I gave my talk today unshaven and in my shortsleeve shirt and jeans. The talk was a comment on a paper about evolution, and I made some comment about my luggage not having evolved enough to understand that the shortest path from Boston to State College was connecting through Kentucky. Every other male who spoke wore a jacket and most wore ties, and I hadn't planned for or packed either, so perhaps it is just as well that rather than being somewhat underdressed I raced to the bottom and wore the clothes that had adorned me through a long travel day the day before. If you are going to dress down, dress down to the ground, Rogaine.
The talk went okay. I did the thing where I talk too fast, but the coherent version of that habit, not the incoherent version where I am mostly just a frustrated twitchy word puddle by the end.
My luggage had not arrived after my talk but did arrive after I returned from dinner. Hooray, shouts a collective olfactory chorus.
Penn State's campus is pretty, but the Nittany Lion Inn has the most confusing layout of any small hotel I have ever been to in my life. It reminded me of being stuck in some "You are in maze, with twisty passages all alike" computer adventure game when I was a kid, where you just wander around without even the aspiration of forming a mental map of the place. The hotel staff are all college students who are almost unsettlingly nice, which undermines my belief that Midwesterners are the most authentically well-meaning people in the country, and would yours as well if you weren't one of those people who thinks Pennsylvania is part of the Midwest.
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