Just one of those days...I hope

A word of advice to prospective graduate students: Don't tell graduate students anything you really don't want their advisor to know. Today Herb was talking about a prospective student who visited recently. The student mentioned to me he applied to grad schools for two completely different things: N stuff (what Herb does) and X stuff. I was interested in hearing more about X stuff from him but we didn't get to talk much, so I asked Herb about it today in the context of, "He told me he had two interests- what exactly was X stuff?" Herb kind of chuckled and said, "He never told me about X stuff, we only talked about N!" This won't ruin the prospective student's chances here at all, but I felt a little bad about it. But not too bad. Diverse interests are not a bad thing as long as you also have depth, and I think the student should have mentioned that to Herb.

Overall, though, today was one of those days when I wished I could take back about half of what came out of my mouth. Class discussion was like that, talking with Herb was like that, random social interactions, introductions to new people, everything. It was all awkward and I think I almost always managed to say the wrong thing. I hope this is just a passing blip of blundering.