How to ameliorate the back-from-conference-blues:
a) spend the night the conference ends holed up in your hotel room, catching up on four days of piled-up email and writing stupid weblog posts to blow off steam.
b) on return, spend a couple days in a fabulous coastal cabin on Galiano Island — preferably freeloading off friends who are paying the bills.
c) if you can, try to arrange for a bald eagle to be circling your building when you arrive back on campus.
Of course, these techniques are of only superficial benefit if you happen to be the sort of person who habitually over-commits and has perpetual missed deadlines hanging over his head. In the interests of clinging to my peppy vibe for a few more minutes, I post a link to a link (is that illegal too?) of the latest argument in practice for saner copyright law, via Stay Free! Daily:
If you see one fake movie trailer this year, make it this remix of The Shining.
Everything in this is copyrighted, but it should fall under fair use (except, perhaps, the music). It is both a satire (of movie trailers) and a parody (of the original movie). It is brilliant because it shows how selected clips from a movie can tell any story the editor wants to tell. It is important because it provides an example of how art can be transformed into new original works. Mostly, though, it is just hilarious.
