This was supposed to have been yesterday's update, but after attending a certain academic conference yesterday, my brain was a little too fried to function, so I only wrote it today.
I hadn't updated for two days, and I truly felt somewhat guilty, as though I'd let everyone down.
A while back, I got a bit of inspiration from reading, so I casually wrote an article and showed it to my university literature teacher. To my surprise, she praised it highly after reading it. With her help, I revised it into a paper, then passed it on to another professor. The professor found it interesting and invited me to a certain academic conference.
It counted as the first time in my life that I attended such a high-end, grand, and classy gathering as an academic conference.
Back in university, I had considered going into academia, but my English was terrible, and I was more interested in "telling stories." So Chinese cuisine ended up with one fewer lousy critic and gained one more second-rate wordsmith. Yet I never imagined that one day, I would appear at an academic conference in this form.
Of course, there were also some flies in the ointment. For me, most of the people attending that academic conference were university teachers, and there were a slightly excessive number of sessions discussing writing instruction.
On top of that, one of the conference guests was actually the author of the textbooks I'd used in university. That really made me feel frightened and uneasy—especially since I was somehow the youngest participant at the conference.
All in all, it was a rare experience.
Between preparing my speech and attending the conference, I ended up skipping updates for two whole days. Please be understanding. I'll do my best to make up the