Instead of making arrangements to get coffee, brownies, and chopped honeydew for a meeting I'm supposedly organizing in a week, I spent the whole day at a conference kinda sorta related to my dissertation topic. "Kinda sorta," because although scholars in this field have pioneered new approaches to some of the issues I'm writing about, pretty much no one working on traditional twentieth-century U.S. history cares what these people have to say. I hasten to add that I had heard of two of the four presenters, one of them mind-scramblingly famous, but I am apparently unusual. So I went. And I learned a thing or two: new books I should read, pictures I would never have seen otherwise, and who used to sleep with a famous lesbian novelist.
Sometimes I think being a grad student going to a conference with famous people is like being in an X Men comic book or movie, meaning a bunch of mutants (like me) with weird powers they can't really control gathering to hear a possibly crackpot professor guy talk. Then we're supposed to go out and save the planet, slay the dragon, get tenure, whatever.
Well-attended panels can get really weird. During the Q&A at the end of one today, some guy asked a question and three famous professors all of a sudden started crabbing about the question among themselves. Seriously, they started talking to each other, and a big roomful of people were left to listen to this troika of fame hash out the finer points of one particular school of demography. This was my cue that shit was getting irrelevant for me. I doodled in a notebook for a while. When I looked up again, the celebrity trio was still going at it. I glanced around the room and saw someone who taught one of my grad seminars gesturing wildly to the moderator to please, for the love of god, take another question! This finally happened, but by now I was in orbit in some mental galaxy far, far away. Finally, the session ended. We all clapped, then rushed out to the reception area for some coffee, brownies, and chopped honeydew.
I was going to call it a day before the last session, but I decided to stick around. On the way back in, Professor Wink-a-Lot (who seriously winks, like, a lot) winked at me and said, "When are you going to ask your question, CheeseQuest?" I can never think of witty rejoinders to Professor W.a.L., so I mumbled something about how all my questions were answered at least halfway. "I'm kidding!" Professor W.a.L. said. I should have known from all the winking going on.
The last presenter was interesting, but by the time he finished I was packed up and ready to go. No more Q&A's for me. I thought of hanging around until they unveiled the food at the big reception afterward, but the thought of trying to make sparkling conversation while standing up with a plate in my hand and a bunch of food in my mouth just didn't appeal. So I hoofed it back home and ordered in. The end.
2 comments:
That conference was a WASTE OF TIME. If I had known it was going to be a rehash of a book each presenter had already published, I would not have wasted my time. Well, I still would have come for the free catered lunch I yelled about getting in on, but that would have been it. And the Q&A sessions. OY.
And, for the record, the lunch was painful. Prof. SUPER FAMOUS, is, as you might expect, a bit arrogant and dictatorial.
NO. He was so generous during the Q&A's!
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