The British are Coming!

Okay, slight exaggeration. 1 Brit, but he's a good one. Paul's flight should be leaving San Diego in the next hour. Appropriately, it's absolutely pissing it down with rain this morning. Sitting in the lounge of my department and looking southeast at the grey wet Lower East Side I do feel a bit nostalgic for England. As luck would have it, Paul and I will be traveling to the airport together Wednesday, and when he returns to San Diego I will head 3,000 miles in the other direction for a graduate student conference.

NYLON is just a pretentious labeling of an excuse for students from NYU and LSE to get together and talk culture. Historically, the group used to be a bit of an old boy's club, but in my role as the rambunctious little sister of the group I've been doing my best to mix it up over the last few years. The pink shirts have been replacing the blue shirts. This year we're being whisked away to the English countryside and are staying at what looks to be a fairly posh estate house. Sure beats the macro hostel we stayed at in London 2 years ago with approximately 70% of all Spanish school children aged 12-16.

Lest you think sociology conferences are all tea and crumpets, the price of admission to this otherwise free trip is having to read some 17 papers and the ensuing discussions. There's an underlying divide between us and them - European sociology tends to be much more theoretical while its American counterpart is more empirical - but once we get past that some of the discussions can be quite interesting. Sadly the engaging and relevant bits usually account for only a fraction of the discussion. Then it just becomes an epistemological pissing contest:

• "How do you relate this to Habermas' interpretation of the Kantian aesthetic?"
• "What does this case tell us about the practice of craft?"
• "The real problem with this paper stems from your fundamental misunderstanding of urbanism."
• "Isn't this really just a case of double hermeneutics?"
• "Where are you in this paper? More importantly, where am I?"

Translation into plain English: "I'm going to ignore everything you wrote about, in fact I haven't even read past page 3, and talk about what I'm interested in so I can show Dr. Famous von Social Theorist how brilliantly clever I am."

Somewhere about half-way through the second day of the conference we usually start to get a little loopy (the aftereffects of the previous night's social event combined with jet lag taking hold) and make efforts to spice things up a bit (as much as is possible in this situation). For example, Tey had to comment on a paper two years ago which pretended to be about the ethical implications of intimate involvement with one's research subjects. Basically, the author of said paper just wanted us to know he was banging a Swede. Tey was able to work in the phrase "the fuck-er/fuck-ee relationship" - which made things a whole lot more interesting. Last year Noah rose to the challenge of using the word "mayonnaise" in the discussion during the final panel.

I have to be careful not to maximize my fun potential at the conference, however, because after all the glamour and excitement of Sociologists do Sommerset has subsided I'm hanging out for a few days with Lenny the Great (DJ name: Preacher's Daughter) in London proper, and hope to sneak in a cheeky pint with Dr. Jessica Lamb (DJ name: Aunty J or Lammo) as well. Hopefully I'll have lots of exciting tales to tell! Back in the states 3/14. Keep cool, my babies!

Cheers!!