Two Conferences Down, Three to Go

On Friday, I presented a paper at Write Now, a conference I helped to organize and did the publicity for (Tweeting, blogging, wheedling, home-paging). Today I was supposed to have presented a poster about my current research project. I say 'supposed to,' because I gave up on the conference at lunch-time.

I felt I had fulfilled my brief. I was asked to make a poster that was accessible, that minimized jargon, that could be understood by anyone who looked at it. The prof who worked with all of us (more than 100 grad students from across the university) for two days last month, encouraging and challenging us, felt I had done just that.  He told me he loved it, and loved the fact that it was visual, that it was emotive, and that I made explicit links between what I do as a clinician with what I do was a writer. I put two references on it. I didn't put my primary supervisor's name on it (the project is mine, not his, and he wouldn't have wanted me to do that). I tried to make the poster about what I do. And I tried to feel less nervous when I got to the conference this morning and saw how few people had left their posters the way they were when we 'completed' them. References everywhere, masses of text, prof's names, long titles-- in short, everything we'd been told to remove-- on most of the posters.

Today, I had nowhere to sit, despite having been promised that there would be accommodations made so that I could participate fully. I had to go up and down stairs. I had to stand, and stand, and stand until I couldn't stand it any more. And when I came back from perching desperately on a radiator for a few minutes so that I could get the Dead Leg to SHUT UP ALREADY with demanding codeine and Versatis patches and some bed-rest, I found 3 students I didn't know from Chemical Engineering looking at the poster. I got ready to meet yet *more* people I felt too sore and tired to meet. I heard one of them say, as they all pointed and laughed at the poster, "Any time you see a loop on a diagram, you know you are looking at a pile of pointless shite...only a retard would have hung this shit up. Unbelievable." I found out that I was not just a cripp, but a 'retard' as well. I asked them to come back later to make fun of it, so that the judge (who had just arrived, clipboard in hand) could ask me about it. One of them pointed at my stick, laughing again as he walked off. I don't know which posters won. I took mine home hours ago.

I am hoping that the next 3 events in my socio-academic calendar are more accommodating and less humiliating.