I'm at a conference for a few days.  We're by the sea!  It's lovely.  Some of us will have a party on a ship in a couple of days.  I'll see all sorts of friends!  It's going to be a blast.

It will also be busy and overwhelming and I'll not have much time to myself.

I've begun to learn, after almost thirty years of conference-going, that I survive these things better with some quiet, and a regular reminder to myself that you wanted to come to this thing, and there are things about it you really like.  I had a revelation a year or two ago about the foul mood I found myself falling into at conferences, and the revelation was this: at conferences everyone is the way I am almost all the time--everyone is interested to meet you, to make friends, to make connections.  At conferences, this feels pretty thoroughly transactional, even mercenary, and to me definitely questionably instrumental.  It may not be--most people are not like this I think--but it feels that way to me.  And because this is the way I am most of the time, at a conference I feel especially like an insincere person.  I hate that feeling.  So I began to resent how I felt about myself at conferences, and it spilled over.

Once I realized that something like the above was going through my mind, I began to tell myself, it's not that bad, and it became less bad, if not entirely un-bad.  Yes, I see transactionalism, even in myself.  Maybe most obviously in myself.  But then again, that's part of what conferences are for!  It's not personal; it's business.  It's fine to meet and talk with people once in a while, for professional reasons--that's what we're here for.  So I don't now let my teeth-grinding resentment go unnoticed, or unchallenged.  Now I try to say that I should allow for transactionalism, as everyone expects, and maybe even accepts, that some of that will happen.

Plus there's all the chances to talk with my friends.

Anyway, because of my conference going, I anticipate that there will be more days like yesterday (a blog desert!) than today (over-sharing! even if only in a very narrow and actually not very sharing way at all).  But I may post some links of links. In fact I'll do that in a second.  

Hope you are all having a good Friday evening, wherever you are!  I'm in a hotel room, all by myself, which is pretty relaxing.