my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

I am a giant ball of stress and what is more I am sick. This is unfortunate. But! Cool things are happening.

Sometime in the afternoon this Saturday, I'll be speaking at URI's "Carried Across: Translations, Temporalities, and Trajectories" conference. It's open to the public and the other presentations look cool too so I encourage you to attend if you weren't doing anything else this Saturday and feel like going to URI. (Contact me if you want to travel from Boston.) I'll be talking about the rhetorical techniques different authors have used to make different audiences comfortable with different kinds of passing, and briefly suggest things authors of contemporary passing narratives should consider. I'm focusing on race and gender but other things might come up? I'm still finishing the "condense giant paper into 15 minute talk" exercise so I'm not 100% sure which examples I'll be using yet...

EDIT: I'm panel D, Session IV, 2:30-3:45. Whole schedule here.

Before then, I need to get a copy of my thesis dropped off at UMass Boston during working hours. Are any of my un[der]employed friends in the Boston area willing to bring this to a specific office at UMB at drop it off for me? This would involve taking the train to UMB, taking a shuttle bus from the JFK/UMB station to the campus, going to the second floor, and handing the envelope to someone behind a desk. I haven't actually seen the desk, because I didn't drop this off the first time it needed to be dropped off, either. Ideally you would pick up this envelope from me on Friday either at my house or near Central Square, though I am flexible on this and could also give it to you Thursday evening. I will give you $20 if you can do this for me. EDIT: I could now give it to you as early as tonight, although I am either going out to my previous social plans soon or punting and going to bed, depending, so that might be hard.

Also, is anyone out there enough of a LaTeX master to answer the question "How do I take a TOC that is otherwise perfect and indent each chapter record? Currently they look like "1. (some space) VACATION" flush left with the heading "CHAPTER" and I need them to look like "(some space) 1. (some space) VACATION" and my theory was if I kept coming back and trying this for thirty minutes every day I'd eventually get it but now I just hate the LaTeX TOC code more than I knew was possible. I'm currently looking at tocloft but it looks like that would make me largely have to start over and right now I am sick and just never want to think about this ever again.  EDIT: It turns out if I stop trying to do it Right and just manually add \hspace{} and then fix the indenting by tripling a value in em I only sort of understand, it looks perfect. Since I no longer care about doing it Right, just having it Done, I win. But oh my god this is one of the most abusive things I have done in LaTeX and that is saying something.

Also also just so you know it looks like I'll live in Indiana as of May 17th.