New York, New York

Saturday was going to be an exciting day for me, one that I had been eagerly awaiting for the past couple weeks. It would be the first time I would set foot on the upstate New York campus of Binghamton University, where I’ve been accepted as a Ph.D. student in Art History beginning this fall. I’d get to see my family in New Jersey, which I love doing and have written extensively about before, though I know you’ve followed this blog with the utmost diligence and knew that already.

Still, though I had a four-and-a-half hour drive ahead, no degree of anticipation was large enough for me to indulge when my alarm went off at 5:30 AM yesterday morning. No activity should be pursued at that hour other than sleeping, and the last thing I wanted to do was get on an interstate highway with my functions operating so sluggishly. So, I went back to bed, woke up at a more reasonable hour, and got on the road...

…and almost immediately drove into a snowstorm. I might remind you that April is right around the corner, and this unexpected meteorological development sparked extreme annoyance within me, and this feeling was aggravated further right around the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, where it seemed that no one had ever seen such a phenomenon, and if they had, certainly did not know how to drive capably in it. I passed two bad wrecks that backed up traffic for miles, encountered cars moving at under 10 miles per hour even on open roads, and was forced to take a detour from my planned route through Harrisburg to an alternative passage around Lancaster, Reading, and Allentown.

At this point in the morning, annoyed by incompetent motorists and still feeling a bit tired from the night before, I felt sufficiently hangry enough to stop at Sheetz in Kutztown, though Sheetz is worth anyone’s patronage no matter how they are feeling. Sheetz is an American treasure; both as an endlessly entertaining source of people-watching and for its delicious MTO food creations. I gorged myself on a hotcake with maple sausage, egg, and cheese, and washed that down with a nice flatbread sandwich with bacon, caramelized onions, and cheese (of course).

After surviving the heart attack scare prompted by the instantaneous clogging of my most vital veins and arteries, I plowed deeper into the heart of Pennsylvania, driving on past Wilkes-Barre and Scranton before crossing the border into New York.

Binghamton University is actually located in the small town of Vestal, a three-mile drive straight down the shoreline of the (frozen) Susquehanna River from the city of Binghamton itself, which is home to nearly 50,000 people and about 16,000 more when the university is in session.

It is probably best known as the alma mater of Tony Kornheiser, a co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and formerly an outstanding sports journalist at both the New York Times and the Washington Post. His daily radio show emanating out of D.C. provided the majority of my entertainment in podcast form on the long drive.

If not Kornheiser, you may also have heard of the illustrious achievements of Binghamton’s men’s basketball team, which competes in the mighty America East Conference and has fought its way valiantly to a 26-128 record over the past five seasons. The last time the Bearcats did achieve success on the hardwood, when they reached the NCAA Tournament in 2008, they did so on the back of a crack-dealing point guard, a forward who left a classmate in a coma after a barroom brawl before jumping bail and returning to his native Serbia, and a transfer student who was charged with stealing condoms from Wal-Mart.

I was invited to a conference put on the university’s Art History department; it provided a great opportunity for me to network with current students and faculty, interact with visiting speakers from other universities, including Harvard, MIT, and UMass, and listen to papers on such titillating topics as “Image and Materiality: Man Ray’s Atget Album”, “Glue as Such: The Collaged Books of Aleksei Kruchenykh and Olga Rozanova, 1915-1917”, and “Assembling ‘Smallness’ at the American Small Industries Exhibition, Ceylon 1961”. It was, in all honesty, simultaneously intellectually overwhelming and stimulating, and I was glad to be there. I even contributed to the discussion by asking a question of one of the presenters, whose work was entitled “Industrial Visions: The Politics of Assemblage in Lewis Hine’s Men at Work (1932)” if you’re interested. No? Fair enough.

I was made to feel at home right away, and have nothing but positive things to say about the people who welcomed me to their conference and made concerted efforts to get to know me and answer my questions about the program. If they can somehow help me more realistically afford to attend the university, I would be even more generous in my compliments!

Thanks for the day, Binghamton.

I left Binghamton at about 6:45, having spent just over six hours on campus, and got back on the road for my drive back to New Jersey. This one was a breeze, a quick three-hour sprint back south around Scranton, east through the Delaware Water Gap, then past Piscataway and into the clutches of the Shore. Last night was spent catching up with my aunt, uncle, and one of my cousins, and we four musketeers all attended Palm Sunday Mass in Fair Haven this morning. The Gospel reading was four pages long. FOUR!! Women and children were seen fainting from sheer exhaustion, unable to stand for the duration of Saint Matthew’s recollections.

I’m back in Baltimore now, with Duke-Gonzaga on TV now (‘Zag pride!) for inspiration as I write this. Next weekend it’s home for Easter, then back up to New Jersey and down to South Carolina on successive weekends in mid-April. Until then.