With sleep a very, very distant memory, I staggered into the student labs last Friday morning under the weight of freshly graded (and alphabetized!) lab reports. Yes, I survived the Stack of Doom. But I was quite glad that the campus was nearly empty of students (It's spring break! Everyone headed down to...Lewiston?) so that no one could witness my ridiculously Sisyphean effort of heaving papers up a long flight of stairs.
My only excuse for not getting the reports graded earlier was that I took off to the next state (all of ten miles, mind you) after dinner to go see a lecture by Jane Goodall. Let me first say that I was disappointed.
How can you be disappointed? You might rage at me. She's a Famous Scientist!
Yes, I know. But I went in expecting one thing and then getting something totally different. I was hoping to learn something about chimp research. Instead, I got an environmentalist screed. Now don't get me wrong--I think saving the rain forests and trying to find a way for marginalized peoples to survive without resorting to killing endangered animals are noble goals. I really enjoyed Goodall's speaking style and the stories about events in her childhood and young adulthood that inspired her to become a primatologist. But that's just not the same.
Maybe I should have read the advertisements about the Goodall lecture in the local papers and the fliers being handed out prior to the lecture. Perhaps I should have realized that my fellow lecture attendees (a middle-aged woman holding a tub of popcorn, a man dozing on his girlfriend's shoulder, a student blabbering about Noam Chomsky and philosophy to his friends, geeks playing online chess on laptops and reading fantasy books with large swords, an older man in a Mr. Rogers' vest and a pretentious magazine, an expensively dressed older couple nearly bulldozing me down in their eagerness to get their VIP seats on the front row) weren't the sort to actually care about a scientific seminar--so why should this lecture be one in the first place?
I hate to say it, but I could have spent that time grading and getting an extra hour of sleep.
