So I wanted to talk about my youngest daughter, Cass, because if any of my
children are going to end up philosophers, she will.

How do I know?  Here's a clue,   I might have mentioned her before as the
one that wants to go to Oxford and I teasingly refered to her love of shoes,
but when I told my wife that joke she said "nah.  She heard they had this
PPS degree program that intrigued her.  Some interdisciplinary meld of
Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology."

"Oh".  I replied.  "That actually sounds sort of interesting.  You mean
she's really serious?"

I was taken aback.

Here's another recent clue: I mentioned to   her that meeting of the
American Philosophical Association that Craig posted?  She wanted to go.

So we did.  Sort of.

I mean, I had to try.  It was her 16th birthday and thus she should get to
choose how she wants to spend it, right?  The fact that she loves philosophy
shouldn't be held against her.  Just because she's a pretty girl, she
doesn't have to be a mindless bimbo, right?  I mean, if she was blonde like
her older sister, yeah.  But she's a redhead and thus can choose her own
path.


I mean "sort of" because I wasn't going to do anything quite so radical as
officially register or give anybody money or anything.  Obviously I was
gonna try and crash the thing.  The question would be how.  I've been to
enough conventions in SF to have a pretty good idea how these things go, and
fortunately, as Craig posted, the Royce meeting was one of the last ones.
Just hang outside and cadge a badge from a tired exiting participant, done
for the weekend.  Use my cute daughter as a foil and explanation and voila.

Or better yet, I fantasized, just wander in and if somebody tries to kick me
out I'd ARGUE with them.

For FREE!

Hah. What fun outsmarting the pros can be.  Hopefully I'd even be able to
throw in the nifty line and rub it in their face, "excuse me, I didn't come
her to argue, I came here to argue."

The bastards foiled me though.  They used their usual trick of the pros of
being esoteric and confusing.  You had to have an official program to figure
out what was going on in which room, and we could have possibly poked our
heads in and figured out, but most of the rooms were full of chairs and not
many people.

Which made it too embarrassing to interrupt the serious reading of papers,
but on the other hand what a bunch of dweebs philosophical associations can
be - reading their serious papers into the silence of empty rooms.

They need some cute redheads to spice things up a bit, imo.

So we didn't find the Royceans, but we heard philosophy in the halls, and
enjoyed that.  And the streets of san francisco, where I always get
hopelessly lost.  I just let Cass read the map  and followed her
directions.  We went shopping in Chinatown, we had a late late dinner, we
drove late to back to her school.

We had a good time.
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