I'm still alive

Dear everyone who had the bad luck to try to talk to me in the last few days: I am so very sorry you had to see me like that, all paralyzed with anxiety and obsessive thoughts of my own incompetence. I can get a little high strung when I feel I'm going to be judged. And when don't have any SF high-rollers to hit up for Klonipin. (Kidding! Just kidding!)

I should explain: I was under the impression that I had been asked to give a 20-minute talk. I realized about four days before I had to give it that I was a one-hour talk. As all of you assured me, it was, in the end, fine. In fact, certain people were very complimentary. Although, in the end, I'm not happy about what I actually produced, that was not because I said anything wrong, but rather because there's just so much basic stuff that I wanted to do to actually support my argument that I just hadn't gotten around to doing. The paper also had a introduction that set up promises that were not carried out, a conclusion the summarized yet another non-existant paper, and a three page digression in the middle from a whole 'nother project ("meanwhile, thirty years later...")

In the end, it was a good experience, both because it taught me that I can, in fact, get over my anxiety, and because the Garcia stuff now has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which means, even though I have exactly the same amount of work to do before it's finished as before, it feels a whole lot closer to being a real chapter.