My Weekly Lessons

My posts are slowly becoming more and more infrequent. Whoopsies. Oh well. This past week I've been slowly relaxing again after a hectic American Thoracic Society conference week. My first international conference, I felt like such a grown up! I felt so relieved after last Wednesday, after my (short) presentation, and I didn't realize how much I was worrying about it until after it passed. And now it's nice to not have to motivate myself to go and practice yet another time. So this weekend was nice and relaxing, especially since we postponed (yet again, I live in a family of procrastinators it seems) our garage sale until June. So I feel like in this past week to week and a half I've learned a lot, and not just about lungs.
1. The whole saying about the more prepared you are the more relaxed you'll be is TRUE!!! :D Well, sort of. I was pretty prepared for my talk and studied like crazy, researching and memorizing all these answers to possible questions, and actually lucky for me I got asked some variations of those questions. But I was still nervous as hell, but I guess since I was prepared, I didn't stumble as bad, so the prep work did help I think. But leads me to point two.
2. If nervous, do not twist/shred a kleenex in your hands. Otherwise you will end up with white linty dusty crap all over your suit. Not professional. Oops.
3. It's possible to ventilate a lung in a jar. SO awesome!
4. Not really a lesson since I pretty much already knew this, but I guess I had a confirmation that even with a topic you're pretty comfortable with (in my case, lung mesenchymal stem cells, which I've worked with a little over a year now), it's still possible to be completely dumbfounded with aspects of the topic. Can you say secresome?
5. For me, the key I've discovered to clothes shopping last weekend, is XXSP. How pathetic is that. I had no idea I was that small. Truthfully I'm not actually that short, but it seems I've got to sacrifice length for the rest of me. Dangit.
6. It is possible to build an 8 foot tall Yoda without looking at instructions inside a busy mall. Another awesome discovery, I might add.

All in all, a highly interesting and informative week, I should say.