Pilots

I was just cleaning up my room a bit after doing some laundry, and my mind always starts to wander when I'm doing thoughtless tasks like that. The conference from which I just got back came up in my daydreaming (nightdreaming? It's 10PM). As miserable as it was, I had a somewhat decent experience, and I was able to take back some information that was quite useful, or rather will be quite useful. The welcoming speaker was a pilot named Wally Funk. UW-Oshkosh gave her an honorary doctorate, so now she's Dr. Funk, which is hilarious, for those of you that didn't already know. Anyway, she wants to be an astronaut--actually a cosmonaut--because she was one of the 13 women picked for the Mercury space mission who was subsequently turned down on account of sex, and I guess the space dream just stuck.

I really doubt I'll ever be a speaker at a Residential Life conference. We're too into cliche metaphors, so we often get pilots or people who have literally "flown" to show conference attendees how "high we can fly." I'm surprised we don't have more construction workers talk at these conferences, honestly, because they can talk about how we can "build something out of nothing," etc. No matter what I do with my life, I'm not going to be (a.) an inspirational speaker or (b.) something out of which you can make a really cool cliche metaphor, so I honestly doubt being the keynote speaker at one of these things is in my future.

More updates later.