One of the great pleasures of life as an adult is that you can decide, on a whim, that you'd like a bottle of wine to drink when you get home. Then you can stop at the store, pick out whichever one strikes your fancy - say, a Spanish garnacha - bring it home, uncork it, pour a measure into your nicest wineglass, and sit down to drink it at your leisure.
The prerogative and the pleasure are all yours. And it feels great.
Gave a talk tonight for a class of folks at UMD on the farm bill. I expected undergrads - and I got 'em, along with some random community members and a few farmers just for good measure who'd been invited by the prof.
Public speaking is an excellent exercise in humility, particularly in front of 18-year-olds. I can ace a conference or professional audience pretty easily - assume a basic baseline knowledge, expand their understanding in a few novel ways, make lots of time for questions, and drop in some novelty insider facts or stories to keep things interesting.
That sort of works for undergrads, minus the baseline knowledge and plus their propensity to fall asleep. Which a few did. Like I said, humility.
Just to keep me on my toes, the farmer in the room happened to be in disagreement with me on the usefulness of certain farm subsidies and had no compunctions about asking questions along those lines. Another asked me a real stumper about tobacco.
Meanwhile, as I worked through my slides, I thought of a host of ways I could have streamlined, reorganized, and improved the talk. Typical. Just gotta get step better every time in the iterative work of effectively explaining farm policy and mobilizing sleepy undergrads, right?
Turns out it's harder to find 10 minutes at the end of every day than I thought.
Not that I don't have anything to say.
Not that I don't still deeply enjoy putting some words down, even after a long day of, well, words.
Not that I am so busy I can't find the time.
Mostly I just don't want to give up 10 minutes of precious sleep. The thought at the end of the day of staying up just a bit later and getting a bit less sleep just sounds like the worst idea ever. So I don't.
Could I get up 10 minutes later? Shave 10 off the morning routine to make up the difference? Maybe. Let's try that next.
In the meantime, here are some things I want to talk about soon, for personal reference -
- Sri Lanka
- The continuing horror show of DC dating
- Expectations
- Getting dressed up
- Thao and Sallie
- Art museums
- And probably some other things I've forgotten. Here's hoping this whole 'get up 10 minutes later schtick flies, y'all.