You mean godhood doesn’t come with this job?

I was interviewed for this article about how atheists respond to signs of their own mortality. It’s a little unsurprising…atheists don’t expect to live forever, after all, so there’s no news there.

I am very uncomfortable with the comparison between my recent experiences and what Christopher Hitchens is facing. I had a little cardio-hiccup and quick & easy surgery to correct a potential problem (and a little warning to make some life style changes); Hitchens has a serious disease that is likely to take his life. These aren’t the same thing. These aren’t even close.

I’m also feeling pretty good right now. I’ve been in cardiotherapy three times a week, which has been feeling a little peculiar — I get strapped into an EKG monitor and exercise with a class of 70-80 year olds who’ve had recent heart attacks. It means for the first time in my life it’s like being the jock in PE class. I can run rings around those nice folks. And finally, the instructors have decided I’ve got no problems to worry about, and I’m graduating on Friday.

This is excellent news, because the class was scheduled right before I have to teach here at the U. So no more rushing back to class all sweaty and fatigued, and most importantly, no more keeping my chest shaved (hint if you’re going in for routine heart monitoring: a good shave will save a lot of annoyance when they start taping electrodes all over your body).

So yes, atheists are aware that they’ll die someday. And this atheist is fairly confident his death isn’t imminent, OK?

I Am Curious (Luminescent)

I just got word that I am actually written up in, ahem, Playboy magazine, in the October issue, available ’round about now at your newsstand or via your subscription. Anyone got it? I’m curious to know if they discuss my awesome virility and elegant fashions at all, or if the discussion is confined to my teaching, as they said it would be.

There is no pictorial spread. This is a men’s magazine, remember — they wouldn’t want to intimidate their readers.

By the way, they are a very nice and considerate bunch. They actually sent me notification and asked if there was anything they should be careful about when sending out press releases to local groups. Here’s part of what they sent me:

I wanted to quickly ask you all if there are any sensitivities I should be aware of before conducting any local media outreach around your campuses. I plan on doing so, and wanted to check with you all to make sure that you don’t mind being mentioned in the local paper, campus newspaper, etc., before I begin.

I’ve passed it on to the university PR department (when I told them I’d been written up in Playboy, I got a wary, “Is this a good story, or a bad story?”) and I’m letting them make those decisions. It’s a little touchy. Morris has a bunch of blue law restrictions in town, or it might even be county wide, that do not allow the sale of anything suggestive or pornographic — not even Playboy (so no copy for me until I get to a big city somewhere.)

It would be really interesting to see this article mentioned in the local newspaper, telling readers about my appearance in a Forbidden Magazine.

I had a visitor today

It was very odd, to have somebody from the greater outside world appear out of the east and actually find his way to the remote and mysterious hamlet of Morris, but there he was, and he did bring cameras, and we sat down in my living room, and our conversation was recorded and will someday be edited and appear on the interwebs, and he has since moved on into the west, on his way to the Pacific Ocean and the Shangri-la of Vancouver.

You’ll all have to look for a new video from Thunderf00t in a week or two.

15 minutes…

I’m about to enter a classroom for the first time in over a year. I feel a strange dread that I’ve forgotten how to teach.

OK, I’m back. I survived. No students passed out. I think it was OK, although it was made more difficult by the fact that it involved a transition from one instructor to another.

Now to do it again this afternoon.

Those annoying paparazzi

Can a guy get some privacy? I just learned that some snoop crashed my hospital room to get a picture of me in distress.

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There may be worse to come. I’ve lost some weight lately (low fat diets and all that, don’t you know), and because of the uncomfortable soreness of the area where doctors popped into my femoral artery, I don’t like to wear a belt just yet…so I’m ambling about the house, holding up my pants with one hand, because if I let go, they’ll be down around my ankles. This is not dignified.

And then, of course, there are the revelations about my political leanings and future plans.

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My reading habits exposed

The Chronicle of Higher Ed interviewed me a while back, and asked me about my daily read. It’s a bit strange, though…lately my reading has dried up and been replaced by typing. Gotta fix that.

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One really troubling thing, though, is the portrait they included — I presume it was made from some photo floating about the web. When did I get that old?

How being a dick probably saved my life

I see that the don’t-be-a-dick tone debate is still going on — I’ve been totally unimpressed with the arguments from the side of nice, not because I disagree with the idea that positive approaches work, but because they ignore the complexity of the problem and don’t offer any solutions but only complaints (what are they going to do, break the fingers and gag anyone they judge as ‘harming the cause’?) I side with Richard Dawkins’ comment on the issue. We don’t need to be trivially abusive, but on subjects we care about deeply, we should express ourselves with passion.

You know I’ve had this recent scary cardiac episode, and as it turns out, I think my own dickish personality probably (not certainly, since we’re dealing with odds here) helped me. There was one moment when I literally had two paths to take, and I chose what I think was the best and most rational one.

This whole hospitalization mess started a few weeks ago, when I was on my daily walk, and I’d gone a little farther and longer than I usually do. I was on my way home, and I felt a dull ache in my chest — nothing severe, nothing acute, just a soreness that spread into my left arm. And I stopped on the sidewalk, and looked ahead, where I was only a couple of blocks from home, and I looked to my right, where the hospital was located only a couple of blocks away. And the ache immediately receded, and I had a little internal debate between the nice angel on my left shoulder, and the dickish devil on my right.

And the angel said, “Oh, look, it’s just a little soreness and it’s going away already. Go home, have a cup of tea, lie down for a bit, and then you can get back to work, no worries. You’ll feel fine.”

And the devil replied with the potent one-two punch of reason and abuse: “You teach human physiology, you moron — you know this is one of the warning signs of heart disease. You’d have to be incredibly stupid to ignore this and hope it goes away…until a heart attack comes along to blow your heart up. Jerk. This isn’t even a choice.”

I thought about it a bit and realized that the remote prospect of dying (it was a very mild ache, and I had no feeling of imminent doom) was nowhere near as persuasive as the thought that I’d feel like an idiot if the iron spike of an infarct did nail my left ventricle at some time in the future, and I’d neglected a portent and hadn’t done the best thing for my health. So I turned right, even though I also felt a bit of a whiner for showing up at a hospital with such a small complaint.

Denial is so tempting: the appeal of choosing ignorance to avoid hard consequences was something I felt strongly — it would have been so nice to go home and pretend there were no problems, and I probably would have been just fine, on the surface. But the heart disease would have continued to progress, and a problem deferred would have become a problem amplified.

That is the virtue of dickishness. It provides the social and psychological penalties that counter the draw of complacency. It’s so easy to go with the flow, to pretend that a thousand issues, whether it’s homeopathy or religion or transcendental meditation or an absence of critical thinking or a lack of concern about our health, are OK because they make people happy, and it’s even easier to demonize the cranky Cassandras and make them the problem, because they make people uncomfortable.

But if bad ideas don’t have immediate consequences to the placid mob, and if everyone is being Mr and Mrs Nice Folk and reassuring everyone that they’re still good people no matter what foolishness they might believe in, where is the motivation to change? A skeptic who thinks their mission is to provide only positive messages and lead everyone along with affirmations and friendliness is going to be an ineffective skeptic.

A fistful of stents

Here’s my status right now, for those who have been wondering.

First of all, I’m not dead yet. Let’s get that out of the way.

Yesterday morning was the big event here in hospital-land: I was to get an angiogram, this procedure where they thread wires up your femoral artery to you heart and start poking around with dyes and things to figure out what’s going on. You’re conscious, mostly, through the procedure, so thought I’d live-blog it, if I could, but it turns out they don’t want you monkeying around with anything while the doctors are examining you from the inside out, and there were going to be occasional sprays of x-rays, and I was going to be on some mind-altering drugs. So I resolved to use my keen scientific mind to observe and report back later on what it was like.

They wheeled me in and a nice nurse named Phil leaned over me and told me he was going to put some drugs in my IV that would make me drowsy, which was silly — it was 8am, I was wide awake — but he gave them to me anyway. Then someone else appeared on my right side and shaved my pubic hair. Not everything — he left me a short wide rectangular patch for a landing strip that looked like Hitler’s mustache…and then I noticed that Hitler had a very large nose and two big pink hairy eyeballs, and that kept me amused for about 10 minutes. I think that was my last lucid thought. (Well, it seemed lucid at the time.)

The Jawas came in. They might have been doctors, but they were all covered in robes and hoods and speaking animatedly in some language that wasn’t Englisth — it was very buzzy and abrupt. They didn’t talk to me anyway, but sometimes told Phil things that he would translate for me. They descended on my right thigh and proceeded to build an airlock so they could crawl inside and party on my left ventricle. I tried to tell them that the Left Ventricle was not some trendy nightclub — it’s just a storage unit where I keep my Jesus-shaped hole — but I think what came out of my mouth was a kind of mumbly moan in Ewok, and everone knows Jawas don’t understand Ewok.

And giant cameras just glided by majestically on motorized trackways above my head.

It hurt quite a bit, in a very remote, distracted, distant way, especially then the anaconda in my leg writhed awkwardly, but I was mostly unperturbed. I actually fell asleep a few times.

Then Phil’s giant head floated into view — I think it was mounted on one of the camera tracks—and he announced, “Good news! No cabbage for you!”, which was very cheering, since I don’t particularly care for cabbage. And then the Jawas stomped on my heart for another hour or so. While I napped.

Later, after the cotton swabbing drained out of my cranium, I realized it was very good news. The threat hanging over me was an angiogram followed by chest-cracking and open heart surgery and prolonged pain, but the clever doctors had looked me over and decided they could patch me up with set of stents instead of that elaborate bypass surgery. Yay, doctors! It’s the difference between 8 weeks of ouchy hurty messy convalescence and less than two weeks of taking it easy.

The last fun bit was when they had to strip the hoses from my thigh, which involved a quick yank and then a doctor with very large strong hands holding my naked thigh in a death grip for half an hour. I tell you, that’s a very awkward situation for small talk.

So, I might be getting out today. They’re doing more tests, checking out my kidneys (which had a lot of extra work to do clearing out the contrast dye). Right now, my life consists of lying abed while a pretty nurse comes by every hour and says, “I need to see your groin!”, whips off my skimpy robe, and coos about how good it looks. I think she’s probably talking about my bloody wound, not anything else (and I hope it’s not because she’s a fan of Adolf Hitler caricatures!)

But soon enough I’ll be off to resting at home, beginning the cardio therapy the doctor will no doubt be putting me on, and back to classes and writing. Expect blogging to be on the light side, though, while I catch up on rest and other pressing projects that were interrupted by this surprise event.

I’m doomed now

I’m in big trouble. My wife is sending me pictures of cute puppy dogs to make me feel better.

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Where’s the slime? The chitin? The tentacles? How is this supposed to cheer me up?

Anyway, I’ve been trapped in the hospital overnight, and this morning they promise to finally give me the really good drugs and turn me into a vegetable for a few hours while they stick knives in my heart, which will be a welcome relief from the excruciating boredom. Then I get to wake up to the pain, which won’t be fun at all. At any rate, this is the scary morning, and the rest is recuperation — I’ll let you all know once I’m semi-functional again. Maybe this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow.