Many worlds

It may be a small world, but it never ceases to amaze me how many incredibly different and distinct worlds it contains.  I just got back from nine days in Fiji, where the schedule most days looked like this:

7:00am -- Wake up
8:00 -- Breakfast as a group
9:30 -- Children's/family snorkel trip
10:30 -- Adult snorkel trip (sometimes only one of these trips)
11:30 -- Shower off
noon -- Lunch as a group
afternoon -- Private group snorkel, scuba dive, or lounging by the pool
3:30 -- Tea time by the pool, check email on iPod
6:15 -- presentation by the marine biologist
7:00 -- Dinner as a group
9:00 -- Bedtime

Granted, this was at a resort and therefore isn't most people's normal life.  However, there exists a place on this planet where people wake up every day under thatched roofs to tropical weather and could walk right out into an ocean filled with colorful fish.  Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, people are looking out the office window at the leafy trees of suburbia and calculating the traffic on the roads, possibly looking up what classic movie is showing at the Stanford Theatre that night.  At the same time, students in Cambridge might be fighting through the tourist crowds, zipping past 700-year-old buildings on their bikes.  I'm not even mentioning the even more extreme versions of life that people experience in a given day -- my personal experience is enough to make me shake my head in wonder.

Now that I've returned to the U.S., I'm starting to write my conference paper on good old J.M. Kemble.  I haven't read everything I intended to, but I already find that I'm going to have too much material for a 20-minute talk.  I'll have to force myself to tell a focused story rather than try to spew all the juicy quotes I collected.

It's strange to think that in exactly two weeks I will be back in England...  I find that when I'm in one place, I feel completely, naturally at home, and the other feels a bit like a dream.  I'm also anticipating a blistering pace for the month of September.  Once I finish this conference, I'll take another little weekend trip with my sister-in-law's sister (let's just say friend), then I'll have to read like crazy for another talk on the 24th, meanwhile expanding my Kemble report for an essay competition whose deadline is the 30th.  These are all things I'm excited to do, I just wish I had double the time for each of them.  Once we hit October, a new strangeness will occur: new incoming students to meet and make friends with.  Some of my friends from last year will still be around, and some will not.  The MCR seemed like a fairly cohesive group, so it's hard to picture the same thing happening again, but I'm sure it does every year.  Meanwhile, back to the grindstone!