Notes From Montreal

My French is rudimentary at best, but nonetheless I love speaking it. This morning I had an unpronouncable chocolate and coffee drink and the barista put pink sprinkles on the whipped cream and it was the best thing ever, except for that time I had a vanilla mocha with browngirl.

I'm in a tiny little dorm room at McGill University. The place has no AC, because Canada, I suppose. The one thing I don't like is that there aren't any appetizing places to eat in the immediate block: lots of cheap food for undergrads and some higher-end places for faculty, I guess. Well tomorrow night I promise myself I'll take a book and go to one of them--I opted to not get tickets to the conference banquet because in my experience those things always end up with an entire table chatting animatedly away as they all know each other and me, silent and to the side awkwardly. So I am way better off with a book!

The SHARP conference is going well enough--certainly better than other book history-related things I've been to. (Book historians tend to gather along the spectrum of Extremely Awkward Introverts and Asinine Egomaniacs with a handful of chill people in the middle. I flatter myself I'm towards the middle myself, needless to say.) All of the papers today were interesting, even the one in French that I only partially understood.

I meant to write a longer post, but I am tired, and honestly don't remember what else was on my mind, so.