If I still lived in Durham...

I'd certainly go to this event featuring nisi_la:

In about a week I'm going to speak at a symposium on science and religion at Duke University. The symposium is called "Competing Cosmologies, Effecting Worlds: The Intersections of Science and Religion." I'm sharing the bill with Kim Stanley Robinson and two academics: Bruce Lincoln, a professor in the University of Chicago's Divinity Department; and Michael Taussig, another professor, from Columbia University's Anthropology Department. Heavy hitters, anyone?

My speech's title is "Ifa Cosmology: Reverence, Science, and Social Technology." The title of this post is another way of putting what I mean to say. I'll talk for maybe 25 minutes and read a section from my story "Good Boy." That's the one I call my "space negro" story, featuring John Lilly, Parliament/Funkadelic, and divine possession. I'll round off my hour with a Q&A session, and the symposium's last hour will also be devoted to discussion.

[...]

Open to the public and free of charge. If you happen to be somewhere near Durham, NC on January 29, I highly recommend you attend.

Your diagnosis is, you're a fat fatty with lots of fat

Shocker: Being fat means doctors don't take you seriously.

I've mostly avoided this--doctors tell me that I should lose weight, and there are definitely problems I have that are either exacerbated by my weight (the edema) or caused by the same things that lead to me being fat (e.g., general poor fitness due to lack of exercise), but my docotrs are mostly pretty good about actually treating me as a person rather than a fat thing made of fat.

Actually, the worst thing I've got going on right now along those lines is that I think my vascular specialist has already characterized me as someone who wants to find any excuse not to wear compression (which is only about 25% true) and doesn't, imho, pay enough attention to possible secondary problems. But I'm pretty sure that's not directly related to my weight.