Iris Vander Pluym is holding a virtual birthday party for me. I expect you all to do likewise <invaderzimvoice>RIGHT NOW</invaderzimvoice>
I’m going off to the local F-Word Conference now. I’ll be back to check on you all later. <invaderzimvoice>OBEY! PARTY!</invaderzimvoice>
So last month I registered for the Women in Secularism 2 conference in Washington, DC, reserved a hotel room, and went to book a flight out…and was shocked at the prices, roughly $500-$600, and some of the cheaper flights wanted to land me in Baltimore. It made no sense — I could fly to Seattle (and will be, later this month!) at a fraction of that price. So I didn’t book, and just waited.
And then I checked again today, and found lots of flights at half the original price. It’s like playing Calvinball, the rules just change at the airlines’ whims.
Anyway, yes, I’m going to flit into DC the morning of 17 May. How many of you will I be seeing at the event? Now might be a good time to arrange your flights, because who knows what the prices will be like tomorrow.
Mainly because I’ve been writing like a fiend for the last two weeks when I haven’t been driving across the state. So I took a couple days away from the computer, mostly.
Went on a little seven-mile round trip hike in the National Park next door. No great feat compared to what I used to do routinely, especially since the total elevation gain was less than 500 feet. But it’s the first hike of that length I’ve done in some months, so it did me more or less in. Especially the part about the mile and a half furthest from the trailhead being on deep sand. Which meant three miles hiked on deep sand, as I had to come back. Ow my aching lower extremities.
Along the Boy Scout Trail in Joshua Tree National Park
The trail led to Willow Hole, a seasonal wetland with the aforementioned trees in the middle of the bouldery part of the park called the Wonderland of Rocks:
Just upstream from Willow Hole.
Got there, sat, drank water, heard my favorite desert birdsong, from the canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus):
[Source]
All in all, a good day. Ow.
Miri is ruining everyone’s fun again, telling stories about being bullied in school, and showing this fierce video.
I was lucky. I wasn’t really bullied; my fate was to be neglected and marginalized. I was the dirt poor kid who wasn’t a jock or popular, so I was mostly uncategorizable and overlooked. An example to illustrate the weird social limbo I was in: I was only one of four kids at the school to be a national merit finalist; I’d gotten a near-perfect score on the SATs. We all got invited to the principal’s office when this was announced, and he sat us down: the basketball star, the doctor’s kid, the straight A student (and no resentment against any of those three — all were good people), and me. The principal knew all the others well, they had a good reputation, and he was joking around with them, and then he turned and gave me this look…’whothehellisthis and whyshouldItalkto him’, sniffed and turned back to the others, without saying a word to me.
We got the honor of a few minutes announcement at a school assembly, and it was similarly weird. Each of us four were announced, the teachers and principal said a few lovely things about them, and then they came to me, last, and just said my name, nothing more, before moving on. It was nice to be mentioned, but man, I was clearly regarded as the aberrant weirdo who was only there by mistake. I was the outlier, the person from the wrong class (make no mistake, classism thrives in America), the nobody who didn’t fit.
Again, I wasn’t bullied much in high school. I wasn’t angry at that treatment. What it did instead was make me someone who never felt a lot of self-worth and just kind of generally alone and miserable. But fortunately another thing I lacked was the serious depression that many people experience, even when they aren’t neglected, and so I’ve managed to cope.
I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like to actually have a teacher take an interest in me and encourage me, but at least I never had one make my life difficult. I was too invisible for that.
Having reviewed my schedule for my Bay Area visit, including the fact that Tuesday evening will likely be mainly consumed with helping my Dear Old Mom celebrate her 40th birthday,* I have concluded that I will be having a beer at the Jupiter in Berkeley starting at approximately 5:30 on Wednesday the 27th. The Jupiter is close to the Downtown Berkeley BART station. As the bearded hippie, I will be easy to spot. Hope to see you there.
In other news, I gave my old growth desert lecture a couple weeks back here in town, and a report on that lecture has just shown up in the local press. The reporter, a lovely person, got a couple minor details wrong but I’m always glad for a sympathetic story on desert plants showing up in desert newspapers.
* for approximately the 30th time
With very little notice, I’m going to be in the Berkeley-Oakland area Tuesday and Wednesday, Feb. 26 & 27. My schedule is somewhat in flux at the moment what with borrowing cars and catching up with close friends and family I haven’t seen in too long, but should there be sufficient interest in a FlashHorde Beer Hour, I will carve out the time to make that happen. Discuss.
I am relieved to announce that this book thingie
The best thing about it: I really, really love editors. They have a skill that they apply well, and they make everything twinkle sninily that they touch. I wish I could take this one and make her copy edit all my blog posts from now on (even though she’d probably correct “sninily” and tell me I have to explain these weird terms.)
The worst thing: this book has been moldering at the publishers for so long that I really felt this terrible urge to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up…an act both temporally impossible and contradictory, because then it would take even longer to get out.
Also, I’ve got other deadlines stacked up awaiting my service right now.
I’m wrapping up book editing today, so I plan on spending the whole afternoon staring fixedly at a screen (oh, wait, isn’t that usually what I’m doing? OK, staring with less typing). I am going to be so boring for a while (oh, wait, I’m always boring. I might as well just wrap this up, every word is a lie anyway).
Restart: busy. Staying offline for a while.
But I’m thinking…who would like to do a Pharyngula hangout this weekend? Leave a comment, suggest times (it would be nice to bring in people who usually have time zone problems), and possible topics. Maybe I should nag this Chris Clarke fella to join in, too.
Now…back to work.
I hope you all have grand plans to celebrate. I’m a bit swamped with work today, so I think I’ll be deferring my holiday to this weekend.
I think I’ll go to Florida. We’ve just dug out from a blizzard, so I think it’s brilliant of me to flit down to Fort Lauderdale.
Hmm. Maybe I should visit Broward College while I’m in the neighborhood. It looks like a good place.
And as long as I’m there, I should join in the Broward Darwin Day event, give a couple of talks, maybe say hello to James Randi, you know, the usual.
It’s what Charles Darwin would do.
