take off down the cold pavement
skin tingles and burns
**********
Maybe I should start all of my posts with a haiku describing an aspect of my day.
So, Boston is still dark and cold and weird, as far as I can tell, but I was in a building listening to conference talks for the part of the day when the sun was out, so I'm still reserving judgment. You know what? My conference talk seems to have gone really well. A really kind lady came up to me afterwards and wanted to talk to me some more, and it turns out she's just finished a post-doc with THE bilingualism researcher, just started a job as a professor at Harvard, and studies bilingual brains with ERP and other brain-scanny equipment, and she wants to collaborate with me. So I feel like that's got to be a good sign. We're going to be in touch about a project she'd like to bring me in on, because she wants to look at babies' neural responses to nursery rhymes and she needs a phonetician. Hooray for networking!
Other than that, man am I pooped. I didn't get to sleep until almost 2:00 last night, because 2:00 EST is only 11:00 PST. I had set my alarm for 6:00 this morning, but when it went off, it was clear that that was simply not happening. So I hit the snooze alarm for nearly an hour and finally got out of bed around 7:00, which, come on, is still 4:00 am Pacific time. (So... my normal wake up time these days. Oy.) I practiced my talk a bit this morning and gave it at 11:30, and everyone I talked to said I was a really strong presenter. The Harvard lady said it was an extremely clear, logical, and easy to follow presentation, and that made me feel really good, because by the time I'm ready to present something to other people, I've been thinking about it for so long that I honestly can't tell which parts make sense any more.
Enough of that. The Harvard lady actually bought me lunch, and we talked about all kinds of acquisitiony things, and then I went to some talks in the afternoon. Got caught up with a friend from Berkeley who finished his PhD a few years back, chatted with him and my Stanford/France collaborator (who whom I had my ASA poster this week), and then me and aforementioned collaborator went and got hot chocolate. I was trying to explain to this dear, sweet, innocent Californian friend of mine how the best part about winter is coming in to a toasty warm house when it's cold outside. It's not that cold in Boston right now, by any means, but as we were sitting in Starbucks with our hot chocolate, I realized how nice and warm and cozy it was inside, and how that feeling is only truly soul-warmingly satisfying when you've been walking in the cold for a bit. She tried to understand, but I think she really just wants to get back to California. :)
There was a plenary talk at 7:45 tonight, and there was a whole spread of delicious desserts afterwards, and that is a cruel trick to play on conference attendees, if I may say so. I had to stay for the plenary talk, because the lady giving it is a big name in acquisition research, but my brain was shutting down a little bit. I made it to the end, grabbed some awesome cake, and came back to where I'm staying.
On the way back, I had this nearly-uncontrollable urge to kick off my shoes and just run down the street. I reined it in, but I was thinking about how good it is to have that stinging feeling from bare feet on cold concrete, and how sometimes you really need to just kick off your shoes and run down the street for no reason other than the fact that you can. Instead, I walked quickly back and thought about how I'm going to go for a long, long run along the Charles River tomorrow, and how I wish I had thought to bring my running tights. There's supposed to be a high of 50 degrees tomorrow, and I have a bunch of talks I should go to in the morning, so my plan is to eat a big breakfast and go for my run during the warmest part of the day, in the early afternoon, when I've digested but am not hungry again yet. Then I can eat a big, late lunch, and hopefully hang on until tomorrow night, when there's another late plenary talk that I absolutely must see.
For now I have chamomile tea and nice warm pajamas waiting for me. I will turn on some music and dance around while I brush my teeth, and then I will sleep and sleep and sleep before I do it all again tomorrow.
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