And she lived to tell the tale.

I just spent two nights sleeping alone for the last time in the foreseeable future.

My professional organization just had its annual meeting, in Chicago this year, and I was presenting my early research project. I had been dreading it because people in my discipline have been consistently skeptical about my hypothesis, and I imagined a long line of naysayers. I have the numbers to support my hypothesis and a pair of plausible mechanisms to explain the numbers, but I still wasn't looking forward to it.

It turned out really well. I was supposed to be there for ninety minutes but people kept talking for more than two hours. By the end I was thinking, "If I just lay down on the floor and closed my eyes, would they figure out that it's over?" Several people said, "I saw this in the program book and thought it sounded crazy, but it makes a lot of sense," which was gratifying.

Only one guy was obnoxious. He was asking me for more information about one of the mechanisms I'm proposing and I mentioned that some of the contributing evidence comes from animal studies. He leaned in and said, "Well, you see, animals don't talk." In response I said, "There's compelling evidence from performance in other domains," though what I thought was rather less charitable. When my project director came back she rolled her eyes -- I hadn't connected the dots but this is a guy who hates her work with an unflagging passion and probably stopped by the poster especially because she was the second author. He has a long history of trashing her wherever possible, so I won't get bent out of shape about it.

I stayed in Hyde Park with friends from college and we had a lot of fun together. (I wondered if I might spot Obama but no dice.) The last time I took Amtrak, the train caught fire and I was delayed by five hours; this was a peaceful trip with no firefighters in view.

Tomorrow I am scheduled to send off my dissertation chapters to my committee; last night I dreamed about the final edits. In my dream I was horrified by my verbosity ("This sentence doesn't even make SENSE!") and by the scrawled unfamiliar citations I had to put in the bibliography ("Why am I citing Leakey and Leakey when this dissertation has nothing to do with anthropology?"). Here's hoping the actual undertaking goes more smoothly.