The people who work at this resort really like me and N. I think that’s because we are polite, always happy about everything, treat the workers with respect, and don’t condescend. Also, I’m a Spanish-speaker.

To show their appreciation, the workers decided to give us a romantic surprise. Of course, the butler asked me in advance if we wanted the surprise (imagine organizing something romantic for a couple that is in the midst of a fight, for instance), so it wasn’t really a surprise for me.

The romantic surprise consisted of a drawn jacuzzi with mountains of foam, champagne, candles, flowers everywhere in the room, and beautiful decorations. I will post a photo when I get normal Internet access.

Since N doesn’t speak Spanish, he didn’t understand what the butler was saying to me. I told him there would be a romantic surprise, but I didn’t say what it was. For some reason, N decided that the surprise would consist of a mariachi band that he thought I invited to our room. I’m still puzzled as to why he thought that my idea of romance is to have 3 men in huge hats in our hotel room. He is not a hugely sociable person, to put it very mildly, so he spent the entire evening haunted by the fear of having to interact with people for romantic purposes.

P.S. The fear of a mariachi band was not completely unfounded. Such a band performs in restaurants at this resort.

This is exactly how I feel:

I know that whatever date we pick in late 2013 won’t be the day I think of as our anniversary. We were joined for life the moment he asked me out on July 7, 2007. Will we be “newlyweds” next year? I think not. We’ve already been newlyweds. On our anniversary in 2014, when people ask how long we’ve been married, I’ll probably say “six years.” Because that’s much closer than the truth than “one.”

It was a really good day when we went to the courthouse and had the funny judge make a speech. And the trip to St. Louis after that, emailing people that we’d eloped as we rode on the bus, that was fun, too. But it was just another fun day among many other fun days. It was in no way a momentous occasion. The day we met, however, was. We started living together almost immediately (on the second date), so we knew from the start that it was big.

Paper-signing, however? I don’t know, I see it like giving the Caesar what’s his but not investing this tribute with my soul. The government likes people to sign stuff, so whatever. Real marriages are contracted differently. And they are dissolved differently, too. I know that only too well given that I divorced my first husband officially four years after leaving him and never seeing him again.

And some people, in the meanwhile, keep getting articles accepted for publication.

OK, one article. And they have requested revisions. These will be big, important revisions and I’m only given 60 days to make them.

On the positive side, these are very good revisions that make a lot of sense to me. I feel like the reviewers have hinted that I can take the argument as far as it would go.

This is an important article for me because this is a completely new area of research for me. It has nothing to do with either the Bildungsroman or nationalism. This will be a beginning of a new major research project for me.

At the same time, this article matters to me because I used it to prove to myself that you can still do research while teaching 3 courses. I researched and wrote it in its entirety during the Spring semester. I used to worship at the altar of “you can’t write during a teaching semester, research can only be done in summer”, but now I’m over that shit.

The suggested revisions make me very happy because I believe that I still have a lot to learn as a scholar and I’m grateful for useful suggestions from my reviewers.

I love research, people. Especially when it gets accepted for publication.

A. and I had the perfect relationship. People traveled from afar to look at such a beautiful, loving couple. When we first met, he traveled two hours there and two hours back just to see me in any weather. We spent all of our free time together. We read aloud to each other, talked for hours, for entire days, loved the same music, dreamt of the same things. He sang to me, I taught him to dance. We made each other laugh, cry, and laugh again.

We swore eternal love to each other. We shared every secret, every hope, every painful past experience.

We were supposed to be very happy. Everybody kept saying how happy we were, so I knew we had to be.

So if there was this feeling of emptiness, this invincible cold, this gaping hole inside me, this tedium that crept up on me, this need to stay awake alone all night long listening to sad music, that must have been some defect I had. Some inner issue that prevented me from feeling all this happiness people said I had to feel.

Once, we had to travel to Kiev for our visa-related medical exam. On the train, we shared a compartment with another young couple. As A. and I discussed our favorite writers and engaged in the light-hearted banter we so loved, this other couple kept touching each other, giggling, hugging, kissing. It was as if they’d been physically glued to each other. They couldn’t stop staring into each other’s eyes. Their hands traveled towards each other’s bodies almost against their will.

I tried not to look but there was nothing I could do to avoid being consumed by the feeling of complete terror. There was something right there, in front of my very eyes, that felt like a very distant memory, something I used to know centuries ago, something eternal, invincible, awe-inspiring. Something I didn’t have.

I tried to dismiss these people. “They are a low-class couple,” I told myself. “They probably don’t even know how to read. Of course, there is nothing else for them to do but suck face all the time.”

Yet, deep down under all this condescending intellectualizing, I knew I was the one who was truly defective. Here I was, with the man who had sworn eternal love to me, the man who was going to share my life forever. Yet, we said good-night to each other politely and made ourselves comfortable on our separate bunks. The other couple, in the meanwhile, shared the same extremely narrow bunk, holding tight to each other to avoid falling to the floor whenever the train halted abruptly.

I felt that there had to exist some mysterious reason that forced them to put up with the discomfort of sharing a small space when there was a comfortable separate bunk for each one of them. But for all my intelligence I was so proud of I couldn’t figure out what made it so urgent for them to hold on to each other all night long.

When I left A. a year later, everybody who knew us was in shock.

“You two had such a perfect relationship,” people kept saying. “What on Earth could have happened to tear you apart?”

The anonymous couple who traveled from Kharkov to Kiev in 1997 will never know how much I owe them.

I have to say, people, that at this resort, the American tourists are the best people to have around. The Spaniards are very loud. The Quebecois are extremely rude. The Russians are untidy and throw garbage around. The Dutch find the concept of clothing unappealing. The French never leave tips and are unpleasant to the employees. The Germans love their liquor and become rowdy at night.

The Americans, however, are the quietest, politest bunch of folks who seem obsessed with reading. I even thought there were no Americans here at first. I didn’t hear any English spoken, so I assumed this meant there were no American tourists. Now I have realized, however, that they are all over the place but they either speak quietly or are glued to their Kindles and iPads.

A book came out recently (I’m at the beach, so I have to be vague but I can look up the title later) whose author has calculated that between 78-80% of students at Harvard are first-born children in their families.

Question: why does this happen?

I’m away, so I can’t provide links to new posts that have appeared this week. Instead, I have created this small collection of my own posts from the past that deserve to be resuscitated.

My encounters with weird men 3 years ago.

One of the very few instances when Dr. Phil was progressive. I guess some things are so self-evident that even Dr. Phil can’t avoid noticing them.

Who owns a husband?

Sexism among my students.

Why I’m happy I was born in a 3rd World country.

I succumb to paranoia.

Paper books are such a weird invention.

The dangers of using a prissy textbook in class.

I’m haunted by Mexicans.

Feel free to leave interesting links and self-promote in the comment section.

10. Avoid colloquialisms. “This is a totally cool novel” is a great statement to make to a friend. In an academic essay, however, it is jarring. It is also extremely annoying to see smiley faces and bunches of exclamation signs in academic writing. Try to convey your emotions with words and not with signs. Also, when I see “LOL” and “LMAO” in an academic essay, I see red. What am I, your Facebook buddy?

11. Avoid cliches. Statements like “Since time immemorial. . .” or “since the dawn of its existence, the genre. . .” sound horrible. If you don’t perceive them as such, this means you need to start reading a lot of good writing. As a former lover of such horrible cliches, this is what I did to learn to recognize and avoid them.

12. Start strong. People have little time and short attention spans nowadays. At the same time, people tend to value their own investment. You need to do all you can to avoid losing your readers’ attention for as long as you can. Once you’ve got them to be interested in the first couple of pages, they are likely to continue reading. This means that the first few paragraphs are absolutely crucial. Try to make them as engaging as you can. Don’t hide your most valuable insights at the end of the essay. (This is something I’m still struggling with.)

13. Avoid interspersing your writing with endless “basically” and “actually.” More often than not, these words mean nothing. Yet some people tend to add them to every other sentence which is beyond annoying. The same goes for “kind of”, “sort of” and “or whatever.”

14. Can the drama. You have no idea how often I receive essays where people spend up to a page describing the problems they faced reading the text I asked them to analyze: “At first, I didn’t understand this reading at all. It made me feel completely stupid because I had no idea what it meant. I read it again and still understood nothing. I was about to give up when I realized. . .” Unless the topic of the essay is “The issues I faced when trying to understand the text and how I dealt with them,” just can the drama and do the work.

15. Avoid repetitions. This has been a huge issue for me, people. Good writing is never repetitive. Each new sentence brings something new to the piece. It makes no sense to write a sentence that does nothing but repeat what you have already said. You need to trust that your readers are not complete idiots and are capable of understanding on a first try. As I said, I find it hard to believe that about people. You see, how annoying repetitive writing is? This is why whenever you feel tempted to say “As I already said”, you might wonder why you are saying it again.

16. Read a lot of good academic writing and pay special attention to how this author structures sentences and paragraphs.

I’ve got to run now but if people have any other suggestions, please share them.

P.S. If you feel tempted to ask why I don’t observe these rules on this blog, the answer is: because this isn’t academic writing. I can be as repetitive and colloquial as I please. LMAO.

“We have these menus in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Russian, ” the butler says proudly. “Which one do you prefer?”

“It doesn’t matter, ” I say, puffing up like a peacock. “I can read in all of these languages. ”

We all have our small vanities. What is yours?

I just heard on the news how Susan Rice, the US representative with the UN, says that the country is prepared to go against the UN decisions and “help” the people of Syria through unleashing military measures against them. I have a question: when will we stop giving this unwanted “help” to people who don’t want us around and concentrate on our own serious issues?