Day 2 of Conference

Here are the gloves and the earrings. But, now that I look at them again, I think they are socks.

Here is a closer view of the earrings:

I put both near the door this morning, where you are supposed to put room service dishes to be carried away. The bed was made up so I know someone was in my room, and the towels all straightened, but the socks and earrings still there. Very strange. Anyway, after leaving my room this morning, I had to attend the conference from 9 until 5. It was a long and grueling day. I was also obligated to chair a session at 11 and then present my paper at 2. The chairing business is annoying, because you have to hold up a little sign 5 minutes before the end of their talk, giving them the 5 minute warning, then 3 minutes later a 2 minute warning, then a 1 minute warning and then we have to hold up a STOP sign. Besides feeling part fool and part asshole, I couldn't concentrate on what any of my three presenters were actually saying in their talks because I had to stare at my little clock the whole time, worried that I would lose track of time, run over my minutes and ruin the whole session. Then I had to manage the Q & A session, which means I had to both keep track of calling on people who were asking questions, at the same time making sure no one dominated the question sessions to give everyone a fair chance, and also make sure that questions got asked of all the people who gave a paper. It's too much!! But the worst part came when, right in the middle of it, a woman just announced, out of the blue, that everyone had suddenly gone wildly off course (and she was staring at me while she said this, as if it was all my fault), with all our talk of vague ideas and OPINIONS, when what we SHOULD be doing was presenting FACTS and HARD RESEARCH. Well, given that many of the people were analyzing poetry, film, photography, law, history, architecture, novels, philosophy...I'm not to sure what HARD FACTS they were supposed to be offering up, so that little tirade was strange. When she ended, the room was completely silent--it was very uncomfortable. A conference organizer just happened to be going through the room at the time and said something to box up and toss that comment by the wayside and then everyone moved on as if nothing had happened. But I felt it cast a bit of a pall over the event. I felt like I wore the stigma of "worst chair." (Or, I should say, I did feel that until I heard about the chair from the other conference--the "Space Conference" (which is not what you think it would be about, astronomy, but is about the use of public spaces)--that is running parallel to ours in the room next door and apparently a chair in their 9:00 session today fell asleep right in the middle of the first talk. Now THAT is a bad chair!) My talk today went well enough, though I had to compete with a raucous strimmer just outside the building. Given that all the lawns here are immaculate, I don't quite see the justification for the enthusiasm that we had to endure today but, I suppose, that is precisely how those lawns get to such a level of perfection. Fortunately I have many years of lecturing to large groups of bored students, even competing with jack hammers drilling in rooftops as they have done building repair and renovations/remodeling to French Hall, so a strimmer is nothing to me. Tomorrow, I am very glad, is the last day of this conference. I think this was a much chummier group of people than the one I met in Prague (there were some really flaky people there) but, perhaps I am just getting to old to travel, but I am still just exhausted from getting here and would really just rather be at home.