Well, after feeling like I was at the top of my game yesterday, today I have come crashing down, in small ways. I was like, Well, I guess I was just playing with legos this whole time while all these other guys are building skyscrapers. I also met a guy with tenure at Waseda (Waseda being the Harvard of Japan). Waseda, I said, Wow. How's that? Oh, it's okay, he said.
They are a little bit older, so I guess that gives them a little leg up. But still. I am back in my place.
Ron Carter, great applied linguist from Nottingham, gave a pretty good talk today and I went to a meet and greet afterwards to ask a question. At the meet and greet, there were about twenty other self-important people asking self-important questions, and it took me about 30 minutes to finally say, Excuse me, this is sort of off topic, but do you think there will even be a distinction between written and spoken discourse in 20 years? To which he responded, Great question, and then sort of disagreed with something he had said in a paper earlier this year. Anyway, it was nice to be a self-important academic for about 5 seconds. And for Ron Carter to say I asked a good question.