I feel a little guilty in the sense that when I'm doing popular-math stuff I usually spend a lot more time talking about what string theory is to begin with and a lot less time talking about Hodge diamonds, but chatting with people who actually knew some geometry was seductive.

Evelyn made the transcript! I know because she emailed me to ask what word I was saying for "Fermats".

Complex analysis is so much prettier than real analysis. Everything just works and it's beautiful, plus you get a handful of ridiculous tricks for solving integrals as a bonus. (I took every first-year sequence my graduate program had except for real analysis, which means I know a surprising amount of geometry and functional analysis for someone who's officially an algebraist, but only the tiniest bit of undergrad measure theory.)