If you are on academia.edu, how often do you get messages from it that somebody has searched for you? I made the mistake of starting an academia.edu profile a while ago, and now I get these notifications every day. I haven’t been updating that profile or visiting it at all, yet I keep getting informed of these searches.

The idea that people Google me (not me, the blogger, as you understand, but the RL me) every day is extremely unnerving. I don’t have an important name in my field just yet (and at the rate this stupid manuscript goes I never will), so it isn’t fellow academics. Neither would my students engage in such searches. At least, not on a daily basis.

This is why I’m wondering if this is normal. Please share how often academia.edu informs you that you have been Googled. I’m getting really paranoid here.

I’ve burned myself out working on this manuscript, people. In the past month, I have written two completely new sections on two new novels and transformed one chapter completely. I have revised other chapters. I have also created a detailed plan for the new version of the introduction. At the same time, I was teaching my online course, translating a novel, doing other translation jobs, and developing new courses for next year.

As a result, I haven’t been able to start working on actually writing the introduction. I’ve tried everything: writing in a separate file, writing by hand, walking around trying to find the words, starting at the screen stupidly for hours – nothing works. This is giving me nightmares and causing me intense anxiety.

I was hoping to have the entire thing ready before I leave on my trip on the 15th. But I realize that this is not happening and there is nothing very tragic about that. So it will be done a month later than planned, what’s the big deal, right? RIGHT?

I have now decided to take a complete break from research until I come back from my trip at the end of July. I have also decided to make heroic efforts to avoid feeling like a loser about this. I hate going back on my own decisions and changing my own plans.

P.S. The reason why I’m publishing this intensely boring post is to convince myself that I’m doing the right thing. So please bear with me.

I was asked to blog about friendship, so here goes. I don’t need nearly as much sociability as other people. To me, the people one chats with from time to time are not friends, even though said chatting  takes place every day.

Friendship, for me, is exactly the same as love but without the sexual and romantic component. If I call somebody my friend, it means I’m emotionally plugged into that person, irrespective of where they are and how much time we get to spend together, and care about everything that happens to them.  I don’t have the time, the energy, the emotional resources, or the need to have this sort of a relationship with many people. I feel the happiest with one male and one female BFF. Until a vacancy goes open, I can’t take on any new BFFs.

At this point in life, I don’t have a female BFF. In adulthood, I’ve had three. (I don’t really count childhood friendships here, as cute as they might have been.) These friendships were intense and beautiful but they all fell apart. The first one disintegrated when the BFF decided to pursue the existence of a kept* woman. After she did that, everybody who made a different choice in life made her very angry. I put up with her aggression for a very long time (people who know me in RL will confirm that I was extremely patient with this person for longer than anybody could understand) but eventually it stopped making any sense at all to me to spend time with a person who seemed to feel nothing but anger towards me.

The second BFF became a housewife and we simply don’t have anything to talk about any longer.

The third BFF let me down at a very difficult time in my life. And then did it again. I let people disappoint me once, but after the second time I lose interest completely and everything that I felt for them is instantly erased. I don’t do this on purpose. It’s a psychological mechanism of self-protection that turns off the feelings I have for somebody who has a tendency to hurt me.

Right now, the position of my female BFF remains vacant. When I traveled to Germany in May, I really envied my sister for her BFF. I would not mind at all finding such a complex, well-read, feminist, strong and opinionated woman to be my BFF. This isn’t something that happens on demand, though. Finding a real friend is only a little easier than finding a good romantic partner.

The reason why I have friends at all is not because I feel lonely without them. There are so many things that need to be done that there is no time for loneliness. Having a friend is good because I enjoy the feelings I have for him or her. The feeling is what I miss now that I don’t have a female BFF.

What I find very annoying is when people confuse friendship with other types of relationships. “My best friend is my husband / sister / mother!” they gush without realizing that this only demonstrates that they have no idea how to be either a friend or a spouse / sibling / parent / child.

These, in short, are my feelings about friendship.

* The difference between a kept woman and a housewife is that the former does not even pretend to give a toss about the man who keeps her.

The most difficult thing to translate are concepts that have no equivalent in the target language. I’ve been struggling for 10 minutes with the expression “grilled cheese.” What can be simpler (and more delicious) than a good grilled cheese sandwich? Yet, the Russian equivalent does not exist because grilled cheese isn’t cooked in Russian-speaking countries.

One way out of this is linguistic borrowing. Until the word “boyfriend” became a word in Russian (it sounds exactly the same and is spelled with Russian letters), one had to say something like “the man I’m seeing romantically” to transmit the idea.

Instead of boycotting Israeli academics for a completely fictitious “Apartheid”, like some of my colleagues keep suggesting, it would make a lot more sense to boycott Birzeit University that has allowed a group of unhinged religious fanatics to bully a professor for posting a bunch of cartoons on his office door. The administrators of the university actually participated in the bullying in their attemps to shut up the professor to appease the crazed fanatics:

According to Budeiri, the university then removed the cartoons from his door, and sent three vice presidents to ask him to issue an apology. He agreed to issue an explanation, but not to apologize. . . At that point, the university issued a statement that said Budeiri did not intend to offend Muslims. While the university criticized attacks on anyone for expressing their views, Budeiri said that no action was taken against the students who threatened him. Student protesters also reported having been told that Budeiri would not be returning to the university, he said, and so considered that a victory. He said that various university officials have continued to ask him to apologize and/or take a leave and go abroad for a semester.

If we allow such actions on the part of fanatics go unpunished and do not respond in any way to the universities that let such things happen, we should expect these quasi-religious freakazoids start persecuting us in the same way.

Something tells me, however, that I’m not likely to receive any passionate messages from my colleagues asking me to support a boycott against this sorry excuse for a university.

Irrespective of whether the stickers say “Romney”, “Obama”, “Feminists of the world unite” or “Patriarchy has got to go”, placing them on a baby is wrong and stupid. This is a baby, for Pete’s sakes, not a billboard.

I found the photo here.

I’m noticing that the weather is making everybody very cranky, so I’ve decided to stop commenting on all blogs other than my own until the heat wave passes. I suffer from the heat, too, and the last thing I need is people getting pissy with me for no reason. I don’t find it extremely helpful to leave a comment on a blog saying, “Great post!” and receive an angry rant in return about how I should quit being condescending because nobody needs my praise anyway.

Hopefully, the air will stop boiling by November and people will get calmer.

Last year, there were the most amazing fireworks in my neighborhood. They went on for over 2 hours, and if you went to the senior citizens’ facility nearby, you could see the sky light up in all directions.

This year, however, we’ve had very minimal fireworks that lasted under four minutes!

Also, I noticed that nobody in our street had the July 4th barbecue. We are a street of passionate barbecuers but this year there have been no barbecues for the holiday.

Is this happening because of the heat? We are at +32C right now, and it’s ten to 11 at night! Imagine what it was like during the day. Are people afraid of starting fires accidentally?

By the way, I just discovered a great way of dealing with the heat. You need to carry a bottle of water with you and keep pouring it on the nape of your neck. If there is no bottle, water from sprinklers can be used for this purpose. I will have to venture out of the house tomorrow, and I will use this method because otherwise I’ll just wilt in this heat.

How do you survive this horrible weather?

Does anybody know what “stiff in the britches” means? All I’m finding are pornographic references but the context I need the expression for is not explicit in the least. It’s a reference to a computer game character.

I just read this beautiful post that lists the personal freedoms its author has achieved in her life.

So to honor today’s wonderful holiday, I will list my own recently acquired freedoms.

1. The freedom to be who I am and to hell with the fear that people might find me weird.

2. The freedom to seek psychological help without telling myself that it is too indulgent to do so.

3. The freedom to go outside without looking completely and absolutely perfect.

4. The freedom to be in a relationship without feeling locked down and deprived of choice.

5. The freedom to read Trollope as much as I want.

6. The freedom to decide that I do want a kiwano. My long-term readers will understand. 🙂 Mind you, I haven’t bought the kiwano yet, OK? So let’s all keep absolutely calm.