My talk went great. Usually I'll say things like "Yeah it was pretty good" but no this one was great. Partly this was because I was on a panel with both a really engaged panel chair and also two other top-notch presenters whose ideas neatly interfaced with my own. I rarely feel so psyched about panel-type discussions but this one was really fun all around. You can read my notes and see some pictures from this librarian.net link.

And then there was drinking with archivists and drinking with sysadmins. It seems like no matter where I start out in DC, I wind up in the Brickskellar drinking mystery beer. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Yesterday was a MetaFilter meetup which is sort of a way to actually face-to-face hang out with people I already spend considerable time with online. Again, it went great, nice bunch of people, nice venue, good food (cheese grits, my gosh!) easy to get to, fun.

I'm trying to make peace with the fact that other people's photos of me are going to go online even if maybe I don't look as great as I'd like to look in them [for reference, this pic is nice, this one not as nice, even this one is fine]. It sounds like a trivial issue, but it's not really. I've sort of been having a disconnect between what I look like in my head, to me, and what I see when I look in the mirror. Part of this is getting older, part of it is having moved to the country and put on weight, and part of it is just having been in a long relationship where I was always told "you look fine" but maybe not appreciated/treated as if I looked fine. Swimming all the time makes me feel fit and now I want to bring the rest of me in line and look fit. This includes dropping some weight -- nothing drastic, just paying more attention to food etc -- but also maybe learning how to dress as someone who is built like me, not built how I feel like I am in my mind which probably bears more resemblance to how I looked a decade ago.

I've always dressed almost exclusively for comfort and tried to make this work when I also had to dress for work, or dress to impress. However if you always dress for comfort you wind up in a mumu and that's just not going to work for me, not if I'm leaving the house anyhow. I'll check back in in a month and see how it's all going, this won't become an obsessive navel-gazing "how do I look" set of posts. I just think this sort of thing becomes more useful and more effective if you say it out loud. One of the downsides to being a real in-your-own-head brainy type is that it can be easy to forget that your brain isn't worth much if you're not paying equal attention to where it has to live. Yeah it's another litter box post, but again I think it's a step in the right direction.