For the past three days, I have been in Florida, a state so thoroughly unspeakable that I would ordinarily not have felt the need to speak of it.

Actually, I have been having a good time, discounting the hideous bout of what appears to have been food poisoning. I would not be surprised if it was actually my body rebelling against the choice of nourishment to which I have subjected it since leaving New York: red meat, which I almost never ate before, almost every day (much of it in the form of fast food) and a renewed addiction to a candy called Spree being chief among my culinary crimes.

Rob and I are staying in a suite at the Sarasota Hilton for a few days of comfort and high-speed Internet connections before slumming it again. We actually got an extraordinary deal on the room, which is not, in any case, especially posh. As I type this, I am in the lobby while housekeeping cleans up. A badly dressed businessman just watched me pull out my sleek little Macintosh laptop and asked, "Are you in college?" A corner of my mind dearly hopes that I look as if I might indeed be a student, but it was just a little sneer at my machine, as if it was not capable of meeting the needs of anyone outside of cushy academia.

In case anyone feels as if I might be losing my touch, know that I managed an icily snotty reply that cleared the matter up nicely. He is probably unconvinced, but I comfort myself by thinking that someone with that haircut cannot possibly know as much as he thinks he does.