big city glamour?

This has so far been a Dave Eggers-themed weekend. Friday night, Lisa and I went to Ann Arbor to see him and Valentino Achak Deng speak at the public library. We lollygagged/dilly-dallied too long over coffee, and the lecture room filled up, so we had to watch their talk from the "simulcast" room upstairs, but still it was awesome. They talked at length about the civil war in Sudan and the current situation in Darfur, and also about the process of writing the book. They signed books afterwards. I told them about how my little students know all about the book and they acted like they cared, which is nice.

Then today, I drove back to Ann Arbor to attend a writing seminar given by Dave Eggers. I like Ann Arbor on a sunny day like today. There's always the pull of the good things in Ann Arbor, competing with the gross things: the Indian tapestries hanging askew in windows, the moldy couches on the porches, and the pizza boxes coming out of broken garbage bags onto the sidewalk. Today the biggest drawback, frat boys, was fully evident - bars overflowing with dudes in green. Scary men are everywhere, but a college town on St. Patrick's Day is one of those Scary Men Hotspots. But on the other hand, there are lectures and workshops and classes and books and people and films and Korean lunch counters, too. It feels like a real city, compared to where I'm living now.

The seminar today was really great. He had a lot of good stories and advice. His face looked really smooth and soft, too, by the way. I sat next to a nice 22-year old guy from Ohio on one side and a mentally unstable woman on the other. The mentally unstable always sit next to me. They sit next to me, then proceed to tell me about the minutiae of their lives... This one even chased me down on the street afterward! I thought she was going to ask me to go for coffee or something, and pretended not to hear her calls. Then she yelled out, all breathless, "I just wanted to tell you that you should read Teacherman by Frank McCourt!"