cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My torrid Panamanian affair The Australian invited me to stay with her at a really nice hotel in Panama City on Monday night. She and a lot of the other staff from that research station had a few days off for Carnivale. It also turns out that she is independently wealthy and has plenty of money to spend on nice hotels and so forth. My plan had been to spend my last night in Panama at a cheap hotel that I already knew. This sounded a lot better. She is quite accomplished. Previously, she was a professional classical trumpet player in Australian symphonies and was managing director or something like that for the Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras. Then she switched careers and decided to get her masters degree in biology and ended up doing mosquito research for the Sm1ths0nian in Panama. She left my name at the desk to get a room key and I went up. An hour of talk and then another hour of sex. We went to the pool to meet up with the other scientists and students, hung out with them and had cocktails, and then a bunch of us went out to carnivale. Mostly Germans and Spaniards, plus us. We stayed out until around 3:30 am, came back to the hotel, and fucked until 5:30 am. I woke up in her arms, both of us naked. More sex. Breakfast in the hotel restaurant with her friends, then more sex, then I had to go to the airport. We would be a couple if we were in the same country. She has two more months to go on this research project. I was sort of surprised that she has never been to the US. We talked about making plans for me to come back to Panama before her two months is up, which is actually very possible. She has no idea where she is going or even what continent she will be on after that. There are no expectations. We met on an island and had a brief, torrid affair in Panama. It could turn into more but we'd both have to put a lot of work into that, given the way that each of our lives are organized, or rather not organized. About an hour ago I finally got home here in the US. It is almost 4 am and I can't believe I am still awake after only 3 hours of sleep. I'm drinking some of the rum that the big-deal scientist (not her -- different scientist who has published important papers) gave me a few days ago. This morning, I woke up in Central America entwined in bed with an Australian classical musician and scientist. And now I'm here, sitting on the couch sipping rum and going back to my normal existence and kind-of-routine. She has the weirdest accent. The Australian accent, filtered through several years of living and studying in Germany and still being surrounded by Germans at the research station in Panama, plus a bit of Panamanian Spanish pronunciation since she's been immersed in that for the last 6 months. A few times, while having sex, she has exclaimed things loudly in words that I didn't understand. I posted a picture of us together on Facebook. Interestingly, only 3 or 4 people liked it. Normally if I post a photo, there are going to be 40-odd likes. I know for a fact that there are a lot of women who are silently seething at this photo of her and I with our arms around each other and looking like a couple. I don't want to date women any more who are not wife material. That was one of my two New Year's resolutions. There is a whole cloud of inappropriate women buzzing around, as always. Maybe it doesn't have a future. I don't know. But for those few days, we were entirely together. Holding hands in public, unabashedly boyfriend and girlfriend. Her friends accepted our status. We talked about the things that matter. Even on that short time scale it was a real relationship. I don't know that it is over. I'm not sure what to want, not sure if we'd just be stupid for trying to make this work. My Sm1ths0nian liason with the Tr0pical R3search Institute is delighted by the whole thing. She and I got along really well for the whole trip. She said that in the rare event that a journalist came down to do interviews and put together stories, they tended to be sort of shy and not very knowledgeable and failed to figure out how the organization works. It helps that I write for Sm1ths0nian Magazine as opposed to some other outlet and already know a lot about their work. But she was just tickled that mere days after arriving I was getting invited to the parties, scientists were buying me rum, and I suddenly had a girlfriend who did field work for them. Not bad for a guy who showed up by the seat of his pants and had never been to Panama before. I also dug up a metric fuck ton of science stories that neither she (the communications lady) nor I had any idea were there. My approach worked. I spent a lot of time reading everyone's past papers before talking to them, and got up to speed with the state of their fields. In botany, soil science, anthropology, microbiology, bats, Meso-American history, economics, etc. All things I have spent either months or years studying. I was able to have intelligent conversations with these scientists. And I was careful to explain to them how the whole process works, what the ground rules are in terms of what is on or off the record. My practice is sort of different from most science journalists. It is important to me to treat them fairly, be clear about what is on or off the record, and put in the time reading their papers as well as their citations. And then just being really outgoing and getting to know people both on the record and off seemed to pay dividends in terms of people's willingness to start talking about work that hasn't been published yet. My goal was to find out about really big papers months before they are published so I can have a substantial feature put together with plenty of lead time as opposed to throwing shit together at the last minute two days before the journal runs the paper, which is typically the point when a press release goes out and other journalists slap together a brief, last-minute story. 3:23 a.m. - 2017-03-01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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