The Quarter From the Kitchen

The seminar that matters most starts at two in the afternoon in California, which is three in the morning at my table. I have learned the shape of this kitchen at three in the morning better than I ever learned it in daylight: the samovar corner gone cold, the cezve rinsed and upside down on the cloth, one lamp on so the camera has something to work with besides my ceiling.

I had expected to be there by now. Instead there is a login, a grid of faces in an afternoon I am not having, and a scholarship letter I have read often enough to know where it folds. Nobody in the seminar is where they meant to be either. One tile is in Lagos. Another keeps apologising for a dog.

The hard part is not the hour. The hard part is that this is a degree about meaning, and I keep losing the middles of sentences to a connection that stutters at exactly the wrong moment. Somebody asks what it would take for a machine to mean anything, my screen freezes on a face mid-vowel, and by the time the audio catches up the room has moved on and I am three arguments behind, at three in the morning, in a cardigan, in Bishkek.

So I take notes longhand, which I would have done anyway, and I write the parts I missed as questions instead of pretending I heard them. The questions are turning out better than the notes. I suspect they always were.

My mother asked on the Sunday call whether it counts if you do it from the kitchen. I said yes. I have been thinking about it since, and I still say yes, but I understand the question.