Highlights of my first conference

- One of only about three critics I cite in my paper shows up outside the lecture room door like a revenant just as I'm quoting him (thank God it wasn't Harold Bloom, but rather someone I was agreeing with)

- My paper turns out to match up unusually well with the other one in my panel, and we have an excellent cross-paper discussion

- One of my fellow speakers and I invent beer-wine, which is flat lager with white wine in it, and he starts to find it curiously addictive

- We discuss whether you need to read more than three pages of Powers of Horror to be able to fake in-depth Kristeva knowledge, and then describe everything as "abject" for the rest of the night

- A script treatment for a film about Shakespeare's Catholic espionage activities, co-starring Zac Efron as the teenage vampire addressee of the sonnets, is prepared ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more undead")

- One of the professors tells me it's lovely to meet such young and unjaded people, and wishes me the best of luck

- Another of my fellow speakers fails in his attempt to open an unlocked pub door. "WE'RE LOCKED IN." "I thought you guys were intellectuals."

- Everyone starts to talk in American accents as if they were on The O.C.

- I successfully find my youth hostel and fall asleep on a top bunk

- When I wake up the next day, my hair looks amazing

I don't think I really did any networking, though.