I have to go home this evening and buy *another* set of plane tickets. Catherine and I just made a last-minute decision to go to this really cool conference.

The flyer came in the mail last night, and I almost tossed it without looking at it, but it had a picture of the Bamiyan statues of Buddha destroyed by the Taliban on the front cover and that, of course, caught my eye. I'm just so pleased we can go. Catherine's work will pay for her registration and/or airfare, since all the stuff about "insuring art in an age of uncertainty" and "protecting sites, visitors, artworks" is part of her curator's job. I'm just going because:

a) architecture in an age of uncertainty is just an intriguing concept;

b) I'm interested to see what the architects have to say about the "affirmation of cultural continuity" and building design;

c) I'm intrigued by the talk on "defining cultural attacks," presumably this includes something other than just physical assault;

d) building on the previous item, I want to know what Mr. Lewis is going to say about "defending cultural property." First off, what is cultural "property," is it physical? is it intellectual? are we defending our ideologies, or just the buildings in which we house them?;

e) I want to see Ground Zero now that it's all cleaned up. I managed to type out that addendum to my December blog entry, but it doesn't begin to describe what was going through my mind last time we were there. I want to see what's changed--the site, how I feel, how Catherine feels, how New York feels.

So, come June 6, we'll be going back to New York for the weekend. Which should really, really, *really* piss my parents off.