It’s not too late yet!

A nurse who counseled the dying has compiled a list of popular final regrets. I have to confess…I was disappointed. These aren’t very interesting, but I suppose they are sincere and honest.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I have no problem there. No problem at all.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

OK, maybe that would affect me…but I don’t know what I’d do otherwise. I have a job I enjoy, so there’d have to be some other alternative activity I’d rather I’d been doing.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Heh. Not a problem, again. Although I do admit that I’m quicker to criticize than to praise.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Huh? They should be regretting that they haven’t kept in touch with me!

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I’m pretty happy, but I can’t imagine feeling this way at all. If dying happy was what mattered about your life, I’d have to plunge into the ‘hookers and blow’ cliche.

So I thought about what regrets I might actually have.

“I regret that I have not eaten the hearts of all of my enemies.”

“I regret that I still don’t understand X,” where X is whatever the latest concern in my field of science. Right now it would probably be the totality of mechanisms responsible for translating genes into form. I’ll only have to change that question if I live another century (I’m optimistic).

“I regret that those physicists still haven’t delivered on my time machine.” That’s right, physicists, I might curse you with my dying breath.

“I regret that you haven’t brought me a priest to strangle.”

“I regret that I’m fucking dying. STOP IT!”

The madness descends soon

Classes have started. We’re 3 days in, and so far I’m only 2 days behind, so I’m doing well. I’ve given myself a few weeks of grace to get settled into the routine before the wild flurry of travel begins, so I thought this would be as good a time as any to do a data dump of my travel schedule.

9-10 February: Darwin Day, Moscow, Idaho/Pullman, Washington
11 February: Florida? (I’ve got it marked in my calendar; if you’re the organizer, contact me soon to work out details!)
16-18 February: UNLV, Las Vegas
1-4 March: Council for Secular Humanism, Orlando, Florida
12 March: South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD
15 March: Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Calgary
24 March: REASON RALLY, Washington DC
25-26 March: American Atheists National Convention, Washington DC
30-31 March: Origins Conference, Morris, MN (Local! Yay! Also featuring Neil Shubin)
7 April: University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
13-15 April: Global Atheist Convention, Melbourne, Australia
21 April: NECSS, New York
28 April: Atheistfest, Madison, Wisconsin
18-19 May: Imagine No Religion 2, Kamloops, BC, Canada
25-27 May: European Atheist Convention, Cologne, Germany

There are still a few things to work out; I reserved a few days for Florida there and then somehow lost track of the organizer and other information, so help, tell me what I’m doing! I’ve also had a few feelers from Iceland to take a detour on the way back from Germany, I’ll get back to you soon and see what we can do. There’s also one more invitation pending some negotiation, but otherwise I’m booked up solidly so far.

Maybe I’ll see a few of you around! If I’m looking a bit haggard, don’t ask, or I’ll just wave this schedule at you.

Today is the first day of classes for the spring term

All you professors out there know the existential dread associated with the start of a new term — you’ve only just now cleared away most of the accumulated drudgery of the last term, and now here comes a new one, with all of the work associated with that. And you’re sitting there now with your sets of syllabi, each with dates locked in that represent fresh inundations of exams to grade and papers to read. You’re standing on the shore looking out at the maelstrom, bracing yourself to swim into the heart of it, where you will be buffeted and swirled about and at the end of it, spat out onto another shore to face another in the next term.

And my special horror is that I’m teaching a brand new course this term: 3 new lectures to develop each week, mad scrambling in between to grasp the new ideas in the scientific literature. It’s madness. What was I thinking when I agreed to this? Was I strung out on reefer? Blasé in decadent insolence, my mind half-lost in absinthe-fueled dreams? Or manic on meth, so confident in my drug-induced megalomania that I casually agreed to conquer everything? I’m going to be a gibbering wreck come May and sweet relief.

Oh, well. I’ve survived 37 semesters like this one so far; I’ll make it through another one.

Probably.

I think. It could be the psychosis talking.

Collaborators!

We’re on our way to Minneapolis this morning to conspire with a Skepchick, Kammy, on our plans for Convergence. It’s true: not only does it take 6 months of preparation to organize a kick-ass party at a SF convention, but FtB and Skepchicks are deeply in cahoots. You might really want to be in Bloomington in July for this one.

If you have event suggestions, too, they’re welcome. What do you want to see FtB and the Skepchicks do that would draw you out here (we already have 3 days of panels on science and skepticism, so don’t bother telling us to do that!)

All right, get off the net all of you

It’s Christmas eve! Spend some time with friends and family!

My wife and I just had a lovely dinner with the kids at an Indian restaurant in Madison (Maharaja, highly recommended), and now my daughter has fixed us all glasses of potent glögg…after which we’ll pass out somewhere. Don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing! Go do it instead!