Nervous Nellie

Honestly, I expend so much time and energy getting nervous about giving talks that I wonder sometimes whether I'm in the wrong profession. I've got a 15 minute talk to give on Friday at a very small and friendly conference, but it's a little outside my comfort zone because the topic is a new one for me and the audience is mostly a non-academic one. In my heart of hearts, I think it's going to be a really fun couple of days, but my stupid brain chemicals refuse to fall into line.

Just back from a nice run (4 more glasses of wine -- I could've gone to five but decided to round down for once, besides which it seems as though the more I run the less I drink anway -- all to the good in terms of being around long enough to teach that son of mine all the dirty guy tricks I know -- armpit farts take a fair bit of practice) and now enjoying that dreamy post-exercise state where you feel as though you've just learned how to breath again. I actually had a bit of a scare on the weekend. Right near the end of a fairly long run I had a sudden flutter of rapid heart beats followed by a dizzy spell. The whole thing lasted for about five seconds, and I figured it might even have just been in my head. But I wear a heart rate monitor, so when I got home I checked the graph and there's this nice peak, looking a bit like the Seattle space needle, right at the moment I had to grab the side of a parked car to not fall over.