked out that Jeff wanted a day in New York rather than Milan? He probably had this post pre-typed.
November 22, 2011 at 11:26 am
jeff
It took a lot of planning to swap those passports and ensure that jennie wouldn’t catch it until it was too late. And next time I need to pick a better weekend to do it. Nothin going on at the Village Vanguard.
November 22, 2011 at 10:26 am
Wei
Perhaps that is how Joyce got started…should we expect a 1800 page novel soon? “On a fine autumn afternoon while wandering on the New York streets, the familiar smell of….”
November 27, 2011 at 9:26 am
Mild Speculation
Not to trivialize a beautiful meditation on life’s surprises, but if you’re spending a lot of time managing passwords, you should look into LastPass (lastpass.com) as an encrypted way of storing passwords. It’ll randomly generate secure ones for you, too.