In which Matthew sleeps in a Starbucks

I am too old and too OCD for hostelling; I am too old and too hapless for flying standby. I am a very crotchety and grimacey twenty-seven. For the uninitiated: flying standby means that you pay a reduced rate for plane tickets, but you are not guaranteed a seat -- they sell to you, at a discount, whatever seats are still empty just before takeoff.

But there I was (this is all in flashback: actually, so are my prior two entries, but I've backdated them). I was exhausted, filthy, underslept and undershaven, and embarrassingly homesick, and reeling from a 2 1/2 week, successful and at times bloody fascinating and glorious research trip which took me from Chester (where I viewed and interviewed the amazing participants in the surprisingly good revival of Chester's medieval biblical street pageants, the subject of my dissertation), to Swansea (site of lots of cold fried food and of the 2008 Congress of the New Chaucer Society, where I delivered a discursive but relatively successful paper on medieval Cestrian tourism), to Aberystwyth -- where I was supposed to view a unique manuscript of the Chester Antichrist pageant, but instead looked at the Hengwrt Chaucer (through glass) for as long as I could stand (it was open to the Melibee and I couldn't turn the page!), then headed straight to the Manchester airport, whence I would fly back to SFO.

But I was flying standby. And, infuriated with my accommodations thus far, I'd opted to just spend the night in the airport: I got there at 9pm, and to finagle a[nother horrid] hostel seemed pointless when I'd have to be back there in twelve hours.

And what a long twelve hours it was. And there were only two flights leaving AT ALL for the States, both in the morning. And both were oversold. Not just on that day -- well through the rest of the week, well past when my medication and patience would run out. Turns out I had chosen to fly standby during the beginning of the summer holidays in Britain. Because I'm a fucking Cheez-It of stupidity. Because I'm a schlemihl.

Look it up.

After it sank in that I was out of grant money, broke in general (in debt to my own wedding!), and stranded in a foreign country with no way home, I did what any self-respecting man would do in a public area. I burst into tears and I called Mom.

We found last-minute tickets on Aer Lingus, leaving that evening for a layover in Dublin, then straight to SFO. Another twelve-hour layover. So I slept a second night in an airport, but a much nicer one this time, with a 24-hour Starbucks. By 2am every cushiony or semi-cushiony surface (and there are many -- it's a bloody Starbucks) was covered with a commuter, sleeping awkwardly with a warning arm draped over his luggage and latte. It looked like Yuppies at Katrina.

The flight home was nice -- since I've been on the verge of making sweeping nationality-based generalizations throughout the last few posts, I'll come out and say that the Irish seem to just be better all-around people than you or I. Lauri (kind soul) picked me up at the airport, and riding next to her (in a surprise move, she was supposed to be busy) was Ara. All the baggage which I'd guarded with my life and limbs quickly fell (metaphor?) to the concrete, and I ran to her.