Two Notes

:: When you speak, don't hone in on one or two people that you recurrently glance at, again and again, while giving the rest of your audience only cursory eye contact, if that. It makes it appear as if you want to impress them or you want to make sure you're doing ok in their eyes or that you care a whole lot more about them than anyone else listening. Any way you slice it, it ain't good. Not to sound arrogant about this, because this year I got some feedback for not looking at my audience enough in general, so I'm no expert.

:: You know how sometimes you start thinking about a word and all of the sudden it's not a word endued with meaning, but a strange collection of sounds that feels odder and more bizarre the more you think about it? I had a similar moment thinking about the act of clapping.

I think it would be really odd if you were a person from a culture that didn't do clapping and all of the sudden you were sitting listening to some people sing and when they stopped folks around you started hitting their hands together in such a way that produced a strange noise you'd never heard before.

Maybe clapping is universal, I don't know.