A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

"So how was the conference?" I really dislike having to answer this question. It is an invitation for me to be boring, even to myself, because I am tired of repeating the same stories to everyone who asks. And even though the person asking the question knows that they are also going to be bored by my answer, having not experienced the stories themselves, they feel they have to ask anyway. It is a pointless yet necessary performance of having-been-awayness. But here are some random answers for you:

• The only thing more annoying than the hotel bedbugs was my mother's use of internet research on bedbugs as an intergenerational weapon.
• I got drunk and stoned on a hill overlooking Parliament House. I threw up behind a tree and while I was standing there, trembling with mixed relief and disgust, a possum came up unafraid to my feet and ate my vomit.
• English Department politics are just as gendered and tense as ever.
• Canberra has a large motto spelled out in a flowerbed, in the manner of Melbourne's Floral Clock. Not "Our Nation's Capital" or "Cradle of Federation" but "Spastic Society".
  
• There were incredibly bad egg slabs (I think meant to be frittata) for lunch on first day; the food got slowly better.
• Meeting Ben was a joy. His face is so expressive.
• I am still incredibly humiliated at having introduced two people to each other and getting one of their names wrong.
• I really, really wanted to do "Electric Blue" at karaoke but I couldn't because I was wearing an electric blue dress. Also, they had no Belinda Carlisle. What the fuck is with that?

I have been feeling ashamed. Comprehensively ashamed by my institutionlessness, the shortcomings of my body, my lack of social skills... But especially by the retardation of my paper. At best, it received an ambivalent reception. I was worried that I'd be crucified in question time, because I had written the paper in such a vacuum of fatigue and institutionlessness that I had no way of knowing if it even made sense or if I was using the wrong terms and theories.

I felt it went poorly. I felt I rambled in the question time and missed the point of all the questions. I felt richly ashamed at being the object of my own paper, the layers of bungled irony enveloping me like filo pastry. Afterwards I avoided people in case they wanted to attack me personally.

People have told me that I am beginning to carve my niche. But right now I don't see myself or my ideas belonging anywhere much. This makes me angry, like when I read the paper yesterday and it was full of annoying subbing errors, such as spelling "horde" as "hoard" and "flair" as "flare". Nobody ever seems to get as annoyed by these as I do. One of the worst offenders was the editor who commissioned my hipster-hop story and then just never ran it. I still don't know what to do with that story.