conferring

Ooh went to a conference today and it was borderline punishing. Useful, but exhausting. I tried to stay focused but a combination of factors - low blood sugar due to having forgotten to take healthy snacks for morning tea and avoiding the cake, whirring fan noise, borderline relevant to me talks, disciplinary short hand that went over my head sometimes, too many factoids to follow after a few hours of concentrated listening, and one hard to hear and slightly annoying presenter left me running for the hills sometime after lunch. Which was a shame because I think the better speakers were on this afternoon. Not one to be easily deterred I do plan to trundle back tomorrow and hope for the best. Meanwhile, here is what I scrawled in my notebook when feeling particularly belligerent and unengaged - as an indicator of how I felt about the presenter at the time:

Jug of cream skinned face
with pleased smile
chin jerking backwards
grimace talking
with gash mouth puffing
reedy thin German sounds
voluminous hair, rising upwards
toward laureate heights
forearms jut towards us, with clenched hands
swinging in small circles
flapping, dinosaur, baby bird
hoping to explain
His chin a sail,
raised to the wind, a keel
a stern

Tough audience.


But all was not lost
While sitting and listening, I made up a joke. Yes, truly. And it's borderline terrible, but hey. I was bored.

It goes like this:

"Q. What do you call philosophers wearing frilly shirts, eyeliner and doing robot dancing to eighties synth?
A. The new semantics.

dya get it? dya get it? Semantics! Like romantics! Aaaah hah ha ha ha"

See? Told you it was bad.
Someone mentioned the new semantics in a talk, and I had no idea what that was (or what the old semantics were), and instantly thought of frilly shirts instead.

Mingled
I also mingled. Beelined straight over to someone sitting by themselves and struck up conversation. A well scrubbed, fresh faced, North American man who seems to be doing similar work to what I do - but he is being the interface between policy makers and technical specialists, whereas we often try to be technical expert, interface and policy maker all rolled into one. We had an interesting a passionate discussion about whether entomologists (for example, based on a conference he went to last week) were physically able to give super simple policy advice or whether the languages and needs and drivers of the two groups are so different they can not help but piss each other off and think the other is being unreasonable in their demands. That is a quick sum up, but it was a conversation I found much more interesting than the speaker beforehand.

To do list(en)ing
I did find some great ideas triggered by various aspects of the talks, and jotted down outlines for new publication ideas and reminders for things that had slipped off the immediate to do list. I find conferences especially good for stirring things up, thinking wise - the unexpected aspect I suppose, where it is such a lucky dip what ideas / people/ topics you'll be subjected to, it feels like a random idea generator, which is really useful. That plus the 'nothing else to do but sit and ruminate' which makes day dreaming and ideas noting a legitimate activity for hours on end.