N. has lived in the Midwest since 2003. Still, he doesn’t seem to understand what the area is about. Every time we go to a restaurant here, he asks for a cappuccino.

“A what?” a waiter asks, looking as mystified as if we requested blinis with caviar.

“A cappuccino,” N. responds, undaunted.

“Erm. . . we don’t have anything like that,” the waiter always says uncomfortably. “We might have some decaf, though.”

Time and again, I have tried telling N. that we are in the Midwest and all that restaurants serve is a strange, sad-looking liquid with a smell of burnt day-old coffee grounds they proudly pass for coffee.

N.’s faith in humanity is such, though, that he keeps looking for a cappuccino at Midwestern restaurants.

This avatar looks exactly like me!

Some of the answers I received to the question “What is the name of the group of languages Spanish belongs to?” included:

1. Nahuatl
2. Indigenous
3. Arabic
4. Visigothian
5. Christian
6. Latino/a

To be fair, 12 out of 20 students in this course got 100% for the mini-quiz. So things are not as dire as they might seem.

And you know what is the name of the indigenous civilization whose capital, Tenochtitlan, is located where today’s Mexico City is? The one conquered by Hernan Cortes?

The Inuit.

At least, this student is aware of the Inuit, so that’s something.

A student kept referring to “aerobic language” and “aerobic people” in his mini-quiz.

Of course, he meant “Arabic.”

Welcome to the Midwest, everybody!

One of the best non-medicinal ways of combating chronically high blood pressure is to eat a small peace of dark chocolate every day.

So I decided to make this sacrifice for my health and bought 3 large bars of Russian chocolate at the store right now. People who like chocolate will probably not understand me when I say that it’s an effort to make myself eat chocolate every day.

Wouldn’t it be great if one could substitute a piece of chocolate with a piece of sausage to improve one’s health?

Of course, I also bought sunflower and pumpkin seeds. They are even better for hypertensives but at least I love them.

A professor I had in grad school once told us that the only occasion for which he had interrupted the regular teaching schedule was when the verdict in the OJ Simpson trial was announced. He said that this verdict was so important that he dedicated the class to waiting for it and then discussing it when it finally came in. Hugo Schwyzer, a popular blogger, mentioned two events for which he departed from the scheduled topic of discussion in class: the OJ Simpson verdict and the events on 9/11.

The fascination with the OJ Simpson trial has always baffled me. I was stunned when I heard a TV anchor say something to the effect that the entire world eagerly awaited the moment when the verdict would come in. I was even more stunned when quite a few of the Americans I met when I came to live in the US started asking me what we in Ukraine had thought of the verdict. Ethnocentrism truly rules if people manage to convince themselves that a verdict in some tawdry trial can possibly be of interest to people living on a different continent. It is as if we didn’t have our own issues, problems, natural disasters, political upheavals, and even – believe it or not – famous trials.

I wasn’t here, of course, when the entire OJ Simpson drama unfolded. At the time of 9/11, however, I was teaching my very first college-level course in Canada. I wasn’t scheduled to teach on Tuesday the eleventh (that was the day when I attended grad courses) but I did teach my Beginners Spanish course on the next day. People have often asked me how I addressed the issue with the students. The truth is, however, that I didn’t. I conducted a regular class where we conjugated verbs and did vocabulary exercises (I wasn’t a very good Spanish teacher then).

For me, the goal was to show to the students that a university is a temple of knowledge, a place where the learning process continues as planned no matter what. In this, I was inspired by the story of Fray Luis de Leon who, having been imprisoned for five years by the Inquisition, returned to the classroom and continued the lecture with the words, “As I was saying yesterday. . .”

Today, I read a post by feMOmhist who tried to talk about what was happening to her students 10 years ago. As you will see from the post, she found it very hard to establish a meaningful dialogue with the students at that time and only ended up being exposed to their feelings of the need for vengeance against vaguely defined “them.” Ten years ago, my knowledge of the US history and culture was quite limited. If somebody like feMOmhist, who is a historian and obviously a lot more knowledgeable about the US than I am, didn’t manage to get the students to discuss what was going on productively, I would have failed even more.

This is why I’m still glad I concentrated on Spanish verbs with stem changes in the classroom on 9/12.

What I find really surprising is that I keep finding really great posts today. Among all the photos of the Twin Towers that inundate my blogroll today, I found the following insightful commentary:

Marriage reduces the stresses and demands of ‘wage slavery’ for women, while frequently increasing it for men. Marriage also generally allows women much more time for interaction with and bonding with the couple’s children. The inability of fathers to enjoy similar amounts of family intimacy as their wives is a complaint that surfaces repeatedly in surveys of working fathers, frequently coupled with the wish that they would gladly trade some income for more time with their families if they could do so without adversely affecting their careers and job security. Some men also believe — rightly or wrongly — that if they earned less money, they would face a greater risk that their wives would leave them.

I think that looking at how the gender binary hurts both men and women is what is sorely lacking from the majority of today’s feminist discourse. This is why I’m glad that there are people who are conducting this sort of analysis.