Science in Tampa
(Edited 26 Nov 2006 to add the anaconda-spare-ribs dinner)
I've just recovered from one of the more surreal weeks I've ever experienced: half idyllic beach vacation, half high-pressure stress-fest. About half my department flew down to Tampa, Florida for back-to-back scientific meetings at the TradeWinds Resort on St. Pete's Beach (27° 43' 46.4" N, 82° 44' 42.8" W).
I've divided my tale into three sections: (1) Scientific Masochism, (2) The Reception of Purest Evil and (3) Strolling on the Beach.
Our first conference was the kind of meeting during which groups of attendees brainstorm and throw together presentations for two days, and then deliver their lectures to an appreciative but half-asleep congregation of scientists the following two days. Even before we all arrived, I had unwisely volunteered to assemble the PowerPoint presentation for our group. (I did this not out of stupidity, as it seems, but rather out of stubbornness. And out of respect for production values. I appointed myself Keeper of the PowerPoint Slides after reading through the same group's talk from the previous workshop, and refusing to have my name associated with such an atrociously-styled presentation. Bright, electric blue backgrounds reduced contrast to the minimum possible, and were often overlaid with seizure-inducing, vivid red text. A bounty of stupid animations plagued every slide, including a particularly annoying device whereby every bullet point flew in from the left in a gratuitous and time-wasting display of misdirected computer power.) Before the meeting I crafted a slide template, plus the title and acknowledgments slides; and on the first slide I named our group leader with first initial and surname, and then under it, wrote "P. Sucker, presenter," as a place holder for the poor sucker our group would select to actually give the lecture at the end of it all.
The first day our group held a two-hour meeting during which we hardly got anything done at all. I, and everyone else, had way underestimated the complexity of condensing down sixteen journal articles' worth of research into a thirty-minute lecture-especially by means of a committed of some 25 scientists motivated far more by ego than knowledge of each other's research. (It was for this meeting that I wrote the paper, a couple months ago, upon which I'd invoked Procrustes™.) As it turned out, it fell upon me, mostly, to assemble a draft presentation for the following day's final prep meeting. Fortuitously, a couple of my colleagues offered to help put together slides on subjects I knew little about (which included pretty much everything except my own paper and three kind of similar ones).
Even more to my consternation, I suddenly found myself nominated to deliver the lecture. Now after years of scientific speechifying, I'm no longer worried about speaking in front of 300 people; but I am worried about speaking in front of 300 people on a subject about which I know very little. (You see, I changed research subjects rather abruptly when we moved here last year, and I'm still trying to catch up in my new field.) Before I could decline, however, our group leader also nominated the most astute (or at least the most outspokenly astute) person in the room who wasn't already a professor. And he would be speaking second, and hence fielding the questions. Thus I accepted the appointment as co-speaker.
I stayed up until 2:30 that night generating our draft. At various times in the evening, my helpers e-mailed me (free Wi-Fi in our rooms-woohoo!) materials that ranged from near-perfect to completely useless. (One slide contained nothing but the words "See accompanying table." The indicated table was supplied in a Microsoft Word document, and comprised two full pages of dense text, which, if I'd tried to stuff it all onto a single slide, would not have been legible from a distance of greater than three inches.) Along about midnight I gave up hope of attending the following morning's free breakfast that ended at 8:30. By two o'clock, I could barely hold my head up; I gave up hope of making anything before the break after the early-morning seminars. And I intended to show up that early only because I was hoping there'd be leftover breakfast available. (There was.)
My first order of business the next afternoon was to stroll a half-mile down the street to the nearest grocery store, and stock up on an veritable oil tanker full of Mountain Dew. Our hôtel building had no soda machines. Instead, every room contained what was whimsically named a "mini bar": a tiny refrigerator with two cans of Coke, two Miller Lites (bleah-I don't even drink beer and I couldn't stand to look at that swill), two Heinekens and an assortment of mini-bottles. The deal was that if we took anything out, little elves would sneak in at night and replace it-and charge our room the appropriate amount. An unspecified amount. That alone was enough to dissuade me; and Coke wasn't strong enough medicine, in any case, for what I'd likely have to go through that night. I bought a twelve-pack of Mao Uietunow for about $3.50, and wound up drinking them all over the next four days, in addition to the two liters or so of heavily sweetened iced tea I was chugging down with every meal out. That's how hard I was working over the first half of my "vacation."
(Later, I found out that the mini-bar Cokes were going for $2.50 a pop-and a business plan immediately came to mind. Instead of taking cans of Coke from the mini-bar, I offered to add cans to the mini-bar for the low, low price of a dollar apiece, credited to my room account. Then the resort could re-sell the Cokes at the market price, making a cool buck fifty on each one. Pity they turned me down.)
We didn't mess around at all in our second meeting, understanding that by the end of our two-hour session we had to have a complete, coherent presentation. But alas, what we so efficiently achieved in that meeting was a complete overhaul of the lecture, entailing a redesign on pretty much every slide. SIGH. Plus the integration of new pictures, including several that we'd have to prepare from scratch. To my infinite relief, my co-presenter offered to make all the figures, save two I could import directly from the PDFs of individual papers. He whipped them up during dinner, no less. At the time I thought it rather antisocial to bring a laptop to a nice restaurant and work amidst people's conversations, but around 1:30 that night I recognized his foresight: he actually got to go to bed early the night before the big talk. I'd never before seen anyone who could create decent-looking graphs in Microsoft Excel without spending half an hour overriding Excel's atrocious default style elements.
After staggering back to the room, I kicked off the evening's slide preparation by chugging down two Mountain Dews, hardly pausing to breathe. That kept me awake and alert, despite the huge dinner I'd just eaten doing its best to divert all the blood from my brain down to the food processing center. In fact, the fluorescent yellow caffeine liqueur worked too well. I slipped into bed sometime before two o'clock, ready to snatch six or seven hours of sleep, but when I finally relaxed, ready to catch some intensive Z's, I became aware of a rapid, insistent pounding in my ears. Yep, it was my heart, thumping away at a brisk march tempo. That, plus my mounting anxiety over the upcoming talk, practically ensured I'd get no sleep that night. Instead, I practiced the first four or five slides in my head over and over, while coasting along in a semi-conscious delirium.
Astoundingly, I didn't feel tired in the least when I got up. Good thing, too, because I had a ton of rehearsal in store before our midafternoon lecture. The issue wasn't knowing what to say-I felt reasonably comfortable with the material I was to present-but rather, saying it efficiently enough. I had only thirteen minutes to discuss nineteen slides, so every word had to count.
After all that preparation and apprehension, delivering the talk itself was almost anticlimactic. I ripped through my portion of the presentation in thirteen and a half minutes, my co-lecturer came in under his allotted time, and we had few questions. At last, I could relax and enjoy the fantastic weather we've been having. Well, after the poster session, at which I'd talk about my own work with whomever might be interested. And after the group dinner, which I viewed as somewhat of a chore, even though it was billed as a relaxing social event.
As the Sun plunged into the Gulf of Mexico with a loud sizzle, the meeting attendees gathered around the main entrance of the resort, and we all filed onto tour buses for the drive down to the Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa. I was ready for dinner: I'd eaten nothing during the poster session (an assortment of fruit was available for snacks, but who eats raw fruit on vacation?-except for guavas and passionfruit, of course) and hardly anything for lunch. A 45-minute bus ride got us to the aquarium. We all tumbled out and wandered, sheeplike, past the ghostly shapes of marine life immortalized in concrete, and into the bowels of a wide, low building. The first thing we saw upon entering was an unending queue of starved-looking people waiting for a couple of steam-trays' worth of food. Oh, dear, I thought, and wondered how my watch would taste. But the line moved quickly, and soon my companions and I found ourselves in possession of a diverse array of blobs of breaded...something. They looked kind of dubious, but hey, when you're already snapping at cats, blobs of breaded, fried something are infinitely better than blobs of breaded, fried nothing. All but one type of blob contained smoked gouda: pretty good, but far inferior to the mozzarella I really had my heart set on. The last kind was a miniature, spherical Chicken Cordon Blue.
I'd made the mistake of assuming that this was all the food we were going to get, so I'd piled my plate high with fried cheese before realizing that scattered around the aquarium were tables with all sorts of stuff. The huge, salty cheese bolus oozing around my insides muted my hunger nicely, but now I was dying of thirst. So were the folks I was hanging out with, judging from their gasps and hollow, pained expressions. We eagerly crowded up to the nearest drinks station, but our faces fell when we saw those two hated words: "Cash Bar." I still held out some hope, for cash bars often made an exception for soft drinks. But no: a small, clear plastic glass of Coke, thinned with more ice than the Bering Sea contains in April, was $2.75, and they didn't even give me the can. By this time it was a matter of survival: I paid up. My colleague tried even harder to beat the fare by ordering a glass of water. It cost her three bucks. And they didn't even give her the bottle. What kind of cheap-ass operation was this? Oh SIGH.
That pretty well set the tone for the rest of the evening. We stumbled about from station to station, hoping to find something good, but all the food seemed to be gone, except for about a tonne of cold rigatoni lightly stained with meat sauce. However, in a little courtyard outside, we eventually discovered the stars of the evening's feed: the meat and seafood(!) stations. Having eaten out at least once each of the past three days, I hardly needed to choke down any more meat. Yet I was intrigued by a gigantic cylinder of browned flesh, impaled lengthwise by a femur the size of a flagpole, bearing the improbable name "Steamship of Beef." The etymology escaped me, though certainly it was as large a World War II Liberty Ship. And, I presently discovered, just as tasty.
Meanwhile, all my companions had all fallen behind the odd score of people queued up for the seafood. The line didn't seem to be moving, and the four in the vanguard were staring down at the table with bewildered expressions. I snuck up to the table to check things out. The entire selection had been reduced to a tray of soggy garnish, plus one scrawny crab arranged in the most undignified conceivable pose: flat on its back, its spindly legs piercing the air in at least eight different directions. At first I reckoned the folks were puzzling out how to extract any useful food from this sad little creature, but then I understood that the crab was intact, and they didn't know how to divide it up without resorting to heavy machinery. Just then one of my companions stalked up to the head of the line, grabbed the crab by one pencil-thin extremity, and instructed the others to do likewise. Soon there began a four-way tug-of-war for crab legs. I couldn't stand to watch anymore; I trudged over to the nearest picnic table (don't ask me why they were there) and collapsed, the last 48 hours of stress catching up with me all at once and falling square on my head. I'd had all the fun I could stand; I just wanted to go back to the resort and sleep for about fifteen hours.
Someone then suggested the we explore the aquarium. Oh, yeah! I'd forgotten all about the entertainment. Unencumbered by food, we clambered up the stairs to the second floor, and on the way we heard whispers of a dessert station somewhere within the dark recesses above. For some reason, the entrance to the Tidepool Zone was blocked off with a corrugated steel door, so we set off in the other direction, toward (I surmised) the Pretty Fish as Seen through a Mat of Algae Zone. We encountered quite a few mildly interesting fish, but nothing special compared to what I'd been used to at the Seattle Aquarium. But then we came upon the most beautiful sight of the evening: the dessert station! Even better, there was still some dessert left, most likely because the station had been sequestered in such an obscure location. Oh boy-chocolate mousse cake! And strangely enough, a few pitchers of ice water-free, ice-cold, extra-wet H2O-had been stashed in a little nook just off the main passageway. We had to shake our heads in disbelief: our boycott of the cash bar (after the first, life-saving drink) had left us parched for most of the evening, and suddenly we stumble upon a cache of water with a street value of at least $1500.
Once we'd finished cleaning up the remaining crumbs of chocolate mousse, we continued down the hall toward the shark tank-only to be turned away five feet later by a scowling, elderly sourpuss who kept up a grumbling litany: "Let's move along, this area's closed; let's move along...." Retreating to the atrium of the upper floor, we saw that the entrances to the other exhibits were being sealed off, as well. We'd been there less than two hours, and already we were getting kicked out. My indignation was only surpassed by the colossal fatigue that once again almost physically dragged me down to the floor.
(The punchline: one of our graduate students had brought along his girlfriend, who had not registered for the meeting. She'd paid-get this-sixty dollars for the privilege of scrounging for morsels and paying through the nose for beverages and getting kicked out from anywhere fun within an hour of their arrival.)
After that there was nothing for it but to stump back to the buses and slink home in disgrace. Yet even that was easier said than done. Our evening's luck held, and we wound up with the slowest bus driver in the entire US of A. He took special pains to miss every traffic light in the city of Tampa. I could watch the timed Don't Walk lights counting down the seconds-8, 7, bleen, 6, 5, ...-as we graaaaadually approached each intersection, and I'd mentally scream, "Just press the gas pedal down! It's the one on the right! Just a little bit, and we'll make this light!" Nonetheless, the light invariably turned yellow when we were about six inches short of the intersection, and we'd screech to a halt to wait through another thirty-second red light. Exactly the same thing happened time. After. Time. It was hardly any better when we finally, finally, reached the highway. We puttered along, in the middle lane, in what sounded like second gear, as on both sides of us vehicles whipped past almost too quickly to be identified. Within the first five minutes I watched all the other tour buses for our convention tear past us, engines roaring in a Doppler-shifted, falling pitch. It began to get quite warm, and very stuffy: the bus was evidently sealed airtight. Since the driver had turned off all the lights, I couldn't search visually for amenities, but my hand reflexively reached up for the personal air blower I knew was up there somewhere. I gave it a hard twist, but nothing came out. Pawing around, I located the reading light. Click. Nada. If anything, pressing the button made the darkness more oppressive. Everyone began to grumble about the heat and lack of oxygen. Earlier, I'd noticed that half the meeting participants, who had been walking around in ones and twos all week, had suddenly conjured infants from nowhere especially for the "dinner" reception. When the temperature in the bus crossed 85 °F (29 °C), all thirty of the babies on board simultaneously erupted in a cacophony of wails and screeches. For once I wasn't annoyed: the kids were merely giving voice to what we were all feeling. I was at the point of joining them, but restricted my protests to a series of low, agonized moans of the eternally damned.
The ride back to the hôtel lasted, in actuality, an hour and a half. From our perspective, we thought we'd have to check a calendar to see how many days we'd lost in that motorized Gehenna.
Still, I had reason for joy. My ordeal was over in two different ways: not just the bus crawl, but also my grueling presentation, was securely in the past. I could relax at last, and I had three more days in Florida with only one required task remaining, a (second) poster session that I expected would be no sweat at all. But first-time to zonk and zonk and zonk.
As it happened, I hauled up to my room-and found that I was no longer tired. (Perhaps the circumstances earlier in the evening had merely sapped my will to live.) That suited me just fine, because I finally had a chance to take a walk on the beach at night, under a starlit sky.
I'd taken a nice, long walk along the waterline late the first morning, before we had our initial project meeting and I realized how much work I'd inflicted on myself. Our resort was situated near the north end of a wide, immaculate beach spanning several miles of Gulf coastline. The sand was so fine that where recently moistened by tide, it cemented into a compact mass that, as a walking surface, felt almost like asphalt, but springier to the step. Higher up, the sand was littered with small clamshells. (I wondered whether there'd been a huge die-off recently, or whether the local shellfish just had very short lifespans.) Starting north, in ten minutes or so (or about 1 km) I reached the breakwater delimiting a boat access to the inner channel on the mainland side of Long Key, upon which St. Pete's Beach is situated. Slow-flying pelicans dive-bombed for fish in the shallows just beyond the tidal zone. Several kinds of slender, long-legged birds (herons? sandpipers? I never did figure them out) tiptoed a few feet above the surf, skittering away madly whenever people approached. I about-faced and doubled back southward. Now I had the sun directly ahead: the beach curved gently inward, like a bow, and millions of bright, dancing sparkles on the ocean suggested a thick, vibrating bowstring. Anticipating a warm, sunny day, I'd worn shorts, a light shirt and my best bicycling sunglasses; yet with the wind at my back and the sun full on my face, I started to sweat as I drew abreast of our resort and continued on. By the time I returned for lunch, I'd covered more than 5 km (3 miles) of beach, and for a wonder I hadn't twisted a single ankle on soft, shifting sands. And I wasn't the only person to have discovered this wonderful resource: all up and down the coast, a line of people could be seen ambling along next to the waves, each at her own speed, but nobody in a hurry.
Walking the beach after dark was a completely different affair. Visibility was no problem, as every one of the elbow-to-elbow resorts had floodlights glaring westward, and the sand itself was that stark white stuff that practically glows in the dark. For some reason, the ocean waves seemed much louder and closer at night. Maybe it felt that way because the sea was much darker than anything else, including the sky, and I had little sense of distance in that direction. Or perhaps because I had the entire beach to myself-even the birds had long since gone to bed-and so I centered my full attention out toward the Gulf. In any case, to call the experience peaceful doesn't begin to describe it adequately.
The following evening, I took a shorter but more exciting seaside stroll. A gigantic thunderstorm was tearing across the Gulf directly toward us. A steady gale preceded it: not the gusty, disturbed winds that usually herald a storm, but rather a constant, unceasing blast of moist air that kicked up large, curling waves and sent the resort staff scrambling to batten down the hatches. (As I discovered later, the wind had actually feathered my hair back while I was facing into it; and even with my meager supply of hair to forward, I looked as though I belonged in the 70s.) Perceptibly leaning into the wind, I walked north watched the breakers crash against the retaining wall in an arching, white fan of spray, the excess water sloshing back and forth violently in a newly created lagoon above the high-tide line. A few reflected backwards to smack against subsequent waves in a towering aqueous head-on collision. And suddenly the reason dawned on me for the profusion of KEEP OFF signs along the breakwater. Near the north end of the beach, a low wall of sand, maybe a meter high at its tallest, marked the very extremity of the highest-reaching tides. Yet now the surf was undercutting the sandy dropoff, large cakes of packed grit calving and immediately dissolving in the churning tide. There must have been one hell of a storm surge. But most impressive of all was the oncoming storm itself: I saw nothing but blackness out to sea, but frequently, a prolonged flash of lightning deep within the maelstrom would momentarily silhouette one of the thunderheads, and half the sky would light up bluish-white. The action still looked far away, though, so I took my good old time sauntering back to the room. Upon my return I told my roommate that we could expect a real tempest in half an hour or so; and just then, what looked like a solid wall of water engulfed our hôtel building.
Good to know my sense of timing still works well.
Apart from that, there wasn't really anything worth mentioning about the second half of my trip: it was mostly a matter of staying awake through lectures, battling a continual postprandial stupor from eating out all the time. And I did eat very well indeed, knowing that our per diem food reimbursement limit was far greater than anything I could imagine paying for meals. (The second night I dined at a steak house with several folks from my department. One of us ordered the small spare ribs, and received about thirty of them, from a single ribcage: a phalanx of ribs that extended all the way across the wide, rectangular dinner plate and caught air on both sides. I remarked, "What the hell did those come from-an anaconda?")
Perhaps my favorite restaurant-for its theme, not for its food-was a place just down the road called Crabby Bill's. The rendition of Crabby Bill, a lanky, bearded fisherman wearing a scowl that could kill an unshielded victim from 20 paces (see the bottom of the page), never failed to crack me up, nor did his motto: Don't Worry-Be Crabby! That fit my mood perfectly over the first three days of the trip, but in the end I did manage to have a good time.
I've just recovered from one of the more surreal weeks I've ever experienced: half idyllic beach vacation, half high-pressure stress-fest. About half my department flew down to Tampa, Florida for back-to-back scientific meetings at the TradeWinds Resort on St. Pete's Beach (27° 43' 46.4" N, 82° 44' 42.8" W).
I've divided my tale into three sections: (1) Scientific Masochism, (2) The Reception of Purest Evil and (3) Strolling on the Beach.
Our first conference was the kind of meeting during which groups of attendees brainstorm and throw together presentations for two days, and then deliver their lectures to an appreciative but half-asleep congregation of scientists the following two days. Even before we all arrived, I had unwisely volunteered to assemble the PowerPoint presentation for our group. (I did this not out of stupidity, as it seems, but rather out of stubbornness. And out of respect for production values. I appointed myself Keeper of the PowerPoint Slides after reading through the same group's talk from the previous workshop, and refusing to have my name associated with such an atrociously-styled presentation. Bright, electric blue backgrounds reduced contrast to the minimum possible, and were often overlaid with seizure-inducing, vivid red text. A bounty of stupid animations plagued every slide, including a particularly annoying device whereby every bullet point flew in from the left in a gratuitous and time-wasting display of misdirected computer power.) Before the meeting I crafted a slide template, plus the title and acknowledgments slides; and on the first slide I named our group leader with first initial and surname, and then under it, wrote "P. Sucker, presenter," as a place holder for the poor sucker our group would select to actually give the lecture at the end of it all.
The first day our group held a two-hour meeting during which we hardly got anything done at all. I, and everyone else, had way underestimated the complexity of condensing down sixteen journal articles' worth of research into a thirty-minute lecture-especially by means of a committed of some 25 scientists motivated far more by ego than knowledge of each other's research. (It was for this meeting that I wrote the paper, a couple months ago, upon which I'd invoked Procrustes™.) As it turned out, it fell upon me, mostly, to assemble a draft presentation for the following day's final prep meeting. Fortuitously, a couple of my colleagues offered to help put together slides on subjects I knew little about (which included pretty much everything except my own paper and three kind of similar ones).
Even more to my consternation, I suddenly found myself nominated to deliver the lecture. Now after years of scientific speechifying, I'm no longer worried about speaking in front of 300 people; but I am worried about speaking in front of 300 people on a subject about which I know very little. (You see, I changed research subjects rather abruptly when we moved here last year, and I'm still trying to catch up in my new field.) Before I could decline, however, our group leader also nominated the most astute (or at least the most outspokenly astute) person in the room who wasn't already a professor. And he would be speaking second, and hence fielding the questions. Thus I accepted the appointment as co-speaker.
I stayed up until 2:30 that night generating our draft. At various times in the evening, my helpers e-mailed me (free Wi-Fi in our rooms-woohoo!) materials that ranged from near-perfect to completely useless. (One slide contained nothing but the words "See accompanying table." The indicated table was supplied in a Microsoft Word document, and comprised two full pages of dense text, which, if I'd tried to stuff it all onto a single slide, would not have been legible from a distance of greater than three inches.) Along about midnight I gave up hope of attending the following morning's free breakfast that ended at 8:30. By two o'clock, I could barely hold my head up; I gave up hope of making anything before the break after the early-morning seminars. And I intended to show up that early only because I was hoping there'd be leftover breakfast available. (There was.)
My first order of business the next afternoon was to stroll a half-mile down the street to the nearest grocery store, and stock up on an veritable oil tanker full of Mountain Dew. Our hôtel building had no soda machines. Instead, every room contained what was whimsically named a "mini bar": a tiny refrigerator with two cans of Coke, two Miller Lites (bleah-I don't even drink beer and I couldn't stand to look at that swill), two Heinekens and an assortment of mini-bottles. The deal was that if we took anything out, little elves would sneak in at night and replace it-and charge our room the appropriate amount. An unspecified amount. That alone was enough to dissuade me; and Coke wasn't strong enough medicine, in any case, for what I'd likely have to go through that night. I bought a twelve-pack of Mao Uietunow for about $3.50, and wound up drinking them all over the next four days, in addition to the two liters or so of heavily sweetened iced tea I was chugging down with every meal out. That's how hard I was working over the first half of my "vacation."
(Later, I found out that the mini-bar Cokes were going for $2.50 a pop-and a business plan immediately came to mind. Instead of taking cans of Coke from the mini-bar, I offered to add cans to the mini-bar for the low, low price of a dollar apiece, credited to my room account. Then the resort could re-sell the Cokes at the market price, making a cool buck fifty on each one. Pity they turned me down.)
We didn't mess around at all in our second meeting, understanding that by the end of our two-hour session we had to have a complete, coherent presentation. But alas, what we so efficiently achieved in that meeting was a complete overhaul of the lecture, entailing a redesign on pretty much every slide. SIGH. Plus the integration of new pictures, including several that we'd have to prepare from scratch. To my infinite relief, my co-presenter offered to make all the figures, save two I could import directly from the PDFs of individual papers. He whipped them up during dinner, no less. At the time I thought it rather antisocial to bring a laptop to a nice restaurant and work amidst people's conversations, but around 1:30 that night I recognized his foresight: he actually got to go to bed early the night before the big talk. I'd never before seen anyone who could create decent-looking graphs in Microsoft Excel without spending half an hour overriding Excel's atrocious default style elements.
After staggering back to the room, I kicked off the evening's slide preparation by chugging down two Mountain Dews, hardly pausing to breathe. That kept me awake and alert, despite the huge dinner I'd just eaten doing its best to divert all the blood from my brain down to the food processing center. In fact, the fluorescent yellow caffeine liqueur worked too well. I slipped into bed sometime before two o'clock, ready to snatch six or seven hours of sleep, but when I finally relaxed, ready to catch some intensive Z's, I became aware of a rapid, insistent pounding in my ears. Yep, it was my heart, thumping away at a brisk march tempo. That, plus my mounting anxiety over the upcoming talk, practically ensured I'd get no sleep that night. Instead, I practiced the first four or five slides in my head over and over, while coasting along in a semi-conscious delirium.
Astoundingly, I didn't feel tired in the least when I got up. Good thing, too, because I had a ton of rehearsal in store before our midafternoon lecture. The issue wasn't knowing what to say-I felt reasonably comfortable with the material I was to present-but rather, saying it efficiently enough. I had only thirteen minutes to discuss nineteen slides, so every word had to count.
After all that preparation and apprehension, delivering the talk itself was almost anticlimactic. I ripped through my portion of the presentation in thirteen and a half minutes, my co-lecturer came in under his allotted time, and we had few questions. At last, I could relax and enjoy the fantastic weather we've been having. Well, after the poster session, at which I'd talk about my own work with whomever might be interested. And after the group dinner, which I viewed as somewhat of a chore, even though it was billed as a relaxing social event.
As the Sun plunged into the Gulf of Mexico with a loud sizzle, the meeting attendees gathered around the main entrance of the resort, and we all filed onto tour buses for the drive down to the Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa. I was ready for dinner: I'd eaten nothing during the poster session (an assortment of fruit was available for snacks, but who eats raw fruit on vacation?-except for guavas and passionfruit, of course) and hardly anything for lunch. A 45-minute bus ride got us to the aquarium. We all tumbled out and wandered, sheeplike, past the ghostly shapes of marine life immortalized in concrete, and into the bowels of a wide, low building. The first thing we saw upon entering was an unending queue of starved-looking people waiting for a couple of steam-trays' worth of food. Oh, dear, I thought, and wondered how my watch would taste. But the line moved quickly, and soon my companions and I found ourselves in possession of a diverse array of blobs of breaded...something. They looked kind of dubious, but hey, when you're already snapping at cats, blobs of breaded, fried something are infinitely better than blobs of breaded, fried nothing. All but one type of blob contained smoked gouda: pretty good, but far inferior to the mozzarella I really had my heart set on. The last kind was a miniature, spherical Chicken Cordon Blue.
I'd made the mistake of assuming that this was all the food we were going to get, so I'd piled my plate high with fried cheese before realizing that scattered around the aquarium were tables with all sorts of stuff. The huge, salty cheese bolus oozing around my insides muted my hunger nicely, but now I was dying of thirst. So were the folks I was hanging out with, judging from their gasps and hollow, pained expressions. We eagerly crowded up to the nearest drinks station, but our faces fell when we saw those two hated words: "Cash Bar." I still held out some hope, for cash bars often made an exception for soft drinks. But no: a small, clear plastic glass of Coke, thinned with more ice than the Bering Sea contains in April, was $2.75, and they didn't even give me the can. By this time it was a matter of survival: I paid up. My colleague tried even harder to beat the fare by ordering a glass of water. It cost her three bucks. And they didn't even give her the bottle. What kind of cheap-ass operation was this? Oh SIGH.
That pretty well set the tone for the rest of the evening. We stumbled about from station to station, hoping to find something good, but all the food seemed to be gone, except for about a tonne of cold rigatoni lightly stained with meat sauce. However, in a little courtyard outside, we eventually discovered the stars of the evening's feed: the meat and seafood(!) stations. Having eaten out at least once each of the past three days, I hardly needed to choke down any more meat. Yet I was intrigued by a gigantic cylinder of browned flesh, impaled lengthwise by a femur the size of a flagpole, bearing the improbable name "Steamship of Beef." The etymology escaped me, though certainly it was as large a World War II Liberty Ship. And, I presently discovered, just as tasty.
Meanwhile, all my companions had all fallen behind the odd score of people queued up for the seafood. The line didn't seem to be moving, and the four in the vanguard were staring down at the table with bewildered expressions. I snuck up to the table to check things out. The entire selection had been reduced to a tray of soggy garnish, plus one scrawny crab arranged in the most undignified conceivable pose: flat on its back, its spindly legs piercing the air in at least eight different directions. At first I reckoned the folks were puzzling out how to extract any useful food from this sad little creature, but then I understood that the crab was intact, and they didn't know how to divide it up without resorting to heavy machinery. Just then one of my companions stalked up to the head of the line, grabbed the crab by one pencil-thin extremity, and instructed the others to do likewise. Soon there began a four-way tug-of-war for crab legs. I couldn't stand to watch anymore; I trudged over to the nearest picnic table (don't ask me why they were there) and collapsed, the last 48 hours of stress catching up with me all at once and falling square on my head. I'd had all the fun I could stand; I just wanted to go back to the resort and sleep for about fifteen hours.
Someone then suggested the we explore the aquarium. Oh, yeah! I'd forgotten all about the entertainment. Unencumbered by food, we clambered up the stairs to the second floor, and on the way we heard whispers of a dessert station somewhere within the dark recesses above. For some reason, the entrance to the Tidepool Zone was blocked off with a corrugated steel door, so we set off in the other direction, toward (I surmised) the Pretty Fish as Seen through a Mat of Algae Zone. We encountered quite a few mildly interesting fish, but nothing special compared to what I'd been used to at the Seattle Aquarium. But then we came upon the most beautiful sight of the evening: the dessert station! Even better, there was still some dessert left, most likely because the station had been sequestered in such an obscure location. Oh boy-chocolate mousse cake! And strangely enough, a few pitchers of ice water-free, ice-cold, extra-wet H2O-had been stashed in a little nook just off the main passageway. We had to shake our heads in disbelief: our boycott of the cash bar (after the first, life-saving drink) had left us parched for most of the evening, and suddenly we stumble upon a cache of water with a street value of at least $1500.
Once we'd finished cleaning up the remaining crumbs of chocolate mousse, we continued down the hall toward the shark tank-only to be turned away five feet later by a scowling, elderly sourpuss who kept up a grumbling litany: "Let's move along, this area's closed; let's move along...." Retreating to the atrium of the upper floor, we saw that the entrances to the other exhibits were being sealed off, as well. We'd been there less than two hours, and already we were getting kicked out. My indignation was only surpassed by the colossal fatigue that once again almost physically dragged me down to the floor.
(The punchline: one of our graduate students had brought along his girlfriend, who had not registered for the meeting. She'd paid-get this-sixty dollars for the privilege of scrounging for morsels and paying through the nose for beverages and getting kicked out from anywhere fun within an hour of their arrival.)
After that there was nothing for it but to stump back to the buses and slink home in disgrace. Yet even that was easier said than done. Our evening's luck held, and we wound up with the slowest bus driver in the entire US of A. He took special pains to miss every traffic light in the city of Tampa. I could watch the timed Don't Walk lights counting down the seconds-8, 7, bleen, 6, 5, ...-as we graaaaadually approached each intersection, and I'd mentally scream, "Just press the gas pedal down! It's the one on the right! Just a little bit, and we'll make this light!" Nonetheless, the light invariably turned yellow when we were about six inches short of the intersection, and we'd screech to a halt to wait through another thirty-second red light. Exactly the same thing happened time. After. Time. It was hardly any better when we finally, finally, reached the highway. We puttered along, in the middle lane, in what sounded like second gear, as on both sides of us vehicles whipped past almost too quickly to be identified. Within the first five minutes I watched all the other tour buses for our convention tear past us, engines roaring in a Doppler-shifted, falling pitch. It began to get quite warm, and very stuffy: the bus was evidently sealed airtight. Since the driver had turned off all the lights, I couldn't search visually for amenities, but my hand reflexively reached up for the personal air blower I knew was up there somewhere. I gave it a hard twist, but nothing came out. Pawing around, I located the reading light. Click. Nada. If anything, pressing the button made the darkness more oppressive. Everyone began to grumble about the heat and lack of oxygen. Earlier, I'd noticed that half the meeting participants, who had been walking around in ones and twos all week, had suddenly conjured infants from nowhere especially for the "dinner" reception. When the temperature in the bus crossed 85 °F (29 °C), all thirty of the babies on board simultaneously erupted in a cacophony of wails and screeches. For once I wasn't annoyed: the kids were merely giving voice to what we were all feeling. I was at the point of joining them, but restricted my protests to a series of low, agonized moans of the eternally damned.
The ride back to the hôtel lasted, in actuality, an hour and a half. From our perspective, we thought we'd have to check a calendar to see how many days we'd lost in that motorized Gehenna.
Still, I had reason for joy. My ordeal was over in two different ways: not just the bus crawl, but also my grueling presentation, was securely in the past. I could relax at last, and I had three more days in Florida with only one required task remaining, a (second) poster session that I expected would be no sweat at all. But first-time to zonk and zonk and zonk.
As it happened, I hauled up to my room-and found that I was no longer tired. (Perhaps the circumstances earlier in the evening had merely sapped my will to live.) That suited me just fine, because I finally had a chance to take a walk on the beach at night, under a starlit sky.
I'd taken a nice, long walk along the waterline late the first morning, before we had our initial project meeting and I realized how much work I'd inflicted on myself. Our resort was situated near the north end of a wide, immaculate beach spanning several miles of Gulf coastline. The sand was so fine that where recently moistened by tide, it cemented into a compact mass that, as a walking surface, felt almost like asphalt, but springier to the step. Higher up, the sand was littered with small clamshells. (I wondered whether there'd been a huge die-off recently, or whether the local shellfish just had very short lifespans.) Starting north, in ten minutes or so (or about 1 km) I reached the breakwater delimiting a boat access to the inner channel on the mainland side of Long Key, upon which St. Pete's Beach is situated. Slow-flying pelicans dive-bombed for fish in the shallows just beyond the tidal zone. Several kinds of slender, long-legged birds (herons? sandpipers? I never did figure them out) tiptoed a few feet above the surf, skittering away madly whenever people approached. I about-faced and doubled back southward. Now I had the sun directly ahead: the beach curved gently inward, like a bow, and millions of bright, dancing sparkles on the ocean suggested a thick, vibrating bowstring. Anticipating a warm, sunny day, I'd worn shorts, a light shirt and my best bicycling sunglasses; yet with the wind at my back and the sun full on my face, I started to sweat as I drew abreast of our resort and continued on. By the time I returned for lunch, I'd covered more than 5 km (3 miles) of beach, and for a wonder I hadn't twisted a single ankle on soft, shifting sands. And I wasn't the only person to have discovered this wonderful resource: all up and down the coast, a line of people could be seen ambling along next to the waves, each at her own speed, but nobody in a hurry.
Walking the beach after dark was a completely different affair. Visibility was no problem, as every one of the elbow-to-elbow resorts had floodlights glaring westward, and the sand itself was that stark white stuff that practically glows in the dark. For some reason, the ocean waves seemed much louder and closer at night. Maybe it felt that way because the sea was much darker than anything else, including the sky, and I had little sense of distance in that direction. Or perhaps because I had the entire beach to myself-even the birds had long since gone to bed-and so I centered my full attention out toward the Gulf. In any case, to call the experience peaceful doesn't begin to describe it adequately.
The following evening, I took a shorter but more exciting seaside stroll. A gigantic thunderstorm was tearing across the Gulf directly toward us. A steady gale preceded it: not the gusty, disturbed winds that usually herald a storm, but rather a constant, unceasing blast of moist air that kicked up large, curling waves and sent the resort staff scrambling to batten down the hatches. (As I discovered later, the wind had actually feathered my hair back while I was facing into it; and even with my meager supply of hair to forward, I looked as though I belonged in the 70s.) Perceptibly leaning into the wind, I walked north watched the breakers crash against the retaining wall in an arching, white fan of spray, the excess water sloshing back and forth violently in a newly created lagoon above the high-tide line. A few reflected backwards to smack against subsequent waves in a towering aqueous head-on collision. And suddenly the reason dawned on me for the profusion of KEEP OFF signs along the breakwater. Near the north end of the beach, a low wall of sand, maybe a meter high at its tallest, marked the very extremity of the highest-reaching tides. Yet now the surf was undercutting the sandy dropoff, large cakes of packed grit calving and immediately dissolving in the churning tide. There must have been one hell of a storm surge. But most impressive of all was the oncoming storm itself: I saw nothing but blackness out to sea, but frequently, a prolonged flash of lightning deep within the maelstrom would momentarily silhouette one of the thunderheads, and half the sky would light up bluish-white. The action still looked far away, though, so I took my good old time sauntering back to the room. Upon my return I told my roommate that we could expect a real tempest in half an hour or so; and just then, what looked like a solid wall of water engulfed our hôtel building.
Good to know my sense of timing still works well.
Apart from that, there wasn't really anything worth mentioning about the second half of my trip: it was mostly a matter of staying awake through lectures, battling a continual postprandial stupor from eating out all the time. And I did eat very well indeed, knowing that our per diem food reimbursement limit was far greater than anything I could imagine paying for meals. (The second night I dined at a steak house with several folks from my department. One of us ordered the small spare ribs, and received about thirty of them, from a single ribcage: a phalanx of ribs that extended all the way across the wide, rectangular dinner plate and caught air on both sides. I remarked, "What the hell did those come from-an anaconda?")
Perhaps my favorite restaurant-for its theme, not for its food-was a place just down the road called Crabby Bill's. The rendition of Crabby Bill, a lanky, bearded fisherman wearing a scowl that could kill an unshielded victim from 20 paces (see the bottom of the page), never failed to crack me up, nor did his motto: Don't Worry-Be Crabby! That fit my mood perfectly over the first three days of the trip, but in the end I did manage to have a good time.