It’s too bad I don’t have a therapist, because we could have a lot of fun with this dream.

It wasn’t much. I dreamt that the omega variant had come along, there was mass death everywhere, including my wife and I. Our floppy, decaying bodies were flung into a mass grave, and then her corpse rolled away from mine and we were separated by piles of dead strangers. The end. That’s when I woke up at 4am deep in the slough of despond and have spent the day stumbling through a grey world.

Anyway, I need to take some time off. Classes start on Tuesday, and ain’t nothin’ gonna stop them.

Well, other than death.

I’ve got everything done for the first week of classes. Lecture prepped, lab instructions posted, flies flourishing, syllabus done, first problem set written and posted, everything. Everything!

Now savoring the moment. This is probably the very last time I’ll be all caught up until May. I’d do something to celebrate except there’s a pandemic and I’m on an Only Bad Food diet and most of the spiders are frozen and the whole world sucks.

It gives me some hope for the future, it does. Students are leading the way and walking out of NY schools.

Students at several high schools in New York City coordinated a walkout from classes on Tuesday to call for remote learning as they protest what they say are unsafe learning conditions inside school buildings as COVID cases surged just as the spring semester began last week.

A campaign mounted by students and activists across some of New York’s best-known high schools – including Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant – led to a walkout shortly before noon on Tuesday.

While precise numbers were not immediately available, organizers estimated hundreds of students participated, with about 400 students walking out at Brooklyn Tech alone.

Hundreds of kids walked out of Brooklyn Tech today to protest the continuation of in person school during the Omicron wave and to call for a remote option pic.twitter.com/0HMVAFM2YC

— Jillian Jorgensen (@Jill_Jorgensen) January 11, 2022

Those are smart students.

I’ve been busy revamping my upcoming genetics course for that kind of eventuality. I’m less concerned about the administration putting us in lockdown (if that happens, it means students are dropping dead in the hallways), or about a mass walkout by the students, than I am with individual students having to drop out for a few days or weeks at a time to deal with their own illness, or family emergencies. I know that’s going to happen. It happened last semester, it happened last year. It’s going to happen some more this spring. So I’m putting a lot of work into revising the course to incorporate more flexibility.

There’s a limit to how much flexibility I can program in, though. There is a breaking point where I’ll be the one walking out.

I’d like to know how someone smuggled a camera into my classroom to record our interactions in the future.

Wow. I fought this video enlightening. pic.twitter.com/YbVGydqwvH

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) December 30, 2021

I’m not at all concerned about urine drinking going on, but I feel like I need to pass a rule prohibiting breathing, just to be safe. At the very least, NO SINGING.

I’ve lost of all the quack remedies for COVID that have been invented by grifters: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, bleach, betadine, etc. Here’s one we could have predicted — urine. There’s a weird fringe of urine-drinkers who have been around for a long time, so it’s unsurprising they were ready to leap into the fray.

Anti-COVID-19 “Vaccine Police” leader Christopher Key has a new quarter-baked conspiracy theory for his anti-vax followers to use to cure themselves of COVID-19: Drink their own urine. “The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy. OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need,” Key said in a video posted over the weekend on his Telegram account after being released from jail over a trespassing charge. “This has been around for centuries,” he added. “When I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt,” the anti-vaccine advocate warned while saying people might now think he is “cray cray.” “Now drink urine!” he continued. “This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” he concluded. “I drink my own urine!” Reached for comment by The Daily Beast on Sunday night, Key doubled down on what he calls “urine therapy” and railed against “foolish” people who took the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective.

Oh, you think that’s awful? Here’s something worse.

Never take a popsicle or a glass of lemonade from a stranger, and don’t let your kids take drinks from their weird friends.

My last video was edited in such a way that you could only see hints of what I was wearing, and some people were curious. It’s winter, so I was wearing a sweater, and it’s the holiday season, so of course it was a Christmas sweater, and I’m an atheist, so I don’t worship Jesus, so instead it celebrates my Lord and Savior, Darth Vader.

I know you’re envious and want one of your own, but don’t ask me where I got it, I forget.

What nonsense, you may wonder, is going to afflict us next? Surely we’ve hit rock bottom. Nope.

Cult-like extremist movements appear to provide an antidote to the potent mixture of isolation, uncertainty, changing narratives, and fear we have experienced during the pandemic by offering a skewed form of safety, stability, and certainty, along with a cohort of people who are just like us, who believe us and believe in us. As the activist David Sullivan—a man who devoted his life to infiltrating cults in order to extricate loved ones from their grip—pointed out, no one ever joins a cult: They join a community of people who see them. In 2022, this appeal of cults will only grow, and those that arise next year will make QAnon seem like the good old days.

Yeah, great, I’m going back to bed. Wake me up in, oh, 2025 and I’ll reassess.

An interesting local development: we were supposed to have a Division of Science & Math Holiday party back in December, but it got postponed to 13 January because of rising pandemic concerns. I was just notified that it has been outright canceled because those concerns have gotten worse.

I didn’t feel like a party anyway, and was planning to not show up.

We’re a bunch of scientists, you know. It’s not like we’re Boris Johnson.

Sorry. We can try poking the University of Austin with a stick, but it seems to be just lying there, inert, after the scathing laughter at the announcement of its existence. I guess Doonesbury is going to try prodding it a bit.

Do the kind of people who found fake right-wing universities read Doonesbury? Probably not. The corpse will continue to lie there, rotting.