Sabbatical

Today I said good-bye to another place. A colleague took me to lunch. I visited with the program director. And in the evening, my last college dinner. 

The college dinners are so special--I sat beside a physics professor, across from a veterinary radiologist and a historian of Anglo-Saxon art. I was katy-corner from a guy who helped draft a report on refugee integration, which will inform Labour's approach. So of course, I took the opportunity to question him about immigration. The man beside me, it turns out, was an animal rights legal scholar! So I questioned him about the relationship between disability rights and animal rights at the most theoretical level, something I've really wanted to know about ever since reading Peter Singer. I was slightly embarrassed to eat steak beside him, a vegan, who compared bringing a deer you hunted home to killing a child and throwing it over your shoulder. (His argument is more subtle than that; I think he was trying to shock me.) But it's hard to shock me because I think of red meat as a health food, which has been my firm position since Q's birth when red meat and floradix returned me to health. Also, the refugee scholar was questioning a scholar from India about her views about the Indian election. I couldn't quite hear their conversation because it was too far away, but I sure wanted to. 

The food is just ok, but the conversation is always stimulating.