What I miss on this blog is the mood update option, like they reportedly have on Facebook.
The first day of classes did not go as planned. First, I discovered at the worst possible moment that somebody messed up and let me down in a very big way. Then, I had to spend the entire day redoing a shitload of work to correct their mess-up. I hate it when people mess with my plans. I’m extremely well-organized in everything that concerns my work, and it annoys me when anybody interferes.
And now my beautiful, perfectly planned syllabus is a flaming mess.
And there is a book that came out tonight that I’d been waiting for since 2010, but I couldn’t read it as planned because I had to correct somebody else’s huge mess-up.
And at this moment I can’t even enjoy the book because I’m still annoyed about how the day went.
And I couldn’t work on my midpoint tenure dossier because of redoing a shitload of work.
And the professorial bathroom has not been repaired since last semester, which annoys me.
So I made reservations for a Peruvian restaurant for Saturday. The really great restaurant in St. Louis I visited last time wasn’t featured on the blog because it was romantically dark and the pictures of food didn’t come out right. Instead, I’ll try to take photos of Peruvian food.
We’ve been to the only Peruvian restaurant of Chicago, and it wasn’t good at all. We have Peruvians in the family, so I know good Peruvian food from fake Peruvian food. Now let’s see how St. Louis stacks up in this area.
P.S. One good thing, though, is that I’m not teaching freshmen this semester. And what joy it is to have normal, alive, curious, engaged students for a change. They kept asking questions and even laughing at my jokes (in Spanish). After a semester in silent classroom filled with comatose freshmen, I feel transported to heaven.
OK, I feel less crabby now that I’ve shared. Blogging helps.
Clarissa's Blog 
Remember you complained about not finding new good books in Russian? I’ve found one! One of the rare books I started and really want to continue – Наум Ним «Господи, сделай так…» (“God, please make so …” by Naum Nim).
Description:
This book is about the most charming place in the world and a multi-year life of our country (Russia), to some extent by the lives of four friends – Mishki-Meshka, Timki, Seregis and a narrator. Or maybe it’s a book about the lives of four friends, to some extent determined the life of our country. Everything in this book are true, and all are fantasy.
It helps me understand what life in my mother’s generation (1950ies) was like, tells a great story in general and is full of (saddish) humor. I’ve been wanting to read something similar about friends growing up for a long time and now’ve found this.
In Russian I liked this description most:
~ el (writing from not my computer, so no password)
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This is a very new book, published only in М.: Астрель: Corpus, 2011 г. (октябрь) and hasn’t been translated into English (yet?).
Hope you’ll feel the opposite of crabby soon and really enjoy this great book too!
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Sorry o! Good that writing here makes you already feel better (a bit).
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At least you have Peruvian food to look forward to? And people are sucky. I hope today is better. 🙂
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Wow, they laugh in Spanish. I’m happy for you.
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