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A Conference, A Scholarship and Some Strippers
Saturday, Apr. 16, 2005 at 5:43 PM


I haven't been wanting to write here lately. Not for any deep reasons - no personal crises, no falling into the depths of despair - but because I've come up with a new idea for a template and this one seems totally inadequate in the face of it. I'm going to surprise you, so stay tuned.

The conference went incredibly well! There were a few crises, but all-in-all it was a great event. The problems were as follows:

  • Our first speaker had slides and the slide projector we ordered from Media Services didn't come with a carousel, making it necessary for me to make a frantic, five-minute search.
  • The guy from Media Services set up the slide carousel incorrectly and the first speaker (in from another state) couldn't use the slides he brought.
  • Media Services set up the video camera we ordered incorrectly and we missed the Dean's opening remarks and ten minutes of the first speaker's talk
  • Although I didn't have to deal with this personally, I feel the need to record that someone put their coffee cup in a box of materials for a private awards luncheon we were holding on the same day and the secretary had to run across campus to print out replacement programs and name tags.
  • A woman on the advisory board thought she was invited to the luncheon and I told her she could come, but didn't explain that she hadn't been invited. This wouldn't have been a problem in-and-of itself if she hadn't taken it upon herself to tell a bunch of people that there was a lunch! I was helping one of the keynotes test out her slides (which our first speaker should have done, so I can't feel too bad about his not working) and when I got upstairs was informed that there wasn't any more food because there were so many extra people there! I personally ordered food for the invited guests and each staff member but with all the crashers we couldn't even fit at the table, including my boss! The university caterers let us know that there was extra food but no plates and eventually they scrounged some up and I could eat. This was the first time I had eaten that day and before I wolfed down the plate of food I was completely freaking out!
  • After I had tested the speaker's slides but before I had eaten, one of the professors gave me her powerpoint presentation on a CD-R (there were supposed to be more, but the person in the morning with a powerpoint presentation had graciously given up on the idea). The presentation worked just fine, but the CPU in the auditorium wouldn't eject the disk without me without turning off the entire machine. We had two powerpoint presentations back-to-back, so this wasn't going to work. I went upstairs to the lunch to grab my boss's laptop, took it all the way downstairs before I realized that I had grabbed his briefcase instead of his laptop bag and had to go all the way back up to replace it.
  • The laptop must have no battery life because the laptop died halfway through one of our keynote's presentations and there were about five minutes of me and the secretary bustling around her to plug it into an outlet.
  • This last thing was more funny than anything else and didn't really effect me, but our first keynote speaker (same guy that didn't get videotaped and couldn't use his slides) left the conference with one of our moderators, who he's friends with, and they never came back! A woman from the English Department was supposed to take him out for dinner to hold court for a couple of other professors, but she was happy enough to go home. My boss seemed put out that he'd leave without saying goodbye, though, and I don't really blame him.

I did get one of those writing scholarships from English that I mentioned, worth $800, and went to the award ceremony yesterday. The adulation was nice and I saw a bunch of people from classes that I hadn't seen in a while and even two guys from Collide, plus the girls from my writing class who all won awards, too. I think they may have talked me into taking another 5000-level workshop with them in the fall in addition to my three other classes, but we'll see. I also saw my ex, which was uncomfortable but made easier by the fact that I didn't want to talk to him. So, I didn't!

After the award ceremony and a nap I went out with Sherina and her boyfriend Q. After dinner we wound up at Bazouki's, a strip club on the ground floor of their apartment building in Greektown. It was fun, although not as exciting as the first time because, well, it wasn't my first time! Q paid for everything the whole night, which was nice, and I'll probably watch America's Next Top model with the girls on Wednesday.

In other news, I actually did my taxes this year, and on time! I'll be getting $45.96 back: $25 from the City of Detroit, $18 from Michigan and a whopping $2.96 from the federal government, which I think is hilarious. I'm coming out of my financial slump, mostly due to the birthday money I asked my Mom to paypal me early so I could buy some food. I need to change the number of exemptions on my tax stuff at work now that I'm actually making a decent amount of money, and once I do that (and buy car insurance) I doubt I'll have enough cash to cover my bills each months. So, it's back to a monthly check from Mommy and Daddy but at least I'm keeping track of things.

Now, if you'll excuse me I need to get some fast food because I'm fucking starving.


I'm listening to Guero (natch)
I'm reading A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling
I want fast food, which I'll get once I meet up with Kelly and she gives me rent money

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Guero

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