Academia: the Last Refuge of the Coward

Going to conferences seems, in the abstract, like a totally barbaric process, especially when you're at the bottom of academia like yours truly - in an area nobody cares about, not even dissertating yet, no published credits, etc. You just poke around until you find a conference subject you more or less could sort of have something to say about and then apply, knowing full well that it has the potential to turn into a barbaric wolf-pack type of savagery. You're about to be faced with a room possibly full of experts on something you possibly only know well enough to talk about for ten pages. Fortunately, many academics are so blinded by their own genius that the ones who ask the really hard expert questions end up answering those questions themselves. But as you're getting ready, as you're reading, as you're sitting on that panel, you always have that horrible sinking knowledge that someone, someone out there is going to ask one of the many possible questions that reveals you not only as a fraud masquerading as an expert, but a complete moron and waste of human skin that would have been better employed as an Ed Gein poncho.

This may not sound like an ideal situation for an admitted coward to enter into. This is why you must always approach them while at peace with the fact that what you're doing is totally insane.

One should be drunk during all steps of the conference process and only do the prepatory work when absolutely necessary. For the faintly OCD academic who needs some order in their insanity, you can make a highly structured drinking game out of the whole rigmarole. Notice a likely (or unlikely) call for papers, take a drink. Take subsequent drinks for each paper you've written in grad school which cannot be used at this particular conference. Take two drinks for each paper that could work. Of each of those, take a drink for each page you need to cut to get the damn thing readable in ten minutes. If you have no eligible papers, count the number of days between the current date and the date proposals are due, and take a drink for each. Repeat on the day the proposal is due, and only then write the proposal, emailing the poor incoherent little bastard child of your loins off to the conference peoples only when you're having trouble figuring out if you spelled your own name correctly in the top line.

This process continues on and on; I'm sure you can figure out the remaining intricacies on your own. The ideal conference paper should be written on source material you haven't read, in notecard form, no more than ten minutes before you're due to speak, while you're half-crazed with fear and at least twenty-seven sheets to the wind. Extra points for each four-syllable word you can squeeze into the title. That way, when difficult questions pop up, you'll have enough leftover adrenaline and Irish courage to start throwing boozy punches. Remember, everyone in academia is insane. Demonstrating that you're willing to perform for the kiddies as a particularly memorable, entertaining, and volatile insane person will guarantee you spots at many career-enhancing conferences to come, all of which you will apply to because you are, after all, insane.

This is my theory.

Now, I'm slacking a little bit on my scheduling, admittedly, but am currently attempting to write one paper for a conference I was accepted to a few months ago and a proposal for another conference (again for a paper I haven't written) which I believe happens just about the same time. I have to say this because I have completely forgotten when the first conference takes place - I think I remember which state it's in, but that's all - and am sort of vaguely hoping that the good people who let me in on the strength of my staggeringly incoherent proposal will contact me at some point to remind me to show up. So I can at least get my ten minutes' warning to buy notecards and vodka.