Checking my mail today, I discovered one curiosity, one holiday card, and one piece of Very Official Stationery from the University that employs me.

The curiosity: I actually got a reprint request. Those are very strange — it used to be that you’d always get a flurry of these after publishing something, and you’d be sure to order lots of extra copies of your paper so you could send them out, but nowadays they are going the way of the dodo. It’s so much easier to download the paper from the journal’s electronic archives, and even when I get a request because of limited access, I can just email a pdf. I usually only get these from third world countries anymore. This one, though, was from the US. From Liberty University. Asking for a copy of my review of Miller’s book. Weird. Sorry, but I don’t have any paper copies of that article…and the request didn’t include an email address. How quaint!

The holiday card: it was from the OSU Students for Freethought. May the FSM nod benignly upon you, and caress you all with his pastalicious appendages.

The Official Notice: my request for a sabbatical leave next year has been Officially Approved! Huzzah! I have big plans for some serious writing, new course development, and new research directions, and now I may actually get the time to do it all.

This is sad news. Greg Cahill, an old acquaintance who had been a fellow graduate student with me at the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, has died suddenly. I did not know him well, but I remember him as a fine fellow among my small cohort of fellow students, and it’s sad to hear of this unfortunate loss.

No, I haven’t forgotten how to blog all of a sudden — I’ve been distracted. I wrenched an ankle wrestling with a snow blower the other day, and woke up this morning with my foot all swoll up like a lumpy ol’ potato with five little toes wiggling at one end. It’s not good.

Joints are such a fragile point of failure. I’m finding the little lower torso replacement illustrated above extremely enticing right now.

Even though we couldn’t be there in the flesh, we did watch the ceremony over the web…and there’s our boy, receiving his diploma. Yay!

It was not an auspicious start to the day. Before we could even leave for my son’s commencement at UW Madison, we had to clear the 6″-8″ of snow that had fallen overnight from our driveway. Then we had to flounder through unplowed roads to the highway. Then we discovered near-blizzard conditions of blowing snow on the road, but we persevered. We told ourselves that it would get better the farther east we went — Minneapolis always has wimpier weather than we do.

Then we got to the freeway…and it got worse. The roads were icy and slick, everyone was limping along at half the speed limit (except the idiot drivers of 18-wheelers, who were howling along at over 70mph in the left lane, stirring up billowing clouds of snow as they passed that would blind us all with a temporary white-out), and scattered all along the road were cars that had spun out and ended up in a ditch. We were held up by multiple car crashes. The final straw was when we pulled over to ask at a gas station about conditions further east, and were told a tale of apocalyptic catastrophe further on, with the freeway in both directions snarled with flipped and smashed cars.

We gave up, and came home. It was just too dangerous.

Now we are Disappointed Monkeys — we have to miss our son’s graduation. It also means he is stuck in dreary, uninteresting, barren Madison for Christmas, since we planned on bringing him back with us.

At least the university will be streaming the 2008 Winter Commencement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so we can watch it, but it’s not the same. If any of you happen to be going to the commencement for your own kids (or perhaps because you’re graduating, too), could you listen for the name Connlann Myers and give a little whoop and holler for us? We’d like to have been there, but we thought that orphanhood would be a really lousy graduation gift.

I’m a pilgrim today, traveling far to the east to the mysterious land of Wis-con-sin, where I shall spend some time in adoration of the son.

My middle child, the cute and monkey-like Connlann, is graduating from the University of Wisconsin Madison tomorrow, with a degree in English. Hooray for the hard work and success of our boy! Hooray for rituals of completion! Hooray for the end of chunky great tuition payments!

So, anyway, I shall be spending most of my time today driving, and most of tomorrow driving, and a good spell of tomorrow sitting in uncomfortable seats watching a ceremonial parade of strangers, but it is all worth it.

(Thanks to Lisa M for sending me the charming Happy Monkey illustration.)

Perhaps you have been pondering the meaning of the new traditional greeting, Happy Monkey! (important usage note: it is not Merry Monkey, nor is it Happy Monkey Day. It is simply “Happy Monkey”, full stop. Trying to change the phrase means you are waging war on the Monkey, and you know how they will respond.) I haven’t. I’ve been bogged down in the end-of-semester grind for the last week, writing tests, giving tests, grading tests, and there has been little room in my brain for deep philosophical thought.

But then, just a few minutes ago, I reached an end. The exams and papers were all marked and graded, and I filled out the forms and submitted them to the registrar. And I had an epiphany. Happy Monkey is not a day, not a greeting card, not just a phrase. Happy Monkey doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Happy Monkey…perhaps…means a little bit more. And what happened then…? Well, my small Monkey grew three sizes that day!

Happy Monkey is any moment that you feel the burdens lifted, that you feel a lightening of the mood, that you feel puckish and prankish and like kicking your heels. Happy Monkey can strike any time, any day!

So Happy Monkey, everyone! And may you have many Happy Monkeys in days to come!

A quick note of thanks to the UCF chapter of the Campus Freethought Alliance for the pleasant time in Florida (especially pleasant now that I’ve come home to the prospect of several inches of snow today). We did get a nice photo of our last supper together: pizza and beer, of course.

I’m about to fly away, and I got word last night that the Dean of the Chapel at Rollins is suddenly getting quite irate about my visit. Finally, someone is reacting to me as if I were the antichrist! Maybe we’ll get some controversy Saturday night, although more likely they’ll discover I’m this terribly mild-mannered academic teddy bear and it will all blow over.

There are days I wish I were 6’6″ with tattoos and leather and a voice that was all iron and fury…but it’s just not my thing.

I have sinned. While I was in Philadelphia, I was supposed to attend the Drinking Skeptically event on Thursday evening, and I was honestly looking forward to it…but I went to dinner with Michael Weisberg, Janet Browne, Rasmus Winther, John Beatty, Jane Maienschein, and a few others, and when I finally looked up from the conversation, it was 10:30. Too late. I offer abject apologies to Salvatore Patrone and everyone who showed up.

To get even, the Science Pundit has tagged me with a meme. I am, of course, obligated now to actually address it, as long as I’m groveling. Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Hang on, my entire life is random, a chaotic maelstrom with a thin thread of intent tangled in it. How am I supposed to pluck out just six fragments from it? Oh, well, here’s something:

1. The oldest object on my person is my social security card. I still have the very same rectangle of paper I was issued when I was 14 and got my first job. It must be made of gopherwood pulp to have held up so long.

2. I used to be wickedly accurate with a slingshot in my misspent youth. I haven’t used one since I was a teenager, though, so don’t send me out to slay any giants.

3. I have never smoked a cigarette or any other combustible tube, nor have I ever been tempted to do so in the slightest. My parents were smokers, so I was never curious, I didn’t see anything faddishly rebellious about it, either, and the habit always simply seemed revolting.

4. I have three small scars on my head and forehead, because when I was a toddler I had multiple independent falls and bloody collisions with coffeetables. My parents and grandparents apparently purged their houses of all such furniture until I reached an age where I was reliably able to stand up without falling down — when I was about 20, I think.

5. The biggest fish I ever caught was a 29 pound Coho Salmon. This was on the same trip where my father caught a 45 pound King. Oh, but we are fallen from the Ancient Days.

6. The quietest place I have ever been was an old growth forest in the North Cascades, when the wind was completely calm and the cedars went still and nothing anywhere was moving — it was eerie. Visit that same forest when there’s even a hint of wind, of course, and the trees are all moaning and whispering to you without cease.

Now I have to tag 6? I took a semi-rational approach, and plucked out the names of the six most recent commenters to leave a url here: Scrambled Stoic,
Big Dumb Chimp,
Susannah,
Mike Haubrich,
Matt Heath, and
Tim Fuller, you’re it.