TOC 2 with chop sticks

The wake up call came at 6 a.m. I always fumble around with the phone until I finally remember it is a wake up call. In that sense, wake up calls are rather creepy. It is a "Twilight Zone" thing, the phone rings and there's nothing.

If there's one thing I wish I could do better at conferences, it is network. I am told that regular attendees at the big academic conferences, such as AAR, ignore the planned sessions and spend the entire time just reacquainting themselves with friends and fellow scholars. I always forget my business cards, and I'm never really in a position to need to frequent all the vendor booths. That would actually be some kind of torture from hell: be assigned to a cool conference but have to spend the entire time suffering one vendor pitch after the next. A subcategory of that hell is when you are confined to your booth. I did some booth work for EP. We went to this cool performing arts conference. I spent the entire time sitting bored behind our table.

Inevitably, my kind of networking is, "So who are you with?" or "I notice that you are with Random House." It always helps if the conference organizers make everyone's place of employment so small as to be nearly invisible. This is especially handy when you are trying to figure out what company or organization a woman you are talking to is affiliated with, as it looks for all the world like you are making great efforts to stare down her blouse. It also says something when people don't keep their badges visible, or allow them to twist around as well. What, are they so important or unimportant that no one needs to know the usual info? Is the conference just a wrap up for them from here on out?

Here's another moray to observe during conferences. I made the mistake this trip on day three (so I'm getting a little ahead of myself here) to engage a vendor in conversation during lunch. I'll wait until a future post to spell out the details, but, suffice to say, it was hard to get a bite in with so many people talking at once.

Conferences should break for an afternoon nap. I say this because around 2:30 p.m., I get so tired. My butt has long since gone to sleep in three places, and my legs ache. Even worse, I've lost complete interest in the speaker, no matter the topic, for psychosomatic reasons. The first time this happened, I was at a conference at Villanova in Pennsylvania. The speaker was saying something about Lévy-Strauss or Lacan or somebody, and I realized with absolute clarity that not one cell or fibre of my body gave a crap. TOC on day one was made worse by a pallid afternoon lineup.

One cool thing to happen during the conference was that I met up with Carlo and his boss, Jorge. Carlo is TN's publisher in Brazil, and he is such a fun human being to be around. He is well traveled, and has lived in several countries, including the USA, where he received a degree in publishing in New York. Carlo is a huge photography buff, and he knows all the international-traveler workarounds for phone outages, the awful U.S. wireless system, or Web sites blocked or governed by country of origin. This time, Carlo told me all about Skype, which sounds great. I hope that one day L and I will be able to take Carlo up on his offer and visit he and his wife in Rio. I'd never met Jorge before--a tall, good-looking man with an excellent speaking voice and an educated and interested demeanor. I wish there had been more time to spend with him. Carlo and I saw one another at the conference, but he was always busy meeting international friends to do anything afterward.

It bothered me that I had no idea how to edit the video I'd shot the night before. Just because you own the software doesn't mean you know how to use it. I also felt that it wasn't really very good. When you are speaking into a camera it is hard to keep your thoughts. You are so aware that you are being filmed. I ramble and go on about this or that. It is hard to remember to make an argument or support a point. I wanted to shoot more video, but I wasn't sure just how to organize my thoughts or, with five pages of notes, exactly what my thoughts were.

Hunger put all doubting aside. I wanted to go a little further out, and I wanted Japanese food. So I consulted my map, did a little more research, and set out for Ocha. By the time I got there, I was so excited that I called L and said, "I'm in Manhattan at a Japanese restaurant eating with chopsticks. How cool is that!" Unfortunately, it was too cold to do any more exploring. Satiated, I went back to the hotel and read the help files on Windows Movie Maker until after one in the morning.