I took today off.

I took today off so I could get up at 6 a.m. and go to a Law Conference. This is what passes for fun in my squalid existence. There should be some interesting articles about the conference itself that I can link to later, which is good because I’m too braindead to recount any of the details now and I don’t like to write about work here anyway. So I’ll just jabber about a few random things that got loose in my brain today and then go drink tea and write a lecture.

I didn’t want to try and park at the Law School so I took a bus. A bus full of law students. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were all talking at once. Not to one another, mind you. They were all using their little earpieces to yap on their cell phones.

Do you have any idea how fucking irritating it is to be on a bus with at least a dozen people all carrying on conversations with invisible beings? It was like being on a bus full of untreated schizophrenics.

And then, because I wasn’t quite on the edge of my sanity yet, the bus driver’s cell phone rang. And he answered it, taking both hands off the wheel to do so and thus driving on the sidewalk for a few moments but never slowing down.

Today I was reminded why I generally avoid buses.

Somehow, we got there without any harm coming to anyone on the bus. They went their way, I went mine.

Coffee. Panel discussions. Coffee. Panel discussions. Coffee. Panel discussions.

I’ve realized something very important about my brain. About 3 hours into panel discussions, by brain goes out of service for a few minutes. No matter how interesting or dynamic the panel is, I hit a wall. It’s like everyone is suddenly speaking Finnish and I have to concentrate very, very hard to translate it all back into English. “section 54 in effect … compulsory … confiscatory … mechanical … disintermediation … rights of the creator … whatwhatwhatwhatwhat?”

Today when I hit that wall I found my mind wandering to the idea that perhaps if I went to a conference in Finland I would find that at the 3 hour mark everyone would start sounding like they were speaking English. Then I checked weather.com and realized it was currently 12 degrees in Helsinki. That snapped me back to reality and I was able to follow the rest of the panel just fine.

At the end of the day I discovered that I had just missed the bus and the next one wouldn’t be along for another half an hour. It was roughly a mile back to my car. All uphill. And I was wearing a long skirt with no walking pleat. And I had my briefcase. And it was starting to get dark. I could walk, uphill, in my skirt, in the growing twilight, carrying my briefcase or I could wait half an hour and then ride the bus with the law students.

It was a nice walk.

And so, in closing, let me say that, although I am of course fascinated by Peter Huber’s brain, I find it hard to make eye contact with him because he has the most amazingly beautiful and interesting hands. He creates a sort of gestural poetry when he speaks.