I’m amazed by my Associate Dean. He is a man of truly infinite patience and kindness. Not remotely a pushover. The expression “balls of steel” was created for this guy. Machiavellian in his plotting capacity. But his reserves of patience are infinite. He has about 70 times more absolute walnuts total morons wonderful people and great intellectuals working under him than I do. Yet he never loses his patience. To give just one example, there’s a form several of us have to sign digitally. We’ve signed these forms for years, yet there’s been an endless exchange of emails about the form because we are just not managing to do it. Instead of telling us all to bite it, he filled the form himself and emailed it to us.

How does he do it? OK, he’s religious. But so am I! And it’s not helping. I told the priest at confession about my irritability. He started giving me instruction, and I immediately got annoyed. So that’s a work in progress.

I’m good when I have time to react. I meditate a lot by way of decorating my notebook. But my instantaneous in-person reaction is too fast. I have the words “wow, what an incredible moron you are” pulsating on my face like a huge neon sign before I can get a handle on myself.

By the way, there are two people on this planet who don’t know about my short fuse, moodiness, and congenital judgmentalism. And they don’t believe me when I tell them. These people are my husband and child. They think I’m the most even-tempered ray of sunshine that ever existed. So I’m not completely hopeless.

I just don’t love people enough, that’s the problem.

We have two courses that have been severely under enrolled both times we offered them. They don’t go towards any degree requirement. As a result, the Dean’s office decided not to offer them in the Fall. The people teaching these courses are understandably upset. They are not tenured, and the absence of these courses means they make less money. They started pressuring me to open these sections. I explained to them that this is not a decision I am authorized to make. There’s no procedure by which I can open any courses without the signature of the Associate Dean. I promised the colleagues to argue their case to the Dean. I immediately did exactly that and sent all of the paperwork. The Dean’s office informed me that they have taken the issue under consideration and will let us know the decision soon. I communicated that information to the colleagues involved.

Immediately after that, the colleagues organized a pressure campaign on me from the students. I started receiving dozens of messages, spamming my inbox. Teary delegations of students started showing up at my office and classroom and interrupting my teaching.

I wrote a very kind message to the colleagues involved, explaining once again that there’s nothing more I can do and kindly asking them to stop. As we all know, I have a bit of a temper. It took a lot of self-control to write a kind, polite message. This is the busiest time of the academic year. I’m drowning in paperwork and email. But I overcame my deep desire to call these colleagues absolute walnuts and egregious numbskulls. In response, they told the students to badger me harder. The obvious result is that I’m not motivated to do any favors to these colleagues at all.

My question is, under what theory of the mind do such people operate? These are both very middle-aged people, not excitable kids. They should have found out by now that the only way to interact with somebody on whose goodwill you depend for many different things is by making yourself agreeable. I have gotten an enormous lot of good stuff for my colleagues at the department by cultivating goodwill among the administration and support staff. I’ve smiled, I’ve been patient, I’ve thanked for every little bit. People are stunned by how much I managed to wrangle out of the cold, steely jaws of the administration. I’m naturally not given to any of these behaviors. I’m naturally grumpy, cantankerous, and with a tragically short fuse. But I overcome these inclinations because if I gave free reign to them, my department would be where the Physics department is now. Which is not in existence.

It is not my decision whether to open these sections. But it is 100% my decision whether to make the position of one these colleagues permanent. The next Chair is a very close friend of mine which is widely known. Am I extremely motivated to inflict the colleague who is being an absolute walnut and acting like a total brat on my own close friend as a permanent hire? Clearly, not. Why is she tanking her chances for a permanent job over something that cannot bring any gain? There’s got to be some reasoning behind it but I can’t figure out what it is.

Today, Russia carried out targeted strikes on a Catholic church in Lviv and a maternity hospital in Ivano-Frankivsk. I’m still waiting for my friend in Lviv to confirm that he is ok.

As God is my witness, I can’t understand how anybody can support this.

What does progress want? asks Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine. This is the most important question asked by the English philosopher in his magnum opus, and I’ve never seen anybody put it so bluntly before. Formulating the question is half the job of any inquiry. Kingsnorth hits it out of the park with this way of putting it.

What is the purpose of the progressivist project? We can see that it motivates people to make great sacrifices, to lay down their lives, even. There must be some great purpose behind this. Something so big that all of the upheaval the project creates would be justified.

And there is. This great, enormous goal is to move transcendence from the spiritual to the material realm. The project aims to turn humans into gods. It abolishes the otherworldly realm and endows human beings with the powers formerly attributed to God.

Why not? one might ask. Why do we even need God? Why can’t we establish our own moral framework and set our own goals? What’s so wrong with seeking transcendence our own way without involving the supernatural?

My answer—and please remember that I disagree with Kingsnorth on more than I agree with him—is that we, humans, can’t come up on our own with anything except the most crude forms of self-indulgent pleasure that rots our bodies and minds. On our own, we don’t transcend what’s low about us to go higher. To the contrary, we transcend what’s middling to go into the absolute gutter. We don’t do well without fear. Fear of God, illness, poverty. If we are liberated from all those fears, we won’t enter Golden Age. We’ll enter the deepest misery.

More later.

If I retire at the earliest possible date, which would be when I turn 55, my monthly retirement payment will be $3,860.

This is for a job where I only began working at the age of 33. I mean, I won’t say no to the money but isn’t it weird to expect a public education system to produce this outcome in perpetuity? Shouldn’t people work for a bit more than 22 years to get retirement? Or at least past 60? We aren’t working in the salt mines, so the job is neither physically demanding nor onerous.

I’m not turning 55 or planning to retire at all for the foreseeable future. I had to contact the retirement people for paperwork purposes and used the opportunity to have them calculate my benefits just out of curiosity.

The following components went into the creation of the miracle of the Western civilization:

1. The understanding that God is one;
2. The admiration for the powers of the human intellect and the habit of introspection that ancient Greeks discovered;
3. The knowledge that in the beginning was the Word;
4. The realization that the kingdom of God is within you.

When these things come together, you have the Western civilization. Science, art, medicine, technology, rights, literary criticism, high-trust societies of complete strangers, universities, nuclear family, representative democracy. They all come out of this mix.

OK, who told you, my friends, and did it before anybody else that Tucker is a Berkeley leftist?

Tucker: MusIim extremism is caused by the "colonial powers" pic.twitter.com/CtO2QNNANL

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 24, 2026

Now that’s he’s come out as an anti-colonialist, I rest my case.

If there’s one thing I know besides the uses of the subjunctive in Spanish and what to read, it’s leftists. Because they are everywhere in the places where I apply my mastery of Spanish subjunctive and my knowledge of literature. It would be strange if I didn’t recognize the little coocoos. What Tucker says in this video is verbatim what I heard from my Communist professor (literally, he was a proud member of the Communist Party of Spain) on September 11, 2001. The Communist professor and Tucker are also in complete agreement on Russia. And China. And I could go on.

I’ll do my “I told you so” dance in the morning because I don’t want to spook the cat at this late hour.

40% of American women, ages 15-44, would like to permanently move overseas, if possible, per Gallup.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) March 23, 2026

No, they wouldn’t. People who want to move, move. What people say is no indication of anything other than that at this particular moment they felt like saying it for whatever reason.

Only the results matter. What you want is what you have. I want to learn German, so I work on it every single day. If you want to learn German but you aren’t learning it, you don’t really want to learn German.

A conversation with a friend this morning sparked a curiosity. What is the bare minimum you think is acceptable from a spouse and children on special occasions like Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays etc?

A text? A call? Flowers? Gifts? A meal? A party?

— Southern Chestnut 🍀 (@AppyOrtho) March 22, 2026

I’m very sad for people who sincerely fail to realize how off-putting they are. “The bare minimum that is acceptable” reeks of pouty, perennially aggrieved womanhood. Everything around you dies, flowers don’t bloom, milk goes sour, and gifts dry up.

People don’t give gifts because they’ve been presented with lists of barely acceptable minimums but because it brings them joy. Gift giving is extremely enjoyable. Unless you make it unenjoyable following the recipe provided by this poster.

N announced that he wants to become more sociable to practice for his job interview and is willing to accompany me to social occasions.

“Which social occasions?” I asked. “I don’t have any social occasions beyond the coffee hour at church.”

“Well, we went to that party, remember?”

“Which party?”

“I don’t know. But it was a nice party. There were people.”

“What was the occasion?”

“How should I know? There were those gay dudes.”

“Ah! The 2023 Chairs’ retreat at the Dean’s house?”

“If you say so. We could go to that one again.”