false

the PSU Conference hotels are booked up. even a lot of the nearby hotels are fully booked. seems a massive basketball event takes place alongside our conference (so much for kairos). this is bad; cost is already a serious issue, but, i'd thought, this is a fresh new conference venue for me and an opportunity to experience some fabulous talent. so i thought i'd throw in my annual travel budget. i even cut the first 35 seconds of my film (which took about 2 days) and have been getting excited about it (finally, after some initial doubts). if i back out, i will at least have a newlittlefilm to enjoy and possibly share (maybe at NCTE, where i am also scheduled to go but have no $ support from my institution w/ which to do so). whiny, whiny.

so, how do other people do it? for me, travel has never been an issue. if i was presenting, the $ was there. now that we're a university, everyone is terribly worried about budgets because it seems we're increasingly visible and accountable. because i have been so well funded in the past, as the logic (?) has been presented to me, i will be very thinly funded this year, despite presenting, despite publications emerging from my presentations, etc., etc. (more along the same whiny lines). but seriously, i wonder about the extent to which people simply fund their own conference trips. i find it horrifying, which sounds just awful, i realize; still, i'm not happy about having to consider it (and i'm certainly not on an R1 associate's salary). merde.

but this space is for thinking about representation. so what does this funding issue mean? what does my situation represent? in many ways -- i'm revising here from an earlier post that will probably get me into some trouble -- i just can't say it (i did, but i pulled it; maybe you got to see it . . . it's silly, though, going public w/ a rant like that. my apologies). but so the whole thing must be kind of funny, when you think about it. otherwise, it's just sort of tragic (i realize that "tragic" is overstating it, but i'm whining, so let me have it for now; i'll probably pull it later anyhow).

still, the film is fun. i'm glad to get to do it. maybe i'll simply send along a quicktime file and hope that someone pushes "play." this could be good, this absence, because i'm simply terrified of Michael Berube (although i remember fondly and without fear and did certainly identify with something he once said about Elvis Costello and teaching and feeling old in light of his student demographic). but so surely i need not worry about his attendance at my session. as if.