greg, boner, and wingman: 112 hours in texas

so, carin and i just got back from hbes in austin, and damn what a party. i have a few stories, and i'll use bullets because, well, i just got back from an academic conference and i have powerpoint on the brain.

-the title: on friday night, carin and i and our fucking awesome new friend greg went out dancing, and this guy from the conference who had the hots for carin kept trying to dance with her, and he had brought along a guy who was clearly supposed to be the wingman but who was very confused about his duties. obviously the job of the wingman is to dance with the friend of the girl that his friend wants to dance with, so that i would be distracted from protecting carin when this guy started bumping and grinding. well, the wingman was a moron and couldn't handle it, so every time the guy started trying to dance with carin, i'd go over and start dancing with her too, but despite my intervention, the guy was successful in rubbing his disgusting boner all over carin while they were dancing. ew. so, later, carin was telling a story, and she said "so then i walked out of the bathroom and i saw greg, boner, and wingman..." and i thought "goddamn, that might be the best phrase ever."

-the conference: fantastic. hbes is the conference where i presented my thesis last year in berlin, and i just really love it. there were all kinds of insanely famous ev psych people there like david buss, steven pinker, sarah hrdy, etc and they were all just sort of milling around.

-austin: i'd never been there before, and i thought it kicked ass. granted, we went to the same bar three nights in a row, but it was a kickass bar, and we had hard-core dance parties. over the course of three nights, i managed to rock a bracelet off my wrist, an earring out of my ear, a toe out the end of my shoe, and my knee totally out of its intended anatomical position.

-etc: so, we were in a session about taking a darwinian approach to literary theory, and steven pinker was there because he's a linguist, and one of the presenters in that session was sort of attacking pinker's theory. so, there was a fiction writer talking about the impact of ev psych on fiction writing, and during the q&a session, this one guy, whose affiliation was some korean university, raised his hand and said "well, i don't want to ask a question so much as i want to ask for career advice - you see, i've written several psychology books in my native korea - well, i guess you could say that i'm known as the steven pinker of korea." steven pinker's eyebrows shot up, and a few people in the room sort of giggled. the guy ended up saying "well, now they want me to write fiction books. do you think i should?" the presenter was just kind of like, "well, um, sure."

okay, i guess that's all i'll write. carin's going to do a major day-by-day breakdown on smoted so i'll tell more stories over there.