If you work at ####### and ask for a day off from work, you really get about 17 hours. Want Saturday off? Expect to work until 10 p.m. Friday and come into work 7 a.m. Sunday! Factor in two nights of sleep and boom: 33 hours turns into 17 real quick. And actually, I didn’t so much “go to bed” Friday night as I went “to a bar”—code phrase for going to a bar.
SIDE NOTE: I elbowed Bill Self out of my way at one of the bars; he thinks he can box me out? Yeah, right. Big time college coaches: 0. Me: 2 (the first point coming from when I daftly screamed, “Waddup!” to Pete Carroll in 2008).
Back at the night in question, I eventually drank myself happy and collapsed somewhere. Around 8 in the morning, my cell phone alarm clock went off but instead of hitting the ‘snooze’ button I hit the time-traveling button, which immediately sent me thirty minutes in the future. Damn. I hate it when that happens. Anyhow, I made it to the University of Kansas Student Union by 9 a.m. and so started my day at the Ninth Annual KU-MU History Conference.
The name of the get-together is a little deceiving, as it implies only the greatest student minds (available on that late-semester weekend) from KU and the University of Missouri were in attendance. In actually, there were students and professors from NU, OU, KSU, UI, UA, UNI, JCCC, St. Louis University and Fort Leavenworth. So yeah, it was the Ivy League of the Midwest; or at least schools from the Midwest.
For the entire morning, I watched presenters talk about military doctrines, the murder of Annie Mae, the Commerce Clause, Wilhelm Wassmuss, magician pirates, and John Locke. I might have made up one of those. As one can imagine, some of it was rather dry and few presenters dressed up in costumes and performed reenactments--an untapped reservoir of material I especially noted. Fortunately, there was a complimentary breakfast table that would have shamed Motel 6 and I had my fill, and then filled my pockets. Years ago, I was without a dollar in Los Angeles but crashed several banquets on the USC campus—at least stealing pastries and jelly packets before being chased off. I guess old habits die harder than Bruce Willis. In any case, lunch came around and I popped some caffeine pills. Remembering that the food pyramid recommends more than pill-form food, I called up my friend Mac and we got some food that is (now confirmed?) 88% all-beef.
For some reason, I’m still alive.
When Mac and I got back to the conference, the KU spring football game had started. Yeah, there are a lot of questions there; for example: “They play football in the spring?” and “KU plays football?” But back at the history conference, fewer people were getting tackled and the presentations were about to start. Knowing I was the first speaker scheduled after the lunch break, I made it to the room in the Union and started talking to the session’s moderator. As the whole conference was split between two separate rooms, I made sure to talk up my group (“Media in 20th Century America”) and aimlessly bash our rivals (“Miscellaneous Topics”) for the would-be audience still deciding on a location. I especially made sure to direct the most attractive audience members into the correct room…which then turned out to be the wrong room. Yeah, I was in the wrong room and had inadvertently done as much damage to my group’s audience size as possible. So Mac, my one-man entourage, laughed at me as I became less of a “Vince” and more of a “Turtle” and walked into the correct room to give my presentation.
My twenty speech on cowboy films from the 1960s went as well as it could, considering I had spent much of the lunch rewriting segments in my head, and later on the paper. Also, I was given my five-minute warning about one minute before I was expecting and decided to cut several more sections to finish before the Man at the Back of the Room started taping his watch. Assuming nobody had a cane to pull me away from the podium, I decided to do some voices for my lengthier quotes, including impressions of John Wayne and Nate Champion—a real-life rustler who inexplicably kept writing in his pocket book during a shoot-out that cost him his life. Actually, now that I think about it, there was a cane in the audience that people could have used to beat me, but it was held by a blind woman in the second row.
During the second and third presenter in my panel, the blind woman’s dog fell asleep, turned on his back, got his foot caught by the chair in front and slept with his crotch pointed right at me. Yeah, it was a guy dog. I tried to not let the guide dog’s crotch affect my answers during the Q&A session, but it was rather difficult.
“Did the depictions of Native Americans change throughout the 1960s?”
“I'm sorry, did dog crotch what?”
When the session was over, people dispersed into the hallway and some continued asking questions, though in three separate cases the question was some variation of, “Have you seen [X movie]?” Fortunately, being a former film production major, and current film nerd, has given me enough experience with that question when I have to answers in the negative and then take responses such as, “Really? I thought you were, like, a film nerd?” or “How have you not seen that film; it’s a classic” or “Oh, you’d really like it; it’s a lot like Tarantino’s stuff.”
By 5:30 p.m. the conference had wrapped up and several of the, more professional, historians agreed to meet up at 23rd Street Brewery—a place that sells burgers, beers and such for about twice as much as I can afford…so I went along. Again, after downing a couple more caffeine pills to fend off the duel harsh mistresses of Sobriety and Slumbriety.
At the bar-restaurant, I sat at a table of grad-students, Ph.D-students and professors—some of whom have been in history academia longer than I have been able to cleverly butcher the English language. Really, I was just overcome with a flashback of an 8th grade birthday party I went to years ago and had realized everyone sitting around the cake was in the gifted program. Speaking of which, it’s nearly ten years later and I still don’t know what being “gifted” is. It’s like some kind of elementary school Freemasons thing.
Anyhow, drinking with a bunch of history nerds was a lot of fun, even if (or especially because) several conversations came back to Hitler, sex or both. It wasn’t until later that night that I realized the History Channel is, in fact, probably run by a bunch of historians. Right now though, after giving a lecture and then engaging in (unfortunately rare) discussions with other historians with drinking problems or drinkers with history problems, I can’t help but feel teaching is not my place right now. Rather, I want to tell stories and hear stories—most of which are at least based on real events.
Ultimately, these revelations can not be acted upon in one night. Fortunately, thinking about “alternative life decisions” is exactly what part-time work shifts are for.
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