Today I realized I’m traveling to a conference in a week.
“I wonder what the topic of my presentation is,” I said to myself and went to look it up.
“Huh,” I thought when I found out the title. I’d sent in a blurb to that conference in April and gave it no more thought since then.
Writing conference talks is a bizarre way of wasting time. I cull mine out of books I’m writing, and that allows me to give them no thought at all. The whole point of going to the conference is to have 4 days to space out over my new book in an almost uninterrupted manner.
It’s funny how terms like “imposter syndrome” came into being right after the passage of affirmative action laws.
I can’t relate to people who get nervous when presenting their research. Dude, it’s YOUR work. By definition, nobody knows more about it more than you do. Why are you freaking out??
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I’ve seen whole careers come to naught because people turned conferences into the main unit of their scholarly output. And it’s a mistake. Nobody cares. It’s better not to go at all than to see it as very important.
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