I’m on my way back! I’ve been completely out of touch for the last few days — it turns out that China has completely blocked Google, Twitter, YouTube, and…FreethoughtBlogs (I think that last one is an accident of our google adserver code), so I’ve had no access to email or FtB since Thursday. You don’t have to wag a finger at me, since my daughter has “tsk, tsk”ed me already for failing to set up a VPN before I left.

But aside from that one little deficiency, I have had a wonderful time in China. I was blown away by Chinese hospitality, and got so much good food, and got to tour the Forbidden Palace, the Great Wall, and the Summer Palace — it was a terrific experience, and I want to do it again.

At least you had a couple of slymepitters around for a little low quality entertainment — one of them made 107 comments all by his little self. It’s kind of sad and pathetic.

I’ve done a little cleanup, now that I’ve left Chinese airspace, but you’ll have to wait a bit for more substantive posts. I expect I’ll arrive home in Morris around 2am, and I have to get up bright and early to teach a 9am course.

I’m flying to China on Wednesday, and in order not to be unfair to my teaching colleague in cell biology, I’m taking on extra lab sections today and Tuesday, since he’ll be covering for me on Wednesday and Thursday. So I’m going to be working long hours for a while.

And then tomorrow night, it’s Cafe Scientifique with Yuzhi Li, who will be talking about her work on animal behavior. You should come. It’ll be at the Common Cup Coffeehouse in town at 6pm.

Immediately afterwards, I’ll be zooming off to the Twin Cities because I have an early morning flight to catch. I can rest on the plane, right?

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More fun! I got to zip in and get a bunch of vaccinations this morning, and boy are my arms tired.

I was just watching that old 1958 classic, The Blob (I’m killing time before the Hamilton documentary), when the scariest moment in the whole thing was the ending line.

Spoiler!

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After reading about that photogenic wanker Bilzerian, I thought about what I could do to become an instagram star. I should take a storm of selfies of my exciting life.

Here’s my Monday:

• Start my morning with a dental appointment.

• Finish grading 50 cell biology exams. That’ll take me into early afternoon.

• Spend the rest of the day finishing up my science talk for my Beijing trip. There goes the rest of the day.

• Go to bed, too tired to play high-stakes poker.

That’s it. That’s the whole day. Maybe if I used a machine gun as a paperweight and had a team of topless supermodels standing around…nah, too distracting and my office isn’t that big.

One of the odd things about NerdCon is the focus on John and Hank Green, an interest I do not share at all, but there were people there who were only attending to see a Green. They write books that I haven’t read, and I’ve seen a few of their videos, but the cult following is baffling to an outsider like me. I didn’t attend any of the Green events while I was there.

But maybe I should have. John Green posted the text of a talk he gave this weekend, and it’s quite good. It was about his battles with mental illness, and the myths around such illnesses.

In the end, I feel that romanticizing mental illness is dangerous and destructive just as stigmatizing it is. So I want to say that, yes, I am mentally ill. I’m not embarrassed about it. And I have written my best work not when flirting with the brink, but when treating my chronic health problem with consistency and care.

Now if only we had a society that believed in consistency and care…

Alex Jones declared that Barack and Michelle Obama were literally demons who smelled like sulfur. Obama gave this the response it deserved.

We live in a country where flaming nutjobs have massive audiences. We need to laugh at them more.