When Good Lectures Go Wrong

So I went to a lecture last night, by a French linguist, about the idea of happiness as expressed through words. And it was definitely a study in something, but I learned more about my own attention span than how to be happy.

To start with, it lasted two and a half hours, and started twenty minutes late. In theory, I don't have a problem with those things. Well, I sort of do, but not a huge problem. Friday night lectures at SJC lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes, and I totally used to space a lot of those out, but theoretically if the lecturer was engaging (which this guy was) I'm up for listening to him as long as he feels like talking. And the pacing of the lecture was really good, with breaks for actors to come out and read short poems on the subject (it sounds very sixth grade, but that was cool too; the poems were on topic, the readers were good, and it did help with the pacing). The lady interviewing the guy had good questions, the guy was interesting, okay, I can't follow French for two and a half hours, but if I could I would want to follow this.

And the lecture was free, too, so I can't complain too much about its starting late. Maybe the guy was getting his nose hair waxed, I don't know. Shit happens.

But you put those two things together -- the lecture was supposed to start at 8:30 pm, it doesn't start until almost nine, and then it lasts two and a half hours -- on a week night -- and it's like, shit, people. If you're twenty minutes late, ditch your last couple of questions so you can bring it in under two hours. Ditch the poetry readers. Ditch the raffel winners. Ditch something, for Christ's sake.

For the first 30 or 45 minutes, it was great. I actually could follow, word by word, what the guy was saying. It helped that he spoke really clearly, and had nice straightforward ideas, but I was still really proud of myself. I was getting about as much out of it as an English lecture, and that made me really happy. Then for the next hour or so I was sort of spacing in and out, but I do that in English lectures too, so that was okay, and when I tuned in the guy was always saying something interesting. But for the last forty five minutes I was picturing the Interviewing Lady being strangled and drowned at the same time, because it was after 10:30pm, I'd been up since 7 on like, six hours of sleep, and I was at a lecture that would not end, rather than at home, unconscious.

Brite said, on the way home, that she felt the same thing -- by the end you didn't care what he was saying that you were missing, you just wanted him to shut up already, and pretty soon your whole feeling about the lecture went from 'Awesome' to 'Okay, I guess'. Which was really, really annoying.