The arts and academia; or, I did a thing; OR, wow brain still fuzzy ow

There’s this thing people talk about after conventions: “con crud.” You get home, you’re exhausted, sleep-deprived, hollowed out, your skull is full of snot and regrets, there’s a high-pitched eeeeee where sound should be and somehow despite every sign and portent of the vast universe conspiring to signal that you ought to crawl into a deep dark crevasse and become one with the light-shunning lichen until both God and man forget your previous life among the mortals– you still have to go to work.

We’ve all been there.

But while con crud is, in fact, very frequently the result of quite a lot of people crammed together and breathing at one another (particularly pre-2020, ahem), at the time I started writing this I found myself wondering if it can also be the result of spending several consecutive hours getting to be Rabidly Creative, around other Rabidly Creative People, all of whom are Bouncing Ideas around like so many Coked-Up Ferrets and reveling in the joy of Validation and a not-insignificant amount of Dopamine. (…Also while sleep-deprived. That’s. That’s a consistent symptom across all test cases).

This is top of mind for me at the moment because I think, last week, I was very much experiencing con crud–but not from the usual cheek-by-jowl panels, Friday-night parties, and bleary breakfasts. Instead, I think it’s because the day before (or, by this point, last Thursday) I got to meet with my committee and give my MFA capstone proposal presentation.

The presentation itself lasted about ten minutes, I think, and required QUITE A BIT of wrangling my Apothecary Nonsense and Vague Mysticism Regarding the Nature of Art and Space-Time and the Unbearable Beauty of Humanity into a coherent (and brief) proposal, so I had already anticipated being wrung-out after–and there was always the possibility that the committee would very gently take my hand and explain that, perhaps, I should use my words next time instead of just gibbering unblinking for an hour while pointing meaningfully at the moon.

What I had not really anticipated, though, was what happened after my ten-minute slideshow– which was about forty minutes of the various artist brains on my committee going pingpingpiNGPINGPINGPI– as I desperately took notes while feeling all the little Ferret portions of my brain start bouncing in tandem–

Which led to the rest of the day being a bit of a wash while I jittered gently in place behind my dayjob-desk and the following morning being… well, tired and oddly hungover from the large metaphorical neon sign invisibly blinking THINKY THOUGHTS HAVE SOME THINKY THOUGHTS approximately two inches behind each eyeball for the preceding twenty-some hours.

It’s a very special kind of exhausting that comes of ideas and connections rapidly forming and expanding outward through an interior landscape of increasing wooliness. But despite feeling as if my synapses were overheating and a hard reboot would be required in the form of a n+1 Significant Naps in the near future… it also represented one of the reasons I think creative folk attend conventions and, I suppose, academics wander into collaborative fields.

There’s nothing quite like communicating an idea and then seeing– feeling— it refract through the context of other people’s craft before bouncing back to you at an new angle and with colors you might never have before considered. Business-speak calls it “synergy”, except that I’ve rarely experienced it in business settings (though shout-out to really successful event-planning, when you’re riding that cooperative wave it can feel like you’re orchestrating the concept of time itself)— but as glorious as it is, it’s not sustainable for longer than, say, a weekend. Instead, you hastily record whatever wild connections your mind makes, you hope you recorded everyone else’s faithfully as well, and then, on the other side of it…

You blow your nose, you sleep, and you go back to inhabiting your too mortal flesh. In the crevasse. With the lichen.

For a little bit, anyway. Just until you’re ready to bounce around the light again.