Conference

So yesterday I gave my first presentation of my research at a conference.  Writing the presentation was a great way for me to structure my own thoughts about the topic at hand into an argument, and perhaps just as importantly, to think about what I needed to present to an audience of people who had only a passing knowledge about Bolivia, in order for them to be able to understand what I was talking about.

Academic conferences are a great way to see cities around the country I might not otherwise travel to. This one was in Liverpool, and outside the conference at Liverpool University I managed to acquaint myself with the interiors of a couple of pubs. It was a three day conference, and my talk was on the last day, which was good because I got a chance to get to know my audience members before presenting my paper to them. Actually, I knew almost all of the audience members of my talk, the audience numbering only three (not including my fellow panel members). It was a slightly odd, but very stress-free way of giving a presentation, after having been rather nervous beforehand, and then spent the night before creating extra slides for my power point presentation, to find that the people listening to me would have been able to fit into the back of a taxi together.

After my presentation, I was then morally obliged to go and listen to the talks given to by the two women who had listened to me (though I would have gone anyway). After their presentation ended, we enjoyed a wine lunch which we then took with us to the following panel, and which made it rather difficult to follow the arguments of the presenters. Throughout the day - aided perhaps somewhat by the wine - I became more and more enamoured with a pretty blonde woman who had been nearly half of the audience for my presentation. Towards the end of the day, in a moment alone with her in one of the aforementioned pubs, I told her how incredibly pretty I thought she was, which she seemed to take with slight embarrassment. Five minutes later, a friend told me that the girl, in addition to being beautiful and charming, was also married. It felt like an unexpected (and unwanted) sign of my own ageing, that a woman I like is no longer unavailable merely because she has a boyfriend ('why do all the pretty girls seem to have boyfriends?' I often seem to have mused to myself), but rather because she has a husband. I'll have to start checking out women's fingers for rings, from now on, I suppose.