Say goodbye to one hoop

I’m still thinking “giving talks is a funny thing.” I mean, I started out one talk on Monday, got it thoroughly rearranged (for the best) and spent a hefty amount of Tuesday repeating my talk over and over again. The first run-through took 40 minutes, the second a bit less, and finally, at 3AM, I had a fully-functioning-talk. I know I dreamt about it all night, in that way where you catch snippets of your subconscious conversation and don’t want to hear anymore.

Got up at a “normal” time this morning, and practiced again. I was amazed and relieved that I hadn’t forgotten most of it during the night. Got to lab, practiced it two more times. Got to the seminar room, set everything up, and practiced the intro again.

All that time put in, for 23 minutes in front of my peers that went by so fast. When you’ve got a talk down, it’s a little scary when you finish because you can’t quite remember what you said, or if you left out one slide completely. . . . or gave the wrong text. It’s like sleep walking, or I guess more appropriately sleep talking. Freaky.

Anyway! All that effort WAS worth it, because it went quite smoothly and now I get to enjoy compliments instead of invent ways that I’ll be embarrassed by this talk. The funniest part is now I can’t type accurately. I’d like to say it was because I had to think through the talking part of my brain a lot today, but it’s probably more that I should get better than 4 hrs of sleep to function. Oh well. Soon I’ll go home—NEW EPISODE OF LOST!!!! AIEEEE!!!