Tomorrow, I get to go back to Maine, after seven days of running around, meeting people I hardly know, using jargon and ideas that I didn't even know about last year. I suppose the best way to sum up the conference here in Salt Lake City is the talk that Elizabeth and I gave on Tuesday. Imagine this: you're in a room with a few people there, shaking and nervous. The data's in your head and your results are there, but you feel like you somehow don't know them anymore. Like you've lost track. Like the past year has just flashed before your eyes and disappeared. Then it comes back to you, five minutes before your talk's about to begin, five minutes before the guy with the tambourine magnet's finishing up, like that long lost friend, like that missing link, it comes running back to you with open arms and you know it better than you've ever known it before. It's close and it exists, and it's so real that you're not nervous anymore. I wasn't nervous anymore. I told Elizabeth so. And we gave the talk better than we had for our senior project presentations, better than we had in rehearsal. It was clean. It was smooth. It was like a good glass of scotch that you had earned on a long night after finishing a marathon (well, I guess what marathon you finish would change what drink you get, but it doesn't matter). After the talk, Elizabeth and I met the professor from New Mexico State University and he was very impressed, and very happy that we used his assessment materials. Michael was impressed, and said we did very well. Two ladies approached Elizabeth, asking her for the materials that gave us our results with our students. It felt great, but after I left, there was a problem. After every success I've experienced in life, I've felt more certain things would get better. Like getting hired for my internship: I was sure, after receiving that phone call, that I could make it in a world where earning money is a cutthroat process and requires more than skill and good looks. But, after the talk, I felt unsure. Would I have more opportunities to make the same sort of accomplishments? Do the same type of research? Earn more qualifications, get the degrees I so desperately want? In the midst of all the hard work I've done, and all the rewards I've received, all the praise, it became evident that expectations would grow, and so would the amount of work I'd have to do to get what I want. The rest of the conference went very well. I met lots of people, traded email addresses, mingled, talked about research like a peer, like a colleague among colleagues. This was an unsettling feeling for me, mostly because I've never spoken to professors as an equal, but instead like I was a plebe, a mere mortal among immortals, a diminished being in the eyes of giants. For this week, in the moments I've been able to interact with people, I was a giant. Elizabeth and I were both giants. We were doing what the giants do. And that's the last part: I fully enjoyed my stay here in SLC, and I got out of it every bit that I could. I don't think Elizabeth shares my enthusiasm. She didn't meet as many people because she doesn't like to interact with people whom she doesn't know. (You might ask, if you never interact with people you don't know, how do you ever get to meet anyone?) She didn't go to the poster sessions. She didn't stay for the talks, and she didn't talk with the talkers. Then, we sat down for dinner at the Physics Education Research Banquet. We couldn't find a table with any seats free (I wanted to mingle and sit down randomly with people and meet them, and she didn't), so we sat alone. Then I said that I felt like she was jaded about the trip, and that she didn't seem to share my enthusiasm for how it went. She said that jaded was the right word, and that the trip was nothing like what she expected. Well, just what can you expect from a conference like the one we went to? Can you expect anything other than what it was: a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers? I dunno. It's no matter...I just feel bad, but there are different strokes for different folks. If it wasn't Elizabeth's thing, it wasn't Elizabeth's thing. The conference was summed up, also, in the last thing I really remember saying to Elizabeth during the banquet, before a huge PER poster session. I was going to go check my email, leaving her alone at the table, and I wondered if that bothered her. She said no, and asked why I would think that. I simply told her this: "If I had liked you and respected you less, I'd have left you to eat alone. I wasn't going to do that to you." That was the thing I learned about myself above all: loyalty reigns me always.