Yes, I’m in a vile mood right now as evidenced by this photo I just took of myself. And in case you want to be critical, I don’t teach today and feel entitled to wear this dress because it’s hot.

The reason why I’m wearing this mean look on my face is the following. Today is the day that I need to resubmit my article with the changes that I have introduced. The changes have turned out to be quite profound and now I’m worried the journal will not want the article at all. I’ve been futzing with it since 8 am because I feel incapable of letting it go.

And in the midst of this painful process, I had to interrupt what I was doing and go all the way to campus to attend a committee meeting.

“Which ones of you served at this committee last year?” the bureaucrat du jour asked the committee members.

We all raised our hands.

“So all of you know how this works?” the bureaucrat continued.

We nodded.

“Well, then you know more about this than I do because I’ve never done this before,” the bureaucrat said. “In this case, if nobody has anything else to add, we can just end the meeting.”

After which I had to wait for my bus to come for 20 minutes.

And this is why I have this mean look in the photo.

Is it too much to ask that people stop using work mail lists to share their idiotic “prayerful” messages? I just received a chain email that starts with “We pray for the innocents of Iraq and Afghanistan” and I feel like I want to vomit. Why can’t people keep their intimate beliefs to themselves? Why this need to make a public spectacle of their fake faith?

I also have to wonder why these religion peddlers always end up being the most inconsiderate people on campus. I wake up to 70+ emails every day (I teach a blended course) and I end up having to sort through all kinds of crap to get to important messages. Even kitty lovers have the brains to realize that photos of their stupid pets should wait while the first month of the academic semester is over. The religious folks, however, are undaunted. No matter how busy you are, they will persecute you with completely irrelevant and obnoxious news of their idiotic prayers.

The academic blogosphere is abuzz with the news about the job posting from Colorado State University which specifies that the department is looking for a candidate with a PhD “awarded between 2010 and time of appointment“. This sounds very offensive to people who graduated in 2007-9 and haven’t been able to find a tenure-track position because of the recession.

However, after being on a few job search committees, I suspect that this job listing doesn’t aim to exclude people just because they happened to get their PhD in 2009 rather than in 2010. Rather, this might be an attempt to avoid being inundated with applications from housewives who left their careers 10-15 years ago because they had deluded themselves into thinking that their husbands’ success and money had anything to do with them. After those husbands dump them, housewives often try to revive their careers and start applying for positions. However, the years they spent out of work make them incapable of behaving themselves with any degree of propriety. After reading cover letters by housewives narrating in detail the story of their divorce and heaping abuse on the “bastard” of a husband (once again, this is an application for a job in academia) and leafing through letters of recommendation from women who recommended the applicant for a professorial position on the basis of giving birth at the same time as she did and knowing her as a very good person and a nice neighbor, I think any method is good enough to prevent them from applying altogether.

And then there is always that mentally unstable person that each department has as a follower and who applies with mile-long cover letters for absolutely any position offered at this department (from the secretary to the departmental chair.) Our department has a long-distance stalker of this kind.