The Road to Regina is Paved in danger

This last weekend, I was at the Pop Culture Conference at the U of R. It was incredibly fun, once we actually managed to make it there.

I've complained about the road trip so many times to so many different people, I feel like doing it again would be redundant. So instead I'll just post this picture:

Yeah, that basically sums up the experience. We were actually only stranded on highway 2 for about 4 hours, but that was long enough to make us miss the entire first day of the conference. What a bit of misfortune.

When we finally got to the conference on Saturday morning, we were celebrities. Thanks to technology, I had been updating the conference organizers on an almost hourly basis to let them know how horrible the wind was and how badly I needed to pee*. I proudly passed around my phone with the photos of the horrifying snow drifts on it, and we all laughed jovially about the irony of how, even when one is snowed in to a space the size of a closet with very few amenities for 4 hours, one can still update one's Facebook.

I must say, it was an excellent conference. They gave us reusable loot bags with some pretty sweet stuff in it, like CDs and credit card organizers and U of R frisbees, which was pretty exciting because I haven't had a frisbee for a while and last year someone was like "we should go out and toss around the frisbee" and I was all "I don't have one" and then they were unimpressed with me and we had to borrow one from my brother-in-law and then we didn't use it. But this time, I will have a frisbee.

All the presentations were actually interesting and the presenters were all quite talented. Por ejemplo, here was a powerpoint presentation discussing how Heidegarian theory related to Dungeons and Dragons, which went straight over my head since I don't know who Hiedegar is. There was also a paper on the Medicalization of Transgendered Children that everyone got very excited about but they all waited until the evening to discuss it so that they could drink copious amounts of beer before arguing about it and then there was lots of clapping and cheering and it sounded more like a Beat Poetry Night than an argument about sexuality. I've been in enough debates about transgendered children for now, though, so I sat out of earshot and talked about Shakespeare instead**.

I received a lot of very encouraging responses about my short story, too, and that was a great confidence boost, so, yay! As far as I know I did not form any connections with publishers who want to publish any unborn novels I may produce. I also did not have a fabulous shoe collection and impeccable fashion-sense (although I was very well colour-coordinated. I was very green. People kept on asking me "what's with all the green?" and every time I was surprised because I had forgotten what I was wearing). I am not too surprised by this, though. All in all it was a very enjoyable experience.

*Well I didn't say that out loud but I feel that the note of urgency in my voice made this clear to them.

**I will allow the reader to decide whether anyone was there with me, or whether I was just talking to the wall.