A couple of kids from across the street knocked on my door yesterday.

“We will be having a party on Saturday,” they say, “so we wanted to give you our phone number to call in case you are bothered by the music or the noise.”

“Are you students at our university?” I asked.

“Yes,” the kids said.

“I teach there,” I shared.

“Oh,” one of them said in a small voice. “Will it still be OK for us to have our party?”

“Oh yes,” I responded. “I work at the Department of Foreign Languages and we are a very fun bunch. We love partying. What foreign language are you taking?”

Then we had a small advising session right on my doorstep.

My alma mater never ceases to amaze. Here is the most recent exercise in weirdness that has come out of it:

Yale Law School professors Akhil Amar ’80 LAW ’84 and Ian Ayres ’81 LAW ’86 are now pushing . . .  for law schools to offer to pay off part of their first-years’ loans should these students realize that their prospects of successful legal careers are slim. No law schools have policies like this one, and the law professors want Yale to be the first to adopt their proposal.

Yes, let’s reward failure instead of success because there is not enough of that going on at Yale.

I especially love the part that states “no law schools have policies like this one.” I bet they don’t. I also bet that in most graduate schools students don’t conceal their publications in prestigious peer-reviewed journals for fear of being dumped on. I’m sure that in most grad schools people don’t petition to abolish the grading system because those grad students who pass and fail undergrads on a regular basis are too traumatized by the idea that their work might be graded. I can pretty much guarantee that in most grad schools people don’t slink out of the library hoping that nobody sees them carrying scholarly volumes because reading is not prestigious.

If we are talking about Yale, then the last thing this school needs is to reward people for dropping out of grad school, failing, and messing up. It is done way too much as it is. Maybe it’s time to start rewarding success, for a change.

The article I quote above proceeds to get boggled down in really ridiculous philosophizing:

The argument hits a classic question: Should the responsibility of a student’s success in school fall on the school or the student?

This isn’t a classic question. It is a stupid question. Those who want to learn, learn. And those who don’t come up with a shitload of excuses about how they are huge victims of everything. If we attribute a student’s failure to his or her university and proceed to compensate students for that financially, then it stands to reason that if students have wildly successful careers after graduation, they should pay bonuses to the school for making this success possible. And how much success does that make?

This patronizing attitude that completely denies any chance of personal responsibility to human beings is really annoying.

A guy was trying to pick me up yesterday. He is an engineer who is a passionate political activist and whose hobby is XIXth-century history. He wasn’t, however, trying to get me to like him by discussing these topics. Instead, he did what I call “the Superman schtick” and offered me stories about how he was in the Marines and then later participated in covert operations hunting war criminals in Central Europe.

Men always do that a lot with me. I’ve had people drop on the floor and start bench-pressing (or whatever this strange activity is called) in the middle of a conversation in hopes of impressing me. I always somehow provoke the nerdiest guys into enumerating their high-school athletic achievements to me.

I know why this happens, of course. People see how I perform gender and immediately assume that I’m into men who are a collection of macho stereotypes.

In truth, however, I’m into the exact opposite. Nowadays, nobody has a chance of attracting me because, as we all know on this blog, I am passionately in love. However, in the times when I could be attracted, I was totally into the “I spent all day writing code today, after which I played Call of Duty for six hours and other players said my strategy was gay, so I went and wrote a poem about being lonely and misunderstood” guys rather than “I worked out at the gym, watched a football game with my buddies, and swapped memories of our times in the army after that” guys.

The point that I’m trying to make is that the way people choose to perform gender says nothing about their politics, their lifestyle choices, and their dating preferences. My dresses, makeup and shoes mean only one thing: I like wearing them. There is nothing else you can deduce about me or about anybody else on this basis. Gender is always a performance (want bibliography? I have it). And as such, it says nothing about the nature of the performers. An actor who plays Hitler is not an evil person. And a woman who wears heels and makeup is not . . . anything other than a woman who wears heels and makeup.