Then think again. I’m celebrating my fifth anniversary with my husband. While I’m at the restaurant, 48 emails from my students with comments, essays and assignments have accumulated in my course mailbox.

This will be a long night.

Is it possible that the recall of the Wisconsin governor Walker failed? After all the protests, organizing, effort? After it became clear that the guy is a crazy maniac?

Can I have a different news feed because this one is not working for me.

Wisconsin, you suck dick. And the saddest part is that it’s the dick of somebody as unattractive as Walker.

P.S. Romney will still lose the election. This is a completely unrelated issue. If you don’t believe that Romney will lose, just imagine him (the most uncharismatic person in the country since John Kerry) in a debate with Obama (the most charismatic person since forever). Seriously, do you know anybody who’d like to go out for a beer with Romney? I hear this is the main reason people vote in this country. So who do you think will make a better drinking buddy, a guy who smoked pot in college or a guy who spent his youth as a religious missionary? You know I’m right. If you still choose Romney, then confess that it isn’t beer that you prefer to drink but something much heavier.

P.P.S. For the especially serious and earnest readers: I’m trying to be facetious here as a way of dealing with the trauma of seeing Walker not getting recalled.

P.P.P.S. And I immediately got an email asking what I have against Walker. Seriously?

A clinic in Wisconsin has ended medication abortions as a result of a law signed by Governor Scott Walker in April, “The Coercive and Web Cam Abortion Prevention Act,” which puts harsh and ambiguous restrictions on the procedure. The law, also called Act 217, requires women seeking non-surgical abortions to visit the same doctor three times before taking the pill. It also makes the doctor responsible for determining that a woman has not been coerced into an abortion. Additionally, it prohibits the use of web cams (used for physician consult) during medication abortions. Last month, Planned Parenthood announced it would no longer offer medication abortions in Wisconsin as a result of the law. Yesterday, Affiliated Medical Services in Wisconsin made the same announcement. According to RH Reality Check, “it is now impossible to receive a medical abortion from a provider in the state.”

Jennifer Armstrong rules:

Transgression is necessary and healthy. Avoid it at your peril.

Is that the most brilliant thing ever, or what? The woman is a genius, people.

One of every 50 murders is a parricide according to a US study, usually a son killing his mother, pops sometimes gets it at the same time too. Daughters never kill their parents.

After staying up all night reading Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, I have really got to wonder why they don’t. Trollope’s novel is a reminder of how tragic the life of daughters in a patriarchal family is. While sons get some measure of independence (not a huge one, but still, that’s better than nothing), daughters are perennially victimized by their patriarchal families. In Trollope’s novel, there is one heart-wrenching scene after another where a mother practically grinds her miserable daughter into the ground to take vengeance for her own stunted existence.

I watched this documentary once that kept harping on how Lizzy Borden’s case was such a huge mystery. Idiots. The real mystery is why more of those downtrodden, pushed around, persecuted daughters did (do) not explode.

And it isn’t just a XIXth century phenomenon either. I know several women of different ages who are being eaten alive by their families. These are adult women, not kids. All of them are highly educated and financially independent, too. But they are constantly sacrificing their lives to the needs of their harpies of mothers. (I don’t personally know any woman downtrodden by a father, although I know they exist.)

Of course, the ones who realize that they are being victimized at least have some hope. The saddest cases are the poor victims who say, “Oh, my mother is amazing. She is my best friend! It is not her fault that I have no personal life and have been on anti-depressants for a decade!”

Who could have known that Trollope wrote such feminist texts? I always considered him a hopeless Victorian fogey.

So do you want to know why I had to get up at 7 am today?

There is this one student in my online course who never got in touch, accessed the course website, submitted any of the assignments, or answered any of my emails. He hasn’t dropped out either. I have written to him several times, telling him to get in touch but nothing happened. This is an intensive summer course that will end in two weeks, so you can imagine how behind this student is.

The day before yesterday, he finally emailed me to say that he wanted to see me in person to explain the hugely important reasons that had prevented him from doing any work in the course.

I responded that I would gladly see him in my office but, irrespective of what his reasons for not doing this work were, I would not be able to give him a grade unless he did the work. I told him to start accessing the website and submitting assignments immediately.

Of course, the student never submitted a single assignment or accessed the website. Neither did he show up for the appointment. I did show up because it is my professional duty. Got a lot of work done, too, so I’m not sorry. But I have to ask, what is it with such people? We don’t have ultra-rich students here. The money this student paid to take this course and cover the summer registration fees is probably borrowed or, in the best-case scenario, earned by a family member’s hard work. And he just fritters it in this way? That’s insane.

I do not get such people at all. I also don’t get people who miss an appointment they asked for and never inform one that they will not be showing up.

This sounds like it might be good news:

Goldman Sachs laid off about 50 people last week, according to people briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak on the record. The cutbacks have rattled some people in the firm, in part because a number of the employees were managing directors and on the higher end of Goldman’s pay scale. Managing directors make a base of $500,000 and receive an annual bonus that can climb into the millions of dollars.

Last week’s layoffs are seen as a sign that Goldman is looking further up the food chain for additional cuts after already slashing 8.5 percent of its work force, or 3,000 people, in the last year. In addition it has cut more than $1.4 billion in noncompensation expenses from its operations over the last year or so.

I will dance in the streets if this vile excuse for a company that only exists thanks to its capacity to squeeze money out of the Treasury goes out of existence.

My old posts about Lloyd Blankfein (here, here and here), the company’s CEO, had quite a few readers from within Goldman Sachs (I operated on the Blogger platform then and could see where exactly each visitor came from). I was a new blogger back then, so I was almost as excited to get those visits as the ones from the FBI and the US House of Representatives. Now I blog with WordPress, so I have no idea where some of my more unusual visitors come from.

Is the following part of the attempt to smear Quebecois student protesters?

QUEBEC CITY (UPI) — Queen Elizabeth was booed by student hecklers Saturday as she began her controversial two-day visit to this bastion of French Canada. The booing was heard at least twice as the royal motorcade pulled up in front of the Provincial Legislature. It was the first real incident of the royal visit.

Some 50 policemen — part of the most extensive security force in Canadian history — moved in swiftly to disperse the hecklers. Some minor scuffling took place, but police succeeded in herding the demonstrators away from the main entrance to the Legislature. Four or five of the hecklers, including Reggie Chartrand, a former Montreal boxer and well-known separatist leader, were taken into custody by members of the special riot squad.

It’s the “student hecklers” part that bothers me. Will now every jerkwad in Quebec be referred to as a “student”? Surely, no student in Quebec is silly enough to think that the Queen is causing any of the province’s problems.

The only day of the week when I have to get up at 7 am, I had horrible insomnia. The reason for it was that I decided to read a few pages from Anthony Trollope’s novel The American Senator and then couldn’t tear myself away from the book until birds started making those nasty cheerful chirrupy sounds that every insomniac knows and dreads. There is a female character I identified with in a really painful traumatic way in this novel.

Imagine how talented one has to be to write a novel so potent that it can keep readers awake at night 130 years after the author died.

The review of the novel will appear on the blog shortly. How am I at creating suspense, eh?