up in the air

I think it's generally good to accept fault where fault is due (or is most probably due), but--and I don't use this phrase very often--this wasn't my fault.

On Monday I flew into Boston to give a talk at the Wellesley College Hippocratic Society's Annual "Women in Medicine" lecture. The talk went wonderfully, and thank you so much to those lovely ladies (and all those departments!) for hosting, it was truly such a humbling honor to be back giving a talk in the same tiered lecture hall where, once upon a time, long ago, I sat there pretending to understand Organic Chemistry. I would have liked to have spent more time on campus--and my original intent was, indeed, to get to campus well before noon, so I would have the afternoon to walk around, visit old haunts, take pictures, and visit the bookstore for loot (I have my fair share of Wellesley outfitting, but I wanted to get some sweatshirts or whatnot for the kids, because I think there is probably nothing as cute as seeing little boys dressed in Wellesley gear), but as it was I didn't arrive on campus until less than an hour before the event began, and here's why: I missed my plane.

OK, so that sounds bad, like I overslept or something, but listen! Here's what actually happened! Let me say first that I am a historically neurotic traveller. When they say get to the airport two hours before your domestic flight, I get to the damn airport two hours beforehand--I like to think of it as leaving enough buffer time for two disasters. (I'm very "worst case scenario" in that way. Typical anesthesiologist.) It was a little busy at Hartsfield Intergalactic Monday morning (lots of business travelers, I guess) but I got my boarding pass at the kiosk and the security line moved through quickly enough so that I still arrived at my gate more than an hour before departure.

When they started boarding the plane, I moved to the front near the desk and waited for them to call my zone. First they boarded First Class. Then Zone 1. Then Zone 2. Then (wait for it) Zone 3. There were still a lot of people standing around--I assumed for Zone 4 (my zone) and a boatload of people waiting to fly standby. This flight, as well as every other flight to Boston out of Atlanta that day, was significantly overbooked, to the point that they were offering $400 vouchers to people willing to volunteer off the flight. I waited for them to call Zone 4. I also looked at the screen overhead to see if they were calling Zone 4. It only listed Zones 1 through 3. Then--this is the part that I thought was weird--the lady who was calling the boarding zones left her desk, walked through the boarding gate and closed the door. Guh? Maybe something was happening on the plane, I figured, and she didn't want to leave the door open in case non-ticketed passengers tried to rush the walkway.

But then she didn't come back.

I walked closer up to the desk, waited for the be-dreadlocked guy standing there to look up from whatever he was doing, and politely (I thought) asked him when they were going to board Zone 4.

He looked at me blankly. "The plane is gone."

I blinked. "Gone? Like...gone?" Maybe I was misunderstanding.

"Yeah, the plane just left. Where were you?" he asked me accusingly.

I looked at him in disbelief. "I've been standing here right next to you for the past 20 minutes! I was waiting for you to call Zone 4!" I pointed to my ticket, where "Zone 4" was clearly labeled. "You called Zones 1, 2, and 3, but I never heard you call Zone 4!" I gestured to the screen overhead, which was, indeed, also only displaying "Boarding Zones 1, 2 and 3." You never called me! You never called my zone to board!"

"Plane's gone. Don't know what to tell you." He shrugged, looking away, bored of the conversation already.

I had not been distracted. I was not on my phone. I was not wearing earbuds. I was standing right next to the gate. I also would like to note (and these are just things that I observed from the OTHER THREE FLIGHTS that I tried, in vain, to get on on standby) that during this particular boarding process no one ever said anything like:

"Boarding all zones."

"Final boarding call for flight XXXX."

"Paging passenger Au, final call for passenger Au." (I saw this on other flight where passengers didn't board on time but were checked into the airport--I, too, had checked in at the kiosk earlier that morning so in theory they should have known at least that I was there)

Could I maybe have not heard them call Zone 4 because I was, I don't know, daydreaming? Possibly. Could that have unfortunately have coincided with them also not displaying that same information on the screen overhead? Again, possible. Could I have missed ALL of those announcements, the boarding all zones, final boarding, them CALLING MY NAME if I was literally standing right next to the person making the announcement? Possible, I suppose, but I have to say, highly improbable.

People who know airline stuff (Blue, I know you work on an airline, though a different carrier than the one I was on)--what do you think happened? Did I do something wrong? I think the most likely scenario is that they were way overbooked and they just gave away my seat. How they could have done that when I had already booked, paid for, and claimed my seat, I cannot say. But I spent all day at the airport yesterday. It was, uh, a subpar experience. Luckily (and thank goodness for the wonderfully efficient people at the Hachette Speaker's Bureau) they got me onto an early afternoon plane to Philly, with a 40 minute connection to Boston. And I made it in on time and then everything was Swellesley. But that's why I have no pictures of the campus to show you. Well, except for this one picture of my accommodations at the Wellesley College Club, which were cozy and charming and overlooking Lake Waban.

Thank you, Wellesley, I miss you already.  Again.

And screw you, Delta.


* * *


I'm 20 weeks this week, and getting Ye Big Olde Anatomy Scan tomorrow. This is the first time that Joe will actually be able to come with me--it was hard enough even scheduling one of us (me) for an appointment during the first two pregnancies; working both of our schedules into the mix would have been a pipe dream. (To be fair, we were both in residency when I was pregnant with Cal, and with Mack, Joe was in fellowship--generally two stages of life not conducive to ducking out midday. I think the only reason I was able to make my own appointment for Cal's anatomy scan was because I was on a NICU rotation at the time and everyone there was super-paranoid about congenital malformations and therefore more than happy to cover me for the half an hour that the ultrasound took.)

(Don't let this be a call for you guys to tell me stories about congenital malformations, by the way. I've seen them too, and am paranoid enough on my own, thanks.)

Anyway, here's to hoping that everything looks sweet, and that we get some nice pictures out of the deal. We'll post some of the better ones up here, of course. It helps that Joe got the scanner back up and running again. He gave me some long explanation of how he did it, but I stopped listening after he said, "So all I did was..."

Hope everyone out there is doing well.

you guys!

I flew back into Atlanta early Tuesday morning, on a 6:00am flight out of Logan.  It had been a while since I had been in Boston (I actually don't think I'd been in Boston or even anywhere near it since college, which seems like it should be that long but was, in actuality, almost twelve years ago), but aside from the weather being ridiculously cold and dreary, it was exactly as I remembered it, including the automated voice on the Red Line on the T which informed me that "Charles/MGH" was the next stop for, like, three stops in a row.

The book events, all of them, were great.  I had conferred with a few friends in the writing business beforehand about the very fact of doing any live book events, and one of them in particular (my friend from high school Deanna Fei, whose book is out in paperback now) told me that she had been told that one is not a "real author" until they have a book reading at which only two people show up, and one of those two people is the author's mom.  So I had some real fears that this might happen to me, and that I would just be crushed because, you know, I just spent six days away from my kids in order to do all this stuff.  

But you guys!  You guys really made it worthwhile.

This was the turnout at The Coop in Cambridge on Monday.  It was a great venue, and it was actually the only venue at which they set up a podium with a microphone, which was perfect, because after the other two events and doing all those radio interviews, I was kind of starting to lose my voice.  I can't help it, I'm not much of a projector when I talk, usually I'm using my dulcet tones to soothe, like Smoove B.

The book tour (short as it was; I wouldn't have minded going to more cities, and maybe in the future I will, depending on how my schedule and how things with the book are going) was so much fun.  Even the smallest event, which was in Philly, drew more than 20 people, and even if one of those people was clearly there primarily to eat cheese and drink free wine, he was at the least very attentive, and if I may say, his large beard was magnificent.

It was fantastic to meet so many readers, of course--and I was impressed because some of you guys have been reading for a long time, I had more than a few people come with their old copies of Issue #1 (and only) of Scutmonkey Comics, very old skool.  (Fair warning: clicking that link may cause cortical blindness.  White font on a black background with hot pink accents--mistakes were made.)

But what was really amazing was to have the chance to connect with the many, many old friends that I picked up along the way.  In the course of my six days on the road, I caught up with my family, and some of my oldest friends from high school, college, med school and residency.  Guys, I had dinner in Boston with my old Orgo professor and my old pre-med advisor, and we talked about our kids, like I was a grown-up person or something.  It was like "This Is Your Life, Michelle Au"  Blew my mind.

And I think that's what I got out of the book tour most of all.  The events were a blast, and I can only hope that it's going to help the book get some buzz or traction in this busy summer market (speaking of which, my book makes a pretty awesome graduation present, if you happen to be choosing between my book and, like, Betty White's new memoir) but most of all it reminded me of how lucky I am to have so many amazing people in my life, and that where you've been is just as important as what comes next.  

OK, I've got a ton of catching up to do right now, but more soon.  And thank you again to everyone who came to my book events, it really meant a lot to me to see you all there.  Don't forget, people in the Southeast, I still do have one more book event tomorrow evening, 7:00pm at the Atlanta History Center.  Information can be found here or here, RSVP to reserve a spot, or you can buy tickets at the door.

This is the last comic I did for The Wellesley News, and it's the last comic I'm going to put up here for a little while, mostly because of technical difficulties.  The hand-drawn originals of all the comics are on 9 x 12 inch paper, and I guess I must have had a bigger scanner bed in college, but I simply cannot get most of these comics to scan in my current scanner without getting the edges all chopped off.  It's maddening.  I'll probably put some more up at some point (though I do think that there are only a handful left that really stand up to the test of time) but for now, here's one of the least chopped off ones, which is to say that while the left border didn't get scanned, at least no words got truncated.

I know jokes are no longer funny if you have to explain them, but just a few things: roughly one in three juniors seemed to spend their junior years abroad, ad-hoc committees were what we called our super-earnest grassroots student government coalitions formed in the interest of stamping out injustices (or, in this case, reconstituted refried bean deficiencies), and "Schneider" was what we called our student center at the time.  Oh, and "Austin Powers" was a movie that everyone thought was funny and quoted incessantly, before it became a franchise, birthed too many sequels and essentially self-destructed.  The 90's!  They were simpler times.

vintage mau's moments: the bookstore

Woah, teenaged me, way to sock it to The Man!  If by "The Man" you mean THE COLLEGE BOOKSTORE.  That'll show...someone!  Why is the character in this comic wearing a shirt and no pants? Because I was very heavily influenced by the "Jim's Journal" comic as a teenager, that's why.  (Also, "Alvin and the Chipmunks.")

I think I have said in the past that I thought at times Wellesley was a little humorless.  I think I even got asked about that in my interview with the alumni magazine.  And you know, it was a little humorless, but in the way that all colleges are kind of humorless, because everyone's just so young and earnest and full of idealism and WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING AND GOOFING OFF WHEN WE SHOULD BE KNITTING THESE HEMP SHAWLS FOR THE HOMELESS?  In that way, the first two years of medical school are kind of humorless too, before everyone realizes what a ridiculous proposition med school is, trying to take a regular person and turning them into Marcus Welby in a matter of four years.

So yes, Wellesley could be a little humorless at times.  But, you know what--I think that's OK.  If you can't be earnest and idealistic in college, when can you be?

Segue!

(This is how I make a segue.  By shouting the word "segue."  As one does.)

Speaking of bookstores, if anyone has seen my book in an actual, physical bookstore, please take a picture and email it to me!  I know sometimes certain establishments get crazy about photography in the actual store (I'm not sure exactly why), so you may have to do a pretend-to-be-texting-while-actually-taking-a-cell-phone-pic move, but I would love to see the book on physical display, and am curious to see where it's going to be shelved.  Or, if you ordered your book online, take a picture with your copy or up on your e-reader and send that to me too!  We can have a gallery of places the book has been sighted and where it has been.  Extra points for taking a picture of the book either at the bottom of the sea or in outer space.  GO!

Edited to add: Hey! Check out an excerpt from my book featured on KevinMD! Why do people become doctors anyway, and what, exactly, is a scutmonkey?

vintage mau's moments: the curse of the 5 o'clock dinner

Yeah, the water damage is pretty bad on this one, especially up at the top left.  Also see how charming it was that I was writing for the school paper so I couldn't write any curse words?  Not like now, with my blog empire, where I live like a king!  A damn hell ass king!

I remember very little about the food in the dining hall at college, only that there was this one entree, some kind of grilled chicken filet called "Chix Breast."  And I always thought that was weird, especially since we were at a women's college.

As the author of the book, I get a few free copies of course (though not unlimited free copies, as some people think--it's not like printing your own currency), but I did order a copy off of my go-to electronic retailer just to see how fast and when the book would arrive when it finally came out.  The official publication date is May 11th, so you can imagine I was a little surprised when I came home and found this at my front door yesterday.

Behold, the power of free two-day shipping!  Still, that was really quick.  Probably some of you guys who pre-ordered got your copies yesterday too, or maybe you will today.  Gleep!  We've gone live!

So a few small things:

1.) I'm told that since they're out in circulation now, copies of the book may actually start to appear in physical bookstores around the country any day now.  Atlanta is terrible with bookstores (really it seems like there are hardly any, except for a handful of scattered Borders, many of which are closing down) so I haven't had a chance to check this out for myself, but if you happen to be at a bookstore and see a copy of my book sitting there, could you please take a picture and e-mail it to me?  Get in the picture too, if you like!  Do something dorky, like give a thumbs up and point to the book.  Also, maybe do some winking!  I LOVE DORKY STUFF.  (Obviously.)

2.) Take a picture of you with the book in an interesting place and e-mail it to me.  Summer's coming up, and summer means travel.  Might you bring a copy of the book with you to read on the plane, and then pose with it at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, or at the lip of the Grand Canyon?  You just might!  E-mail your picture to me!  (You can pose with your e-reader too, I know many many people got the e-reader version as well.)  Or take it to work, and take a picture of my book in various and amusing hospital settings.  Like, I don't know, sitting in a bedpan.  (Wait--not that.)

3.) If you read the book and liked it, why not write a review?  The book is on goodreads.com, and of course you can review it on the site of your friendly neighborhood online book retailer.  As someone who has been writing on the internet since caveman days, I realize that open and anonymous reviews of this type can sometimes be an open invitation to Random Angries to just write one star reviews which read, in their entirety, "THIS IS BULLSHIT," but it's a free country, I guess.  However, do please consider writing a review if you enjoyed the book.

4.) EVENTS!  I am getting all mixed up with the time and the dates of the events, so I'm just going to put a quick crib sheet here, so that people in those cities can get their schedules straight and come hang out.  If there's enough interest, I will plan after-events (the after-event at Iowa City was surprisingly well-attended and delightful besides) and then we can hang out some more.  Full details of the events are listed here and here, but here's the quick and dirty guide.

Wednesday, May 11th, 6:00pm: NYC (Note the time!  I think I've been saying that it's at 7:00pm, but really the event is starting at 6:00pm. So we have time to eat dinner after!)

Friday, May 13th, 6:00pm: Philly 

Monday, May 16th, 7:00pm: Boston (well, Cambridge, really) 

Thurdsay, May 19th, 7:00pm: Atlanta

I really hope you guys in the area can make it.  It's been many, many years of keeping this blog, and it would be lovely to finally put some faces to the names in the comments section, or to see old friends.

Happy reading!

vintage mau's moments: some scary things about parent-family weekend

The main good think about Parent-Family Weekend was that the food was better, and miraculously, the weather was always pretty good.  That's...that's about it.  There were also a lot of weird men-folk wandering around campus (fathers, grandfathers, brothers) and in the dorms, which was kind of jarring.  I don't know what it was like for everyone else, but for me, after about a week at Wellesley, I kind of forgot I was at a women's college.  That is, until something co-ed happened, and I had to figure out why it was so weird to see someone who was 6 foot 2 with a beard walking around.  The elusive Sasquatch!

vintage mau's moments: expecting important mail?

OK, this one got a little chopped off at edges, but look, my scanner is not very good.  I drew this comic early February of my senior year of college, basically while I was camped out by the mailboxes waiting to hear from Columbia if I had been accepted to their med school.  The day after, I got my acceptance letter.  Did my comic will it to happen?  If you print out this comic and paste it on your fridge, will good things happen to you?  Who can say?  (The answer is yes.)

This comic was not printed in "Chairman Mau's Little Red Book," (I drew it after the book was printed) so unless you are the kind of hoarder that saves old issues of The Wellesley News, you probably haven't read it before, or at least you might not remember you did. It was twelve years ago! 1999! All I really remember from that year was "Living la Vida Loca" playing in some endless loop over unseen speakers. Also, remember in the late 90's, when people straight out of college were, like, getting jobs at Merrill Lynch and stuff?  Also, see how I didn't know how to spell "Merrill Lynch"?  Now you know, all you people in the comments section who point out things that I spell wrong: College Me couldn't spell either!

Special note for international readers:

I have gotten several e-mails from a number of readers around the world who were wondering why certain international book retailer sites were listing that my book would not be available for shipping until August, when obviously, the book is coming out the second week of May.  I had my editor look into this  and she did confirm that, indeed, due to the vagaries of international book distribution, certain international retailers would not be making the book publicly available until August, three whole months after the publication date.

Not only is this a bummer (the book would be great summer reading, seems like a shame to have to wait until the end of the summer to actually get your hands on it), but it also makes international orders from these retailers ineligible for the groovy bookmark giveaway.  I WANT TO GIVE YOU THESE BOOKMARKS GUYS, but it's a very specific giveaway and the qualification does have to be a pre-ordered book to ship before or on May 11th.

I know there's no ideal solution, and everyone's best solution may be different, but I will just tell you what I know: if you want to get your book as soon as possible, please order from your choice of retailer from the list on the sidebar to the right or on this page here, be it Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, Powell's, or whatever.  As an added plus, I've been told that several of these online retailers will be shipping out the book up to a week early, if you pre-order now.  Which means you could be reading the book by the end of next week--certainly well before August.  This is what I know, and this is what I was able to find out, so hopefully this is helpful to some of the people who e-mailed me asking what the best way was for them to get their hands on a copy posthaste.

Thanks again for all your support guys, it means a lot.  I hope you love the book, and get to read it soon!

vintage mau's moments: the things I've done for laundry quarters

I'm not going to scan all the old comics, by the way, just because, like the uncollected works of Salinger, some lost works should stay lost.  (Translation: they are lame.)  But some of them hold up OK.

Here's one from the winter of my junior year.  People probably don't even use quarters for laundry in college anymore, do they?  They probably have swipe cards or just get their holographic robot butler to do the laundry for them.  It's the year 2011.  WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE ROBOT BUTLERS BY NOW.

(Again, apologies for the water damage along the edges.  You can click on the image for a larger version.)

vintage

So I'm working on answering these questions for my interview with Wellesley Magazine (look for it in the next issue, I guess? I don't actually know when it's going to run) when I suddenly remembered this comic strip I drew, back in March of 1998.

I apologize for the state of the image, but I just scanned it from the original, and the original, sadly, was water damaged many years ago from some flooding that we had in our apartment.  It's still basically legible though, and reading through this, and other comics from my tenure as the cartoonist at The Wellesley News (a position I held for three years, mainly because no one else wanted to do it), I was surprised to see that many of them held up pretty well.  I mean, some of them are very Wellesley-specific--some of the references I don't even get anymore, and I wrote them--but many, many of them could be comics about college life in general.

So!  Here's what we're going to do.  I'm going to scan some of the old comics.  And I will post them up here sequentially.  And you can read them.  You'll have to remember though, that I drew these a long time ago.  In March of 1998, when I drew this particular comic about pre-meds, I was nineteen years old.  Some of the comics are also a victim of their times, as my unfortunate and un-ironic use of the word "peeps" probably shows.  But they can be taken for what they are, which is vintage snapshots of me, doing what I still do today, in embryonic form.

I was much more prolific with my cartooning then--I had to do one new comic a week every week for the school year, and some of them were, admittedly, a little rushed.  But I never skipped a week, I never ran a repeat, and I never missed a deadline, even when I had pneumonia and the shingles back-to-back the winter of of my senior year.  That's an ISTJ for you.  (Sorry for referencing that personality test thing again, but really, if you ever wanted to know anything about me, read that link, it has me nailed down to a tee.)  By the way, in addition to this weekly comic strip, and I also had a weekly humor column in The Wellesley News--a form and style of writing which eventually begat this very blog, and then the book.  So thank you Wellesley, for getting me started.

Anyway, look here in the upcoming days for more comics from my old college strip, and try not laugh at me too much.  Or, laugh, but because you think the comics are funny, not because, I don't know, the idea of college me sitting alone in her room drawing comic strip after comic strip is just too dorky to tolerate.  Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly!  And if you're still in Boston or thereabouts, maybe I'll see you May 16th, during my reading at The Coop.  Afterwards, we can wear our pajamas to the dining hall, make nachos in the microwave, and then talk about feelings.