FisherPrice My First Professional Experience.

[Kai]

Okay, not technically my first. I went to a science meeting in Santa Fe this year and presented a poster.

But this was my first /bug freak/ meeting. And I gave an oral presentation.

Bug freaks and geeks are a big like werewolves. You know theres something weird about them, I mean, anyone who stares at bug dick long enough is going to get far more than the mental equivalent of hairy palms.  However, a couple times a year the bug freaks and bug geeks get together for these things they call "annual meetings" or "conferences" where they do three things.

1) Talk about bugs.

2) Get massively drunk.

3) Tell hilarious and horrible stories about their graduate student experience while unsuspecting graduate students listen in and someone in the background plays a bad drunken rendition of Margaritaville on an acoustic guitar, singing badly at the top of his lungs.


These normally mild mannered individuals, older ladies and gentlemen I've known for 2+ years suddenly come out of their shells and say and do ridiculous things and I find myself having, hours ago, shifted from merlot to rolling rock to bud in a can and I don't give a shit. THESE ARE MY PEOPLE. We may not have class but we are slick and can party like you wouldn't believe. These two old gray haired professors standing amidst the graduate students talking about when they bouncered for the Grateful Dead in the company of Hell's Angels while smoking the "wacky tobacky" (as the president of one state entomological society called it while chugging yet another beer). This was hours after my talk, which everyone loved. They said it broke the monotony, that even a taxonomy talk can be good if done right. Hours after I stood in front of the park building, dressed to the nines between 10 attractive young entomologist females and smiling because I was in the middle of the photograph, the president. And afterwards two of us were standing outside the party drunk, and she was telling me "I never wanted to work on thrips, I wanted to work of dragonflies, but Dr. M- had no money for me to do it" and I was telling here it would be fine, I was looking her in the eyes and saying that her master's degree wasn't the be all end all of her life research and that she could study dragonflies on the side, it would be alright, I said.

Even the massive morning hangover before 6 hours of talks was worth it. I'd do it again tomorrow. Something about being in one's own element.

or

[Adios]

Hahahah. Revenge of the (not so) nerds.