I've previously mentioned that I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and perhaps seek out more fear and mayhem than is entirely healthy. As I suss out the contours of this particular psychological peccadillo, I've begun to grasp that while I'm mildly addicted to fear of my own death, I'm thoroughly petrified (like most people) of public humiliation. Given the prospect of making an intolerable schmuck out of myself, I fairly typically shrivel into myself and refuse to get off the couch.

Why the conversational detour, you ask? I'm dipping my toes in the fetid swamp of academia once more. My friend Jocelyn (who just laudably had a paper published in The Lancet) is organizing a conference on Global Public Health at SFU in May, which includes some subthemes of Conflict and Public Health, and Global Mental Health. Some strange amalgam of those two apparently covers the odd academic space inhabited by my unpublished thesis on the evolutionary psychology of suicide terrorism. So Jocelyn has asked me to submit my thesis for inclusion in the conference, the expected outcome of which would be me blathering for half an hour in front of 50 bellicose skeptics who desperately want to prove me decisively wrong. And, if possible, they'd prefer to demonstrate further that I'm a feeble dimwit with intolerably sloppy research techniques using a psychological framework that more than a few people have (utterly wrongly) labeled as enabling racism, sexism, and cultural discrimination. I've never presented a paper at a conference before; I'm unfamiliar with such academic rigours and I have a sneaking suspicion that my thesis advisor in grad school never actually read my paper. So it's possible that I'll open a merciless torrent of ridicule on my embryonic academic reputation, annihilating a field I'd otherwise like to develop much further (since no one else seems to be doing so). I could even lose control of all muscle function halfway through the presentation.

I'm going to do it anyway. But some cathartic kvetching is exactly what the doctor ordered. This is a necessary rite of passage, particularly given that 2 years absence from the cheery world of counterterrorism policy has started to blunt my carefully cultivated (and entirely psychosomatic) micro-reputation as an International Man of Mystery. I'm strongly considering launching my PhD pursuit in the next few months and this would be a fine start. And besides, I was supremely confident in these ideas two years ago when i wrote the thing - I must have been on to something then, right?

So I'm going to go dust off my thesis and immerse myself in my own gibberish about status competition in environments of externalized morality, and kin-altruism identification mechanisms, and higher-order theory of mind. Somewhere in there is 250 words that makes my ideas sound relevant to this conference without sounding utterly ludicrous. Wish me luck.

P.S. It'll also take my mind off the fact that someone important to me is having some inexplicable and scary medical issues very far away, about which I can do very little. I don't feel like getting into the details, but I'm more worried than I probably should be, which does very little to alleviate my apprehensions. So a little ivory-tower sequestration is probably just what I need.