How to look smart for guests
After eight months alone in a foreign land with no sign of my normally intrepid relatives, my family is starting to visit in droves. My brother came a few weeks ago, then my dad came last week. This is enriching me culturally because honestly I could just sit around and eat and watch movies all weekend if I didn't have to look knowledgeable and industrious to my relations. You have to keep your dignity in these situations, and a good way to do it is by developing a guest curcuit of the city. While it might seem like it would get boring, the hidden benefit of the guest circuit is that you actually learn stuff from seeing it over and over. The Museum of Anthropology no longer seems to me a hopelessly immense expanse of ancient history that I can't put together - now I even know how to tell people where the cool rooms are, where the cafe is, the bathrooms... No, seriously, I have been enjoying my growing ability to put together the whole picture, starting with the first human migration from Asia to the Americas.