Or at least I was planning to be.

On the way to the Asian Center this morning I made sure that I had my geeky glasses with me as always. I have horrible astigmatism and really poor eyesight. Sure, I can see the food on my plate, but reading gets horrendously painful without glasses.

So what exactly was I doing in UP if I’m officially on leave from school?

Boring old me got invited to speak at the UPAC 3rd Graduate Students’ Conference and I, of course, took the bait willingly. My professor bullied me (sort of) into sending in a copy of a paper I had previously written and I got chosen to present. Or maybe they just didn’t have enough presenters.

In any case, I did present my paper, entitled “China’s Soft Power Diplomacy and its Impact on Sino-Japanese Relations”, which can realistically be summarized in layman’s terms as what the fuck are you actually trying to say you stupid boring geek. In the rush to get up to the podium and appear somewhat cool (fumbling around with my ginormous bag in search of my glasses is NOT cool), I didn’t get to wear my glasses and of course had to squint for the duration of the paper.

I didn’t have any powerpoint presentation, unlike all the other presenters, and I was the first presenter, too. I was actually half-expecting people to beat me up mid-speech because of my incredible geekiness, but gladly nobody did. Halfway through the paper, though, I was really, really itching to jump a couple of pages just to get it over with. It’s a wonder I didn’t keel over and die of boredom from my own paper.

Or maybe I’m exaggerating, because the response was more than a bit overwhelming. People were actually asking me to polish the paper and have it published — or something. I have no idea. Anyway, I think I did do better this time because at least I didn’t have a coughing attack in the middle of reading my paper.

In the course of performing my duties as presenter, I realized two things. First, I’m corny. Which is not new, really, as I have weird humor that only Michelle gets, I think. Anyway, this was totally confirmed this morning, when I introduced my paper-reading prowess with a disclaimer: “I hope I don’t bore you all to death”. Which is not really a joke, now that I think about it. People may have actually viewed it as a genocidal threat. Hence they did not laugh.

Second: people can be stupid, particularly while attempting to look smart. One girl made several comments about my paper during the open forum and I just knew she didn’t really hear my paper presentation. How do I know that? No, I’m not psychic. Her question was precisely the thesis of my paper, and the answer to her questions were the very body of my paper. I infer she made a question out of the title of my paper, which she would so conveniently find in the program, along with my name. So word to the not-so-wise: when trying to appear smart, make sure you actually know something so you don’t look like you have enough space to harbor squatters between your ears.

And oh, maybe it’s not a very good thing to question my intelligence in an open forum. Just saying.

Anyway, I won’t be attending the closing ceremonies tomorrow, mainly because it’s a Saturday and I’m lazy. Certificates will be handed out and an award for the Best Speaker will be given, but I won’t be there. Because I’m lazy. And it’s a Saturday. Besides, I know I won’t win and I don’t really need the certificate. The warm fuzzy feeling of having tortured people for over 15 minutes of continuous droning was fun enough.

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In other news: I am obsessed with David Anders, a.k.a. Takezo Kensei of Heroes. Nothing about it. Just saying.

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Mike, if you don’t get it, you can always e-mail me. I’ll make a dissertation out of this blog post for you.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 6:04 pm and is filed under school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.