This is, I think, around my tenth time coming to Kalamazoo.  I cant even remember at this point.  But every time I drive up to Western Michigan University, I arrive on campus and register and am reminded of what often happens in Celtic myths about journeys to the Otherworld.  Invariably, a warrior is chasing a stag or something and falls into a cave or a lake.  He is then transported to the Otherworld, which is where the fairies live.  There are several alternatives to what happens.  In one case, he stays in the Otherworld for a split second, but then returns to this world but finds out that he has been gone for fifty years and everyone he knows is dead.  Alternatively, he lives a whole complete life in the Otherworld, maybe marries a fairy woman, but then after fifty years wants to see what this world looks like.  He makes it back, fifty years older, but finds that only ten seconds have transpired.

That is what happens with the Conference of Medievalists.  It is as if nothing has changed since the last time I was here, you see the same people (albeit a little older), and you get this sneaking suspicion that you are in an alternate universe.