My kid’s go-to is, “Mommy, can you tell me that story again about how you were completely normal during COVID?” The story lasts practically longer than World War I, and I can’t resist the need to share it.
The Last Peach
Obviously, peaches are gone from my life forever because of diabetes but I am and always have been like this husband. The “save it for the kids” woman will guilt-trip everybody into infinity with her litany of sacrifices. No peach on the planet will make a child as happy as a content mom who isn’t a sacrificial victim.
Just eat the stupid peach, woman, and stop congratulating yourself for your self-denial because it’s totally fake. I’m not particularly young, to put it mildly, yet I remember women of my mother’s generation go on and on about this stupid last peach. A different continent, a different century, yet women still priss up all over the place about the damn peach.
A Professional Gripe
A minor professional gripe I have is that, in the past, when one used to do book reviews, one would receive an actual copy of the book in the mail. Now all you get is a stupid .pdf. How exactly is one supposed to read and underline a .pdf? This is reviewing for academic publication. I need to do a lot of leafing back and forth and underlining. Also, one chooses books to review because one hopes to use them later in one’s scholarship. And I simply can’t use anything for research that isn’t a real book on paper. My brain refuses to process at the level necessary for this kind of work.
The physical copy of the book was a reward one got for reviewing. These book reviews don’t count as publications and are, of course, uncompensated. One does them as service to the profession. In other words, one does them out of the goodness of one’s heart and to keep things going in the field. Getting the book in the mail was a little bonus in a task that is otherwise academic charity. Academic books cost upwards of $100 each, and such things as book money for professors are long dead in most places.
In the American Air
I tried telling Klara the story of my school observation.
“Everybody at that school was African American,” I said.
“So what?” she immediately interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with that. They are people, too!”
What is it, folks? Do Americans imbibe it with the air? Is it an instinct to react this way to any mention of black people? There was nothing in my demeanor or affect when I delivered that line that was negative. I had a good experience at that school as evidenced by my earlier posts. My kid grew up observing me with my friend from Africa. I organized parties at our house where everybody except us was black. She has no reason to suspect me of bad attitudes towards black people.
I witnessed this years ago when my friend from Latvia said in front of her homeschooled American son that the best basketball players are black and he reacted like she’d announced she was joining the Ku Klux Klan. “Yours will be like that, too,” she told me and I thought she was full of it.
The Funniest Headline
This is the funniest headline today:
You don’t need a translation. Look at the last names.
Different Teaching
If my career in higher education is curtailed, I’ll apply to teach Spanish at this school. Teaching languages to African American students is the easiest, most enjoyable thing ever. The students are very lively and participate in roleplaying and language experimentation eagerly and happily. Every one came up to me, introduced themselves and engaged me in conversation. These are high-schoolers, by the way. Normally, one doesn’t expect from them great feats of sociability with middle-aged strangers.
I’ve observed our student-teachers in an all-white school, and the silence was deafening. Everybody had the largest broom up their anal cavity. Students ignored my existence completely because nobody told them to acknowledge it.
Both ways of being have positive and negative consequences. But it’s definitely an experience to teach a more boisterous group. Out of the 10 students in the classroom today, one had to be removed by security. Three more had to be coaxed extensively to participate in group activities. Two of them were on something that made them sluggish and unresponsive. But I love working with students with behavioral issues. I’m bizarrely good at it.
Observation
Everybody at the school where I’m doing student-teacher observation is black. I haven’t experienced being the only white person in a crowd since my trip to Cuba in 1999.
Speaking of Cuba, any news? Will we finally see the collapse of the Cuban Revolution? Which is not an event but the name of the regime.
I Voted
I voted in the Republican primary today. I’m hoping against hope that we will be able to get rid of the unelectable moron Darren Bailey as the R candidate for governor. This is also an opportunity to support some great R people on the local level. One of them saved us all during COVID and then got displaced by a former colleague of mine. It’s all my fault, actually, because I couldn’t get her a contract amidst budget cuts. She had nothing to do and went into politics, displacing this firebrand Republican guy who also happens to be the husband of a friend of mine. Small towns are like that.
I’m having a crazy day today, having to drive to St Louis for a student-teacher observation in French, of all things, and then back for two DEI trainings one right after another. But at least I voted Republican in the morning. That compensates me somewhat.
Far Away Lands
Actually, Tel Aviv is about a thousand miles farther away from Washington DC than Kyiv. I don’t remember the distance between DC and Tehran but it’s definitely farther away than even Tel Aviv.
This isn’t about knowledge of geography. Obviously, it’s fine not to know the mileage. But Kyiv lies farther away than Tel Aviv in Trump’s imagination. He perceives Middle Eastern problems as something close and European ones as being far away. You can’t successfully put an end to mass migration from a world that you inhabit imaginatively. We don’t have leadership that perceives America as Western and originating in Europe.
Sniveling Liberals
My contempt for these pseudo-rebellious, sniveling pieces of ridiculous liberal trash is so deep that it will probably land me in hell. But I can’t help it. I truly despise them.
I haven’t watched this vomit-inducing documentary and I’m not planning to do it at any point.
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