Our panel presented today, so naturally I had nightmares all night--the usual horrors about standing in front of a group of people I need to impress when suddenly my teeth start falling out, and I have to frantically try to catch the falling teeth while continuing with my presentation. This time the nightmare was enlivened by a visit from my dentist, who first yelled at me for letting my teeth fall out and then dragged my orthodontist into the room and started yelling at him. Then I started yelling back, except my yelling was not confined to dreamland. The longsuffering colleague in the next bed had to gently remind me that all that yelling was not really necessary at 2 a.m.
Nothing could go wrong during our panel that could possibly be worse than that nightmare, which, I suppose, is the point of the nightmare: if I've already survived the worst that could happen, the presentation itself will be smooth sailing. And indeed it was. There were some technical difficulties beforehand and we had to contend with a room cold enough to hang meat in, but all in all, it was an exhilarating experience. Last year in Atlanta I read a paper to an audience that can be described by the equation a = p +1, where a = the number of people in the audience and p = number of people on the panel. Today's audience was more robust, despite the fact that they had to sit on their hands to avoid frostbite.
Best of all, there was no yelling involved--and I still have all my teeth.
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