a conference to remember

I went to my first academic conference, and boy am I impressed. For some reason they picked me to greet the conference attendees, no doubt because of my well known social grace and charm. So I got to get up at 6AM while the dawn was still an unknown rumour. At least the traffic was quieter at that time in the morning. So then, after my successful meet n greet, I got to sit in on the first few hours discussing the fate of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, and whether it was good, bad, or in between that it will bite the biscuit in the next few months. With a topic like that, its hard to go wrong, but I did find myself squirming a bit, until the fireworks started, and the rival camps began accusing each other of various attrocities. I had no idea what they were arguing about, other than the broad strokes that one of them was a dreaded "neo-liberal", while the rest were more orthodox academics, instinctively opposed to global hegemonic power practices. Much to my horror, I was seated next to the neo-liberal at lunch. After an awkward first half hour, I discovered he was from Ottawa, so we bonded over our dislike of the transit system.

After lunch it went on in much the same way, only longer and more boring, except that I got to hear rumours about the outrageous demands of the various attendees, including the one prof who was really annoyed that no prior arrangements had been made for him to sit in an aisle seat on the flight over. The funny thing is that he was actually really angry.

At the end of the day those who had "helped out" such as myself were invited to the wrapup dinner, while those who had merely enjoyed 9 hours of gruelling lectures were shown the door. I think they're trying to break the solidarity of our group. Anyway, it was a highlight since we got to partake in a regular feast at some upscale Chinese place downtown. Again, much to our horror they tried to seperate the grad students by placing us all at different tables in order to... I don't know exactly, but its the way they wanted it. However, once the profs got pretty liquored up everything was fine, and then they started milling, so we could once again rejoin the safety of our peergroup.