I’m sitting in the Stata Center at MIT; I’ve picked up my registration packet for the Women, Action, and Media Conference. My wife, her best buddy Amanda, and I are staying with friends down in Quincy, a few miles south of Cambridge and Boston. It is, not unpredictably, quite cold and rainy. On the drive up to the MIT campus this morning, the outside thermostat on our rented Chevrolet claimed 37 degrees.
We flew in early yesterday morning, and spent much of the day doing the normal touristy things in Boston. I’ve only been in Boston once before, to help film a documentary back in 2005. I spent all of twelve hours in Massachusetts, and five of those in a production studio in Needham, so I don’t really count that as a visit. My wife and Amanda are driving up towards New Hampshire at the moment, but I’m safely indoors for the duration. I’ve got veggie sushi and coffee, so really, there’s nothing else I need. Oh, and I’ve also got MIT’s world-class wireless internet, which seems to be the fastest I’ve ever used.
I’m not presenting anything at this conference, which both simultaneously unnerves and relieves me. It relieves me because, well, I don’t have to get up and give a paper. Though I don’t suffer much from stage fright, I still get nerves at conference presentations when I’m expected to say something really good or interesting. Not having to do anything but be an interested and engaged observer makes things easier. Of course, in another sense, it unnerves me too. When I’m speaking somewhere, I have a context in which to meet people. When I’m somewhere new and not presenting, panel-chairing, or speaking, I have to fight a tendency to disappear. My Myers-Briggs is ENFP, but the E can be awfully tenuous in certain novel situations.
Of course, sometimes I — more than most people — need to shut up and listen. Those of us who teach for a living, particularly those of us who lecture a great deal, risk being enchanted by the sound of our own voices. This is a good time for listening.
I’m looking forward to going to a variety of sessions tomorrow, and I’ll do my best to live-blog some of them. I’ve never live-blogged a conference; back when I first starting going to academic meetings (like the Medieval Association of the Pacific, the first conference I ever went to), not only was no one blogging but no one had cell phones. Nevertheless, we all did a super job of doodling on yellow legal pads while feigning earnest interest in panel discussions on the paleographic differences between Flemish and French medieval monastic hand. I trust that tomorrow’s sessions will be sufficiently challenging and inspiring that there will be no need for any kind of doodling, electronic or otherwise.
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