Back home now after a long weekend in Quaint Smallish City and what felt like a nearly-as-long day today teaching at Big Urban.

It was a relaxing several days, though--a good Labor Day, end-of-summer vacation--and for the most part George Washington Boyfriend and I just stayed in, catching up on work, starting the 4th season of Six Feet Under (and yes, I *do* know how the fifth season ends, damn Nancy Franklin to hell), and working our way through back issues of The New Yorker.

Saturday night, though, we went out with Dr. Fun and his fiancee, Adela, to a new restaurant/bar in town. The place was attractive enough, in a generically upscale-modernist kind of way, but the crowd was awful. Imagine the young, overly-tanned policy wonks of D.C. or the bankers of New York, with all the blustering and the bellowing into cell phones and the sizing each other up--but minus whatever intelligence or interest those people might conceivably have--combined with the trying-much-too-hard-ness of a small city. . . and you've got an idea of the scene.

We were not loving it. But midway through our first round of drinks we discovered the rooftop bar and migrated on up, where we were able to find a table to ourselves well out of the way of the meat market. The weather was gorgeous and the stars all out (some of those stars, disconcertingly, kept moving--there's an airport not far away), and we wound up having a great time. Dr. F had just returned from a writers' colony where he narrowly escaped death in a rowboat, thanks to a dangerously low tide and an island full of aggressive seals--just as last year he narrowly escaped death during a series of drunken races in snowmobile-type thingies. Adela is also a novelist, so the conversation eventually turned to the State of the Novel--but only when it wasn't turned to the perils of Spanish name-giving (Adela comes from a family of Chilean emigrees) or the sweetness of little foreign grandmothers who give their teenage granddaughters trinkets in the shape of the Playboy bunny logo, innocent of the full meaning of that rabbit head in profile.

Otherwise, not much to report. I did in fact throw together a draft of my dissertation introduction, if by "draft" one means something patched up out of my ancient dissertation prospectus, my dissertation abstract, my job letter, a four-page chunk excised from an early draft of Chapter One, a random quotation from Howard Dean, and about three pages of new text. It's dreadful, is what it is, but I was totally blocked and needed some place-holders for my ideas. Hopefully it will be better by Monday.