SEM Day 4: Stand and Deliver

After dragging our hungover asses out of bed, we headed off to catch some Sunday morning papers. We would've totally slept in, but several friends of ours were giving papers, so we made the effort (you hear that, Rumya and Jim?). After a light lunch, we (Andrew, Greg and I) began preparing for our own session.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that our session was scheduled at 2pm - 3:30pm (14h00-15h30 for non-Americans). Now, I don't know how academic conferences are organized in other fields, but at all the music-related conferences I've been to, things end decisively at noon on Sunday. This is mostly because everybody needs to fly out Sunday afternoon to be available Monday at their educational institution. Thus, when the program committee for this year added another set of sessions after lunch on Sunday, they pretty much exiled a half-day of paper panels to a purgatory of inattention. On the upside, we could pretty much assume that nobody few people were going to show up for our papers, so we didn't have to sweat as much about quality and preparedness. On the downside, we all ignored that and worked hard on our papers, so it was a bit frustrating to deliver your paper to a crowd in the single-digits. During all of the preceding days in the conference, friends and colleagues of mine would take turns apologizing to me in advance for missing my paper. They were flying out of town, or they were taking advantage of Sunday afternoon to finally see a bit of Hawaii before their return flight.

Anyway, the paper went well enough, we all took a moment afterwards to grab some ice cream at Coldstone Creamery (cake batter ice cream!!), and then I headed off to the airport to catch my flight. I spent a couple of hours in the terminal, admiring their gardens again (I'll post pics soon), and then got on my flight, headed towards Houston. As I contemplated the 48 hours of travel ahead of me, I fell asleep in my profoundly uncomfortable airplane seat...