Also, as usual at this time of year I have to write a speech for the inauguration of the school year to give at the inauguration ceremony for the Psych Dept. This is typically the only part of the ceremony that is in English, so the WISP students invited to attend basically have to sit through a pile of gibberish to hear me. Everyone has been telling me to just use the speech I gave last year, or the year before, because frankly most of the listeners won't have heard it before. But I somehow can't morally accept that idea. I feel like I have put in some effort to reward their forbearance. So I have been waiting for inspiration to strike (which it usually does by about the day before the speech) me with a theme or a take-home message or a gimmick of some sort that I could riff on for a few minutes. And today, unbelievably, while I was waiting for DH to get from the train station to the hotel after a half-day of zipping around town to deliver goods and services to our elite marathoners, and taking them to dinner, and watching the Ethiopians go through their very methodical consumption rituals, and driving to the train station and not finding DH and calling the hotel numerous times and basically just stressing and getting dehydrated from it, while I was sitting there in the lobby deflating and waiting, I found a hook. And it has to do with marathons. And being Ethiopian. And eating rice before salad before chicken.