PLOV 9 - Summary Day
PLOV
Meeting's over but the work's not done, reader. We're in the weird postorgasmic lull of a completed COP without a completed meeting summary. So the work plods onward, like a waiter bringing food that no one wanted. Oh, stay for a bit of PLOV, my friend, and let me (Bernard Soubry) stuff your face with more than you ever wanted to read.
Summary day. I do not leave my bed until eleven forty-five. I have awoken in the fog that has come down the mountains and rolled over the rowing pond and is nuzzling at my fifth-floor wraparound balcony windows. My mind is a smooth sheet of parchment paper. My legs are square steel pipe. My right tricep hurts a lot, likely from lifting too much weight at Gym YesBody two days ago, but perhaps because of all those tiny mouse movements my upper body has taken in over the past week.
Summary day: the day when my teammates write up every single decision that was taken during the COP, link the relevant coverage description to the individual bulletin we published that day, check all the acronyms and document numbers and speaker names.
I don't do summary in the morning because it is also Analysis Day: the day for me to take everyone's ideas about how the meeting went, What It All Means, the truth about migratory species, and boil it down into a spicy/zesty/hopefully-not-too-bitter two-thousand-word package. We bring it all together in a day, send it off to our editor in New York, and it gets published on Monday night if we're lucky.
Summary day: day of exhaustion. Everyone else gets to go home. Everyone else's brains get to turn to sludge without consequence. We go out for dinner with an ape scientist tonight, and he describes his day walking around in a garden with thousand-year-old trees off in a mountain village two hours from Samarkand. I, on the other hand, have spent from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon glued to one of two Google Docs, listening to the rotating playlist of pop-funk-hard house playing in the restaurant.
At one point, one of my colleagues goes outside for some air and, upon returning into the restaurant, slams the door behind her so hard that the gasket comes off the door. The wind hurtles across the embouchure, filling the room with a breathy, brain-drilling C-C# oscillation.
It is not unfair, because it's what we're paid to do, but we get to spend this day making our final product with brains that have melted into the consistency of hot Play-Dough because every external sign has told them, Vacation mode.
Summary day. I feel summed up. I feel like a short sentence with a hard period. I feel like a well-placed, well-worn clause in the sentence of the week. I feel fully analyzed: I feel like the nothing more there is to say. Oof.
Our summary and analysis will be available here as soon as we're done editing 'em.
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