I'm old enough to know better. I have (through a combination of stars and planets and my inability to shut up) bought myself 4 observations tomorrow by two different people. Immediately after school I am speaking at a memorial service for a remarkable woman Dr. Elena Scambio who created the program that allowed me to slide from medicine to public education. I have a letter of recommendation promised to a student yesterday.

Tonight I am trying to make models of meiosis out of newspaper bags (the Star-Ledger is yellow, the New York Times blue) while building 5 accelerometers out of empty soda bottles and saved corks. I am drinking the last needed bottle now.

None of this matters to most folks reading this, and it's not the point anyway.

35 years ago, when I was in high school, we didn't have the internet. We didn't have personal computers.We didn't have texting. We didn't have individual phones. We didn't have 452 channels on the television. We didn't have digital cameras. We didn't have a clue.

So what am I doing when I should be prepping and praying for tomorrow? I'm playing on the computer, listening to American Idiot loud enough to make my ears bleed, thinking about people I never saw in natural light.

I've caught the disease. And it's not healthy.

Yesterday I held a live wild oyster in my hand, about 4 or 5 years old. It had broken off the jetty, and was sitting on the rippled sand flat. Over the next few tides, it will sink further into the sand, and when the water warms up in spring, it will starve.

It is doomed, and does not know it.

We still don't have a clue. The danger is thinking that we do.

Dr. Scambio's picture is from Bloomfield College; the oyster bed is from the South Carolina Dep't of Natural Resources.