Giving a Talk

Rule one of being unemployed is to keep working. Rule two is to look for jobs. Rule three is not to write on the walls. All the other rules are about chocolate moose and are best left unstated. It's a strange time, especially when you're half-set for a job in September that you MIGHT get but can't be certain about for a while. It's like floating on a little cloud halfway between Wile E Coyote and the ground he's hurtling toward, and as he falls you're slowly... drifting... to an uncertain fate. Oh, Wile E Coyote, you're a rare one for physical comedy.

So what do you do in the interim period? You apply for jobs, work on regardless, and think about the odder parts of the profession that's chosen you, almost by default it seems. What you don't do is drift into a reverie on the bizarre experience that is giving a talk. I think some people like giving talks, but I am not of that persuasion despite it being a fundamental part of an academic researcher's career. For me, it's a magnificently scary experience, and it goes something like this:

1> Someone suggests you give a talk.
2> You think about briefly and agree.
3> Hey no stress, it's still weeks away.
4> Make a little plan on a piece of paper divided up into squares for each slide.
5> Realise you actually have to do some work to fill the slides.
6> Panic a little!
7> Go through a few weeks of escalating stress and preparation.
8> Reach the day of the talk.
9> Forget to practice what you're actually going to say.
10> Make some light notes on what to say.
11> Enter bunny-in-the-headlights mode for talk.
12> Give talk.
13> Answer questions in a haze.
14> Stumble to chair and collapse.
15> Lose memory of the whole talk-giving experience.
16> Sleep.
17> Return to step 1.

It really shouldn't be that scary an experience, but it is. You can tell, as well, because I talk so quickly that I can in finish in as little as half the time I was supposed to take! And I might start talking about donkeys in minarets, great satellite based custard-bombs, the loss of triangles as a design staple in the world, the proper usage of plain chocolate digestive biscuits as construction materials and, if I'm still running, a treatise on the correct way to structure a movie script. Oh, films, you can be so terrible. When will people learn to make it feel like the story was going before the film starts and will continue long after the film is over. That's how you establish a reality, not by artificial beginnings and endings, people! It's all about continuity!

O.