Manly courage

Let me tell you about the first time I asked my future wife out on a date. I was 17. I was terrified. It took me about 3 weeks to screw up my courage, and every day would begin with this absolute, sinking certainty that there was no way she would ever say yes. Then, every time I worked up my nerve, I didn’t have an opportunity to talk to her alone — and even worse than being rejected would be getting rejected publicly. I was very proud of myself when I finally got bold enough to ask her out right in front of one of her friends.

Louis CK reminds me, though, that it required pretty much no courage at all. She was the brave one when she said yes.

Do not read the comments on the youtube video. Do not read the comments on the youtube video. Do not read the comments on the youtube video. Lewis’ Law is in full effect.

Last day of classes!

And you know what that means? The last assignments all come in today, and all the students want to know what their grades are right now. I’m stocking up on red pens and planning to retreat to an undisclosed location to mark up papers until my eyes bleed.

I’m cured, no more meat

My wife is a vegetarian, and I’ve mostly cut meat out of my diet, too — I’ll indulge a bit when I travel, but that’s about it. But I’m done now. It makes no sense: it’s not sustainable or economical, but worse, it’s brutal and cruel. Rolling Stone has just published a remarkable expose of Big Meat, the factory farms that abuse animals.

I made the mistake of watching the videos, too. Fortunately, my dinner had been vegetarian already, or I might have lost it. So be warned.

Really, everyone, this is a small step. We’ve been cutting back on meat for years — I might have a small portion, once a week, if that. We’ve already got all the recipes we need, my wife is already fully vegetarian, this is just making a little more commitment on my part. It’ll be an easy transition.

Just so you know

Next week is the last week of classes. I am behind on my grading. I am on a search committee — phone interviews next week. My driveway is covered in snow. I have 3 exams to write right now. Immediately after finals I’m flying off to Boulder, Colorado. I may be slightly unresponsive to external stimuli for a time.

That is all.

Prezzy!

It’s not even Christmas yet, and Mary and I got a present in the mail.

pillow

It turns out it has magical properties, too. All morning, this cat we’re fostering (want her?) has been pestering me, clambering about and digging her claws into me and nagging me to feed her, and I sat down next to the pillow, and she fled. I think she had presentiments of her fate if she persisted.

Thanks, Caine!

My Thanksgiving plans

This is pretty much my plan for tomorrow.

Although, typical selfe-centred Brit, he doesn’t seem to realize that Thanksgiving is not about celebrating our separation from England, it’s about celebrating our plundering of the wealth of the native people of North America.

We are actually literally doing no work for Thanksgiving at all. We’re going to meet up with our son in St Cloud and probably go out to a Chinese restaurant or something.

We will not be going shopping at any time this weekend. I think that’s the other, modern meaning of Thanksgiving: it’s time to launch the orgy of bourgeois capitalist consumption.

#Skepticon, I wish I knew how to quit you

I’m in the midwest, I was going to fly to my home in the midwest via a stop in the midwest. I don’t know if you heard, but the midwest was a meteorological mess yesterday, so my flights were all cancelled, and I’m stranded at Skepticon. Which isn’t so bad, except for the part where I was on the phone, on hold, for over an hour with United, trying to rebook my flights. They play this short, twangy riff on the United jingle with electric guitars, over and over and over, while they make you wait for a real person. I would have preferred accordion music. It was raw torture, music that had to have been specifically selected to drive customers off the phone.

But otherwise, I just had an easy evening with the organizers and a few speakers who were also held over for another day, and now I get to wait for an airplane. Home and to work!

The cherry dream

cherry

It all started with the wine last night — a dark red, with cherry and chocolate notes. The chocolate I can take or leave, but cherry…cherry is my flavor, and it reacted with the phlegmy mass building up in my sinuses to leach cherry dreams into my brain. This damned cold made my sleep fitful, as well, so unlike my usual nights, when I sleep deeply and blissfully so my dreams all dissipate before they pass into my awareness, I drifted shallowly in the Lethe, my head bobbing above the surface, and I remembered all, a rare experience.

Weird thing, most of the dreams I remember have salmon in them, as does this one. But it’s not got much salmon. It’s mostly about the cherry trees. OK, maybe a fair amount of salmon.

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Avoid the racket

Tauriq Moosa has a righteously indignant article on diamonds and engagement rings. Diamonds are rocks with industrial utility, but we’ve been fed this horrible line of propaganda that they’re essential geegaws for lining the bower to attract a mate; it’s an incredibly dumb myth, leading to much waste and obscene profits to a monopoly. Meanwhile, the whole engagement/wedding ring ritual is absurd: jewelers have unilaterally declared that the rule of thumb is that you should spend three month’s income on an engagement ring…and people actually fall for it. Why three months? I don’t know. Maybe because the jewelers thought it was the maximum they’d be able to bilk the rubes out of.

When my wife-to-be and I decided to get married, we went to the local jeweler and spent about $100 on plain gold bands, simple and adequately symbolic. We would not have spent more, because we were already committed to a freakin’ partnership, and sinking more into a pointless status symbol would have been a reckless waste of our mutual funds. I wasn’t buying her, I wasn’t trying to impress her into thinking I was rich (we knew exactly what we were each worth financially, and that didn’t matter), and tying up our limited capital in a useless rock was not part of the agenda.

Also, Moosa says he’s giving a man’s perspective — but it’s also a sensible woman’s perspective. My wife was even more insistent on keeping our little tokens appropriately priced than I was.