now the dreams are conference anxiety

Usually they're teaching anxiety. But this is the second time in less than a week that I've dreamt that I'm at a conference, scheduled to give a presentation on the last day, and I have NOTHING with me. No paper, no computer, no draft, no nothing. All my friends were there and I had to decide whether I was going to hang out with them and enjoy myself or go up to my room and write the damn paper I had to present. Ah yes, the tension at the center of the nightmare: social life vs. work. I guess this isn't all that surprising since I've been spending more time on the social life lately and have a tremendous amount of built-up guilt about not writing.

Here's the crazy thing: in my dream, I was planning the paper in my head. This is the one on using Bourdieu as a frame for analyzing the textual features in social class narratives that contribute to the production of "authenticity." The title is "Humility, Immediacy, Necessity: Bourdieu and the Production of Authenticity in Working-Class Narratives," and lo, dear readers, I was so desperate that I was planning to write a paragraph about each: one on humility, one on immediacy, one on necessity. A five-paragraph essay for my 4C's paper! Nightmare, indeed.