A bit of background...
My senior year of college, I was involved in a clinic at the Harvey Mudd College Math Department. We had a very open-ended problem statement: to find applications of Link Analysis algorithms. And, as happens when you throw a few smart mathematicians at an interesting problem, we decided to sit down and prove some theorems about the algorithms that were out there.
It turns out that not many people who use these algorithms cares about a mathematical proof of whether or not they work. To the people who are in the field of developing these algorithms, it seems enough to run a bunch of experiments and verify that they give somewhat sensible results. So even though we had some interesting results, we had a problem getting our paper accepted. In spite of all this, the paper was eventually accepted to SIGIR 2001 as a poster.
So the Harvey Mudd Math Clinic graciously offered to fly out my clinic team to New Orleans to present the poster. I flew out on Sunday, September 9. I had a quick layover in Houston where I had to switch to another flight.
Of course, as is always the case when there is a quick connection to be made, the weather was bad. After landing the plane, we needed to wait for an hour before a plane left, freeing up a terminal for us. At this point, it was about ten minutes before my next flight was about to leave, so I ran across the airport to get to the correct terminal for the second leg of my journey.
It turned out haste wasn't necessary; that flight had been delayed due to the rains in Houston. And apparently the same thing happened to the plane that was supposed to fly to New Orleans as the plane I'd just arrived in... We were told twenty minutes later that we were at a different terminal. So I had to cross the airport once again.
All this while, I was trying to find Joel, one of my clinic colleagues. Since I had asked the Math department to handle my reservations (it's great to be able to delegate these kinds of things...) we were booked on the same flight into New Orleans from Houston. About 10 minutes before boarding, he finally walked up; his first flight had been delayed due to the weather. Of course, at the New Mexico airport they had realized this and switched him to another flight, but because our second leg had been delayed so long, he actually made it in time to catch his original flight. So he decided to fly standby, and actually made it on the flight.
An hour later, we arrived in New Orleans. This was about two hours later than we had expected to arrive, so the professor we were meeting there had already left to have dinner. So we decided to walk down to the French Quarter to grab a bite to eat, and ended up at the Bubba Gump restaurant. This is not exactly a New Orleans-specific restaurant, but the food was actually pretty good, especially after a day of putting up with flight delays. Little did I know what else my trip had in store for me...
Since I had gotten the okay from the VP of Engineering at Google to go to this conference without actually taking any vacation time (and it actually is related to what Google does, even if it's not directly related to what I do... Google actually sent four other people), I felt somewhat obligated to actually go to some of the conference sessions. So I woke up at 8:30 so I could get down and register before the 9:00 keynote, which was about mining information from the web.
Registration was a bit of an interesting process. I had to fill out a form, and of course I filled it out as though I was a student. While I'm not technically enrolled in any institution of higher learning, it's not as though my work was paying for this conference. Of course, the woman behind the counter wanted to see my student id so I could write my student number on the form. When I told her I didn't have my student id and didn't remember the number, she told me to just make something up, and suggested putting down my social security number, since that's what most schools use anyways. Luckily Mudd was actually enlightened enough not to use social security numbers, and I hate putting my social security number on forms. I did end up making up the last four digits of the id number, and later remembered the right ones. Oh well... I doubt they'll actually check. And if they do check, I think I have a pretty good defense of why I was paying student fees. (Just consider me a pre-grad student... It's close enough to the truth...)
I was somewhat disappointed with the keynote, but that doesn't really surprise me much with the kinds of things the research department does on a regular basis... After the keynote, I ran into the other Google employees there, some of whom were surprised to see me. I ended up going to a couple more of the paper sessions that morning, but left relatively soon so we could go out to lunch and get ready for the poster presentation that evening.
Tom had been a consulting professor on the project during our senior year, but after we graduated and had decided to actually polish up the work to get a publishable paper, he took more of an active role in participating in the research. He had also been a visiting professor at Mudd during that year, and had later moved on to Gustav Adolphus College in Minnesota. At any rate, Tom had been in New Orleans over the weekend with his wife, and had visited in the past, so he actually knew some places in the French Quarter, so he acted as tour guide for me and Joel.
For lunch we went out to a restaurant on Bourbon Street that had an oyster bar, and most of the rest of the menu was filled with typical New Orleans food. I had some gumbo and jumbalaya. One thing I have to say about New Orleans food: it's generally very good.
We were the first group to set up our poster, so we got to pick where it went. We decided to put it up on one of the two displays that was clearly visible from the front doors of the exhibition hall. This meant that just about everyone who walked in at least glanced at our poster, and since this was really the whole point of going, it went pretty well.
The people who stopped and actually read the poster for the most part fit into two groups. Most Information Retrieval people are experimentalists rather than theorists, so they tend to set up systems and run experiments, and if the numbers that come out seem to make sense, they say they've got a good system. Now, a theorist like me looks at that kind of situation and wants a deeper explanation of what's going on; many of these systems are complicated enough that you often have multiple competing causes. At any rate, the poster we were presenting basically showed that a well-known algorithm had some theoretical problems with it, but we were a bit short on real-world examples of this. The first group of people to see the poster basically said, "This seems sort of interesting, but who's it a problem for? Why should I care about this, if you can't show that these situations come up in real life?"
The second large category of people that saw the poster were the people who weren't familiar with the algorithm, and had to have things painstakingly explained to them. Most of these people seemed to get it eventually, and I think they left with the attitude that what we'd come up with was an interesting mathematical oddity, something that was worth knowing if you needed to use this algorithm, but if you didn't use the algorithm, it wasn't all that important. I think that's also my point of view, too...
The poster session lasted from 6 to 10 in the evening, which struck me as particularly poor scheduling. Here we were in New Orleans, a city with an interesting night life, and we had something scheduled until 10 pm? At any rate, my copresenters agreed with me, and things had started quieting down by about 8:30 pm, so we decided to leave and visit Bourbon Street. Luckily, they had plenty of food at the poster presentation, so we didn't have to worry about getting food. Unfortunately, the food they had there was not all that great... Joel was impressed that he was able to eat sushi, but I think his standards are a bit lower than mine (then again, I doubt he gets good sushi in either England or New Mexico...) They also had mexican food and a couple of other styles of ethnic food; none of it impressed me much.
The previous evening Joel and I had managed to walk past Bourbon Street (where it intersects Canal Street, it's hard to tell it's where everything's happening; things don't really pick up until you've walked a couple of blocks...) This night, we saw quite a bit. They've got the bars where you can walk up to the to-go window, order a drink, and just walke down the street. If you walk down Bourbon Street, you can hear about ten kinds of music over the course of five minutes, everything from jazz and blues to techno dance music. There are really upscale restaurants right next to strip clubs. There are the people who are obviously rich tourists walking around right next to the people begging in the streets. I don't think I've ever been in a place that had so many opposites in such a small area.
This night we decided to go to one of Tom's favorite bars, Pat O'Brien's. It was a nice place, with a courtyard in the middle with a couple of fountains going. So we sat and hung out, talked about what had happened to each other in the last year, talked about collaborating in the future to finish our work on this project, talked about future plans. After a while, we decided that it was time to leave, but it was still too early to go back to the hotel.
At this point, I was kind of interested in what the gay night life was like in New Orleans. Since I thought I was only going to be in New Orleans this night and the next, I wanted to check things out tonight, so I'd have plenty of stories to tell by the time I got home. I wasn't quite sure I wanted to drag my straight colleagues along with me, but Tom and Joel both said they wouldn't mind coming. So we walked down a bit further on Bourbon Street to where the rainbow flags were flying, and walked into a bar called
One thing I've heard about gay clubs is that no matter where you go, it's always the same. People dress the same, dance to the same music, act the same... I'm not quite sure whether this applies to straight clubs too, since I haven't been to many of them. I think there is some truth to this: I felt like I was in almost familiar surroundings as soon as I walked through the door. Then again, there may just be something about going to a place where it's socially acceptable to profess interest in the same gender that makes me feel more comfortable.
At any rate, it was an interesting evening, and I think that Tom and Joel had a good time. At the very least, Tom later told me that he'd had an eye-opening experience that he thought was good for him.
I was expecting to sleep in a bit the next day, since the keynote in the morning didn't really sound all that interesting to me. I didn't bother setting an alarm, but expected to get up at around 10. I was a bit surprised to wake up to my phone ringing. Tom was calling to ask if he could use my cellular phone to call his wife, because he couldn't get through using the land line. Of course, this just confused me further, but as soon as I turned on the television some of it started to make sense. One of the World Trade Center towers was burning, and within a couple of minutes, the second tower had been hit by a second airplane.
I spent the rest of the morning coming to terms with the fact that I'd just seen two 110-story skyscrapers get hit by airplanes, and then fall to the ground. This was especially weird because one of my most vivid memories in New York was sitting underneath the World Trade Center during the summer of 2000 while I was about to start looking for a new job. There's something about skyscrapers that evokes a feeling of stability to me, and I hadn't really realized that the World Trade Center actually held such strong personal symbolism for me until I saw the two towers fall down.
Tom did manage to get through to his wife back in Minnesota without a problem; I then called my parents in order to tell them I was all right. I had neglected to mention to them that I was going to be in New Orleans until I was already in Houston on my way over; they had no idea when I was flying back. At this point there was no way they were worried about me, though: they hadn't had the television turned on. After I asked my father to turn on the television he asked me which channel to turn on; as he took it back because of his realization that the TV stations in New Orleans wouldn't be the same as those in California, I told him that it didn't really matter which station he turned on.
At lunch time, none of the three of us felt particularly hungry, but decided that it would be a bad idea to ignore the fact that we needed sustenance. We walked to McDonald's on Canal Street. I didn't even have the energy to assert my dislike for fast food hamburgers, and managed to eat my first fast food hamburger in over a year without much of a problem.
I spent some of the afternoon attending the paper presentations. Like any conference, some of them were interesting, and others weren't. Fewer were interesting to me, because it wasn't really a conference that's in my area of specialty...
That evening was the banquet of the conference. Tom decided he wanted to have pizza and beer in his hotel room rather than go to the banquet. Joel and I decided to see what it was like. We both planned to leave a bit early, Joel so he could hang out with his brother who was driving over from Texas, and me because I didn't think hanging out with a bunch of people I didn't know would be much fun. We ended up sitting with a group of people from the University of Massachussetts, and stayed a bit longer than we expected to.
When I decided to leave, it was only about 10:00, so I decided I'd go back out. That night, I didn't work up the courage to actually go somewhere new, so I went to Oz again. The night's entertainment was a wet underwear contest. The drag queen signing people up didn't manage to convince me to participate... And it made me glad that I hadn't brought Tom and Joel with me then. The contest involved full-frontal nudity from each of the contestants...
After the contest ended, I decided it was starting to get a bit late, so I started walking home. On the way back, I was accosted by a man on Bourbon Street, who started walking along with me. It soon became clear to me that he was following me, and I didn't feel entirely comfortable with this, but I wasn't quite sure what to do about it. Luckily before too long we passed by where a policeman was sitting. He must have noticed a look in my eyes or something, because he called the guy over and started asking him what was going on. I walked away, without looking back, grateful that someone was watching out for me.
My original flight out was scheduled to leave at 4:40 on Wednesday afternoon. Joel was scheduled to be on the flight as well. That morning, rather than attending the conference, I dealt with the fact that my flight had been cancelled. Joel was lucky; his brother was in town and planning to drive back to Texas. From there, he was confident he could find a ride back to New Mexico somehow. I, on the other hand, was at the mercy of the airlines. Luckily, it seemed that the airlines were being very accomodating. After the automated system told me that my flight was cancelled, I was kicked over to a customer service representative who put me on an 8:00 flight. At least I'd make it back in time to not interfere with my Thursday night plans...
After dealing with this, I went up to Tom's room to see what was going on with him. He had originally been planning on flying out on Tuesday night; when that didn't pan out he eventually got rescheduled for Thursday. He had also managed to speak to his son that day. His wife had mentioned that his son hadn't been able to sleep alone in his bed the night before. That once again brought home to me just how much what had happened had fucked up everyone's lives.
Tom had spent enough time staring at the television that he just wanted to get out and do something else with his afternoon, so we decided to go play tourist in the French Quarter. This day was the only one that I brought my camera out; I didn't feel like getting my camera stolen, and it's just a little bit too big to fit conveniently in my pockets. This means that unfortunately all of my pictures show the French Quarter during the day, instead of in the evening when everyone's out. On this day, we walked around much of the quarter, and saw many of the sights. I got another glimpse of the Mississippi River, and we spent a bit of time strolling around Jackson Square. We stopped in a brewhouse for lunch; the soup there was excellent.
After lunch we went back to the hotel for a while. I spent a bit of the afternoon logged in to work; this gave me a bit of encouragement that at least part of the world was still operating in a manner that at least vaguely approximated normalcy.
That evening Tom and I went out to Pat O'Brien's for an early dinner. He hadn't eaten there before, and had wanted to try something new. At this point, I had decided that I liked almost everything that I'd eaten in New Orleans, and this experience did nothing to change my mind. The other notable part of dinner that evening was the fact that I had a cosmopolitan that didn't suck; Oz somehow didn't seem capable of making a decent cosmo.
After a nice leisurely dinner, I decided that we should go to a jazz club. After all, New Orleans is well known for its musical scene, and there were a couple of nice-looking places back on Bourbon Street. So Tom and I went and hung out for a while in a nice little jazz club, listening to some live music. Listening to good jazz made me want to take my clarinet out again.
Before too long, Tom decided he wanted to go back to the hotel. I decided I needed to check my flight; if it was still leaving in the morning I didn't want to be out late. I called up Continental, and got put on hold. The system informed me that I'd be on hold for 73 minutes. At this point, I didn't have much else to do, so I sat around and started to wait. I called my parents and grandparents on my cell phone as I sat and waited to let them know what was going on. After I'd waited about 90 minutes, I decided to call on my cell phone, and see how long the wait would be if I'd called then. Much to my surprise, I got kicked over to a customer service representative immediately. She booked me on a Friday afternoon flight with Northwest, a partner airline. So I had another day to kill... And no reason to get up early in the morning... So I decided to go out again.
This time I decided to see if I could find something different. A bit further down Bourbon Street, I found an unassuming gay bar called Lafitte's in Exile. This place had a bit of an older crowd, but that also meant that the people there were quite a bit friendlier than at Oz. Here, people actually engaged in conversation; Oz was a bit more like a dance club where people went to be seen.
One of the guys I met there was David, who runs a bed and breakfast. After a while, it became pretty clear that we were both about to leave, so he asked me how I was planning on getting home. At the time I was a bit wary of walking back after my experience the previous night, so I was happy to accept his offer of a ride home, after we walked to his place. That way he'd save cab fare home, and I'd get a ride, and neither one of us would have to walk alone. This sounded like a good idea to me.
So we walked to his place. I've decided that the only part I like about New Orleans weather happens between midnight and 6 am... At that point, the humidity isn't too oppressive; the heat of the day has started to disappear, but there's enough left that it's not chilly at all. At any rate, it was a pleasant stroll, and he had a really nice house. (I suppose that's to be expected, as he rents it out to guests for his livelihood...) After spending a while sitting on the upstairs balcony, he drove me back to the hotel. He also gave me his number, and told me that if I ended up getting stranded in New Orleans to give him a call.
The paper presentations ended on Wednesday, and I hadn't registered for one of the Thursday workshops, so the conference was basically over. Tom decided that he wanted to do something completely different to take his mind off things with the time he had left, so we decided to go out to Harrah's Casino. After my experience on Bourbon Street, and my experiences in Las Vegas, I expected something a bit more impressive than the building we arrived at. We were both surprised that this was a casino. The Harrah's sign was obscured by a palm tree, and Tom turned to me and said, "I thought this was a federal government building..." We went inside, and made a culinary blunder, eating at the casino buffet instead of getting good food somewhere. If I ever go back to New Orleans, I'm definitely going to eat good food, because it's one of the best things New Orleans has going for it.
Afterwards, we decided to play blackjack. Of course, we didn't feel like blowing too much money, so we spent a while looking for a five dollar minimum bet table. At first they were all full, but after wandering around for a while we found one.
It was an interesting, and profitable, diversion. We stopped after Tom had doubled his fifty dollars; in the same time I had won thirty five. This wasn't going to come close to paying for my trip, but at the very least it was going to pay for a couple of meals and drinks.
At this point, Tom needed to get back to the hotel and drive out to the airport. After returning to the hotel, I called David. He told me that he and a few of his friends were going to be out in drag that night for a fund-raising show for one of his friends Jasmine, who was planning to compete in the Miss Gay Louisiana pageant. So, as long as I didn't mind hanging out with some drag queens all night, I should show up at Oz while they were having their weekly bingo game; he and his friends would show up at some time around 5:30 or 6.
For dinner I was determined not to repeat my mistake with the casino buffet, so I wandered around the French Quarter looking for a place to eat. I almost stopped at a place called Madame Cheng's (or something similar), which definitely looked like it had atmosphere. Asian food served by drag queens... But I guess I'll have to look into that one next time; I decided that I wasn't going to get high quality Asian food there. I eventually ended up at the Cafe Royal, and only because I had reached a certain level of hunger and decided that the fact that it had balcony seating appealed to me. It turned out that the food was excellent; the soup that I had (a creamy oyster and artichoke heart soup) was incredible. Just thinking about it is making my mouth water...
After this I walked on down to Oz. It turns out they have a weekly bingo game, which is free for all comers. I'm pretty sure they actually make money on it from all the drinks that get sold; there was actually quite a large crowd. I was there for five games. The third game, I actually got a bingo, but the prize was just a lawn chair, which I didn't want, and couldn't have gotten onto a plane easily at any rate.
David eventually showed up in drag with a couple of friends. I didn't recognize him at all, but none of his other friends that actually knew him did either, so I didn't feel bad about it.
Eventually we wandered down to Lafitte's where the drag show fundraiser was going to take place. After David found out that I hadn't been to the Bourbon Pub, he insisted that I needed to go along. I got the impression that it was much like the Cafe is in San Francisco: it's where everyone goes... We spent a while bouncing back and forth between the Pub and Lafitte's, waiting for Jasmine to show up. It was sometime around then that I became aware that not only is there a concept of "gay time", but there's a separate concept of "drag time"; Jasmine didn't end up showing up until about fifteen minutes before her show was supposed to start, and didn't get started until forty five minutes later.
People definitely notice drag queens. They also tend to notice people who are hanging out with drag queens. I got some rather interesting looks just by virtue of the fact that I was with David.
The evening interesting in many ways. I'd never been to a drag show before. Rather early on in the evening David introduced me to a massage therapist friend who seemed quite taken with me, and kept making overtures at me that got increasingly more forward until he started putting his hands down my pants and I told him I wasn't interested in him. In addition to the drag show, Jasmine was also holding a raffle. I eventually got pestered into buying some raffle tickets, but unlike every other raffle I've been entered in, this time I won. For the first time in my life, I was the owner of porn videos.
After the show, David decided he needed to get out of costume, so we went back to his place where he quickly changed. We then went right back to the Quarter, where we went out to a couple more of the bars. The rest of the evening was rather fun, but rather uneventful (at least by the standards of this week) and ended with my taking a cab back to my hotel.
That night I didn't sleep very much. I got back to the hotel at about one, didn't manage to sleep until 2:30, and then only until 5. At that point, I decided I reeked too much of smoke, and decided to take a shower before trying to get back to sleep... I managed to get a few more hours of sleep before getting up at 9. At this point I was really starting to feel stressed about the whole situation, and a lot of that was the uncertainty of not knowing when I was going to get home. Another large source of stress was the fact that the one person who I really knew in New Orleans had just hopped on a plane the night before and left, so I felt very alone.
At this point I decided to check with Northwest and make sure my flight was still on. When I got through to Northwest, I was informed that they weren't honoring their partnership with Continental, instead trying to concentrate on getting their own customers dealt with. At this point I couldn't get through to Continental, and it was nearing check-out time at the hotel. But David had offered to let me stay at his place if I needed it, so I decided to check out and deal with things from his house.
As I was checking out, he called me and asked what was going on. After telling him what was going on, and letting him know that I was taking him up on his offer, he offered to come over and pick me up. So I got a ride back to his place. By this time it was around 11:30, and I still couldn't get through to Continental, so I called the travel agent that originally booked my ticket. She told me she'd call me back as soon as she figured things out.
I then decided to take a nap. In spite of the fact that I really couldn't get to sleep, it was nice to just lay down with my eyes closed. We then went out to lunch at a nice little italian place in the Quarter. The name escapes me at the moment, but David knew the waitress, and had a good time talking with her. It was just a little while longer that he informed me that she had been born male.
When we arrived back at David's house, the travel agent called me back, telling me I was booked on a flight at 7 am on Saturday. She faxed the information over, and told me to call four hours in advance to make sure the flight was still on.
I wasn't too excited about having to call at 3 am to see if my flight was still on. At this point I decided that what I'd do was stay up until 3; if my flight was still leaving, I'd just try and catch some sleep on the plane. If not, then I'd still get to enjoy a New Orleans Friday night instead of waking up at 3 only to find I'd lost my chance.
I was still a bit tired from the previous day, though, so I tried to take another nap. After sleeping for a while, I woke up to David and his housemate discussing the newscast, which was talking about how Jerry Falwell was blaming the terrorist attacks on the breakdown of American values that was due in large part because of the malicious gays and lesbians trying to destroy the fabric of America. I was having enough trouble sleeping. Getting riled up wasn't going to help the situation, so I decided to get up.
That evening, Jasmine was participating in a drag show in a town nearby (I didn't catch the name of the town, but it's close to the airport.) So we drove out to pick up some Chinese take out to have something to eat before driving off. After arriving at Jasmine's apartment, we discovered that once again, we had failed to take into account the effects of drag time: Jasmine still wasn't quite ready. I decided to just sit back and watch, and stay out of the way while everyone tried to get ready.
We then went out to the bar where this drag show was taking place, a little bar called Angles. There was a stage set up with a large rainbow flag in the background, with a small American flag in the center of it. As we walked in, we were accosted by some people who were taking a survey on people's knowledge of HIV prevention information. Before too long, the drag show started. This one was much better than the one the night before. I don't know quite how this happened, since Jasmine performed exactly the same songs, but she was much better this time. At any rate, it was a really good show. David and I also managed to sit next to a pretty nice guy. He was friendly, and started a conversation with us. I'm pretty sure David managed to get his number; I hope that goes well.
After the drag show, we went back to Jasmine's place before heading back to Bourbon Street. Before too long, David and I got separated from Jasmine and her husband. We ended up upstairs at Good Friends, where we ran into a friend of David's that was about to go back to school in England, with his boyfriend who was getting ready to go back to Germany.
The four of us had a nice conversation for a while. At around 1:45 I called the airline to find out that my flight was still on. Shortly thereafter we left, and ran into Jasmine at the Pub. After hanging out a bit, we all decided to leave. By this time it was about 2:45; I was planning on catching a cab from David's apartment at 4 to make it to the airport with plenty of time to spare.
We started walking back to Jasmine's place. It took a while to get started, because we kept running into people that David or Jasmine or Jasmine's husband knew. But eventually we got started on Bourbon Street. Before too long, a car drove past David and me; Jasmine and her husband were walking a few feet in front of us. I thought it was a little odd that the car was slowing down, but figured it was to avoid hitting the pedestrians. I found out otherwise when the driver reached out and snatched Jasmine's purse, tearing off the straps in the process.
Luckily I caught the license plate of the car, and we quickly called 911. Unfortunately, it took a while for police to show up; about half an hour later, an officer showed up and took a report. At this point I was stressing out about the fact that I was going to be late to get back to the airport.
We dropped Jasmine and her husband off back at her apartment before heading back to David's apartment, where we called a cab and picked up my stuff. David wanted to head back out to the Quarter, so the cab dropped him off there before heading off to the airport.
At the airport, I was relieved to find that my flight was still on and showing San Francisco as a destination. As I was in line, I talked to a couple of passengers who were also on my flight; one of them was flying to Houston to buy a wedding dress for her daughter. We had a pretty good conversation as her sister downed some Jack and Coke to calm her nerves about flying.
Security at the airport was tight, as I expected it to be. The bags I was checking got searched. As soon as the waitress saw the porn tapes, she turned to me and said, "Let's do this on the ground behind the counter so not everybody sees." That was actually more entertaining than it was embarrassing, but she didn't seem very bothered by it.
As I made it to the terminal, one of the women I'd been in line with noticed me, and told me they were worried I wasn't going to make it. We then started talking, and she pledged to me that if we got hijacked, she was planning to fight. Thankfully, it didn't come to that... That was just another reminder of how things had changed...
When I arrived at SFO, I called my roommate Geoff; I was home about an hour later. I didn't realize that this apartment felt so much like home to me; I hadn't even finished unpacking my boxes.