Some places we aren’t:

Flashback Weekend in Chicago, featuring a 40th anniversary reunion event for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman‘s workshop, Working with Our Enemies: Finding Freedom from Hostility and Fear (Admittedly, we were too lazy to go to this. We could have).

The US Olympic Team Trials for Track and Field in Eugene, Oregon. It seemed like a wasted trip since we’re pretty confident that as soon as we tried to run they’d arrest us. We’re old and slow. And don’t do track and field. I hear Oregon is nice, so there’s that, but it wasn’t enough.

Crafty Bastards in Silver Spring.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It’s not that I don’t enjoy being packed into an enclosed area with a lot of sweaty tourists on a sweltering day, who doesn’t love that? It’s mostly that I shared an office with NASA-types in Grad School and I think I’ve probably explored that culture enough, thanks. Some nice people doing cool things, to be sure, but I’m not sure this is a culture we want to share with impressionable youngsters from Iowa. Bhutan and…NASA? I honestly thought that was something made up by The Onion.

I can picture the tent full of post-docs who haven’t bathed in a week, are so jittery from mainlining espresso that they’re speaking really fast and in falsetto like Mickey Mouse yet none of them notices, and have been sustaining themselves by grazing off the olive bar at Shopper’s Food Warehouse. The very idea of that makes me slightly itchy, I think I need to stay in my house today.

FYI: If you go to Folklife and you visit the NASA area and you hear vigorous and heated discussions about RDA, they’re referring to Richard Dean Anderson, star of Stargate not a new kind of rocket fuel.

Also, “DIp” is Klingon for beer.

You can thank me later for this information.