As we say in my culture, I keep finding new adventures for my ass. My Samsung Galaxy smartphone has arrived, and I am now learning to use it. I have a feeling it will take a while because after years of being a BlackBerry addict, a different type of device is very unusual. I keep pressing wrong buttons and scaring myself. The keyboard feels too big. But the Android app market is making me happy because I know it from my Kindle.

Sorry for a boring post. Its main goal is to see whether I can blog from this device.

I often ask my students to create sentences or paragraphs using new words from the readings. This is a great way to get them to expand their vocabulary.

A student came up with the following sentence as part of this exercise:

Women are strange creatures.

The student is a woman.

I’m very happy that I did not choose to specialize in film theory. Teaching film sucks, people.

I have a three-week-long section on Spanish film in my Culture of Spain course, and I suffer. The movies I selected are wonderful, the students enjoy them greatly, we have intense discussions of the films, the students are really good at analyzing movies (which is obviously the result of the hard work conducted by two of my colleagues who do specialize in film criticism.)

Still, I suffer because the moralizing gets to me. The students moralize about film in the way they never do when we are working with literary texts. I’m into moralizing myself but never to the same degree as the students.

“If he is unemployed, how come he has money to buy cigarettes?”

“Why is he sitting in a bar instead of looking for a job?”

“Why is he smiling at his friend’s daughter? Doesn’t he know she is underage?”

“The 40-year-old male protagonist held a 15-year-old girl’s hand. Is he a pedophile?”

“Why is this woman letting a male colleague give her a lift home? Is she cheating on her husband?”

“Why is he using such bad language? Doesn’t he care there is a small boy listening to him?”

When I try to get the students to stop being judgmental for a few minutes and try to analyze the film as a work of art, I begin to sound to myself like a defender of alcoholism, smoking, pedophilia, adultery, profanity, and God knows what else.

If anybody has any subtle tricks they use to soften the students’ judgmental streak, please share.

I wish people didn’t use psychoanalytic terminology stupidly. Because when they do, they say more about their own deep-seated issues than about the topic they think they are discussing. See the following example:

First, Obama’s personality. In an earlier life, I spent a lot of time studying the psychoanalytic literature on narcissism. It was all part of a study of canonical American poetry, where I thought that the imperial grandiosity of the American imaginary could be illuminated by examining its underlying narcissism. But all that is by way of saying I’m not using this term recklessly. I think there’s a lot of the narcissist about Obama. There’s something chilly and empty about him. Unlike Bill Clinton, he doesn’t revel in human company. It makes him uncomfortable. He wants the rich and powerful to love him, but doesn’t care about the masses (unless they’re a remote but adoring crowd). Many people seem to bore him. It shows.

I have no idea whether Obama or Romney are narcissists. I’m not their therapist, so it’s not for me to decide. However, I know that not liking human company is not a narcissistic trait. Neither are aloofness or feeling bored by people. If you consider these to be negative qualities in a human being or a politician, that’s your right. These are not narcissistic qualities, however.

Narcissists don’t like to spend time alone. They are in need of an admiring crowd at every stage of their existence. Narcissists have great people skills because without such skills they would not be able to find the audience to observe their narcissistic performances. Narcissists know all too well how to relate to others and make themselves indispensable. They feel uncomfortable outside of human company, not within it. Other people can have as much capacity to bore them as food does to bore a foodie. They dedicate their lives to consuming other people.

The failed analysis offered in the linked post is a great illustration of why the so-called “psychoanalytic literary criticism” is worthless garbage. Psychoanalyzing and diagnosing works of art is stupid. Doing this to politicians is not too smart either. This kind of analysis is always politically and critically impotent because it betrays an incapacity to engage with ideas (or works of art) and substitutes analytical thinking with a tabloid obsession with personalities.

A brainless clerk sent out a letter to the university faculty members that starts with:

Dear FILL IN:

You are currently employed by X university. . .

Of course, nobody responded to the message because nobody identifies as “FILL IN.” Now the administrators are outraged that nobody took the actions enumerated in the letter. Especially since the letter was filled with the most egregious, condescending insults I have ever encountered inside a supposedly professional letter.

I wondered at first what possessed our normally professional and respectful support stuff to send out such an insulting letter. And then I scrolled to the end of the message and saw that it was signed by the HR department. Then I had no more questions.

I’m sure you’ve all heard this ridiculous idea peddled by anti-choicers that the Progressives support “post-birth abortions”, right? All this wackadoo rhetoric about how “if you can kill it one minute before birth then it follows that you should be able to do so one minute after birth”, etc. crap?

Now it has become clear why woman-haters are so obsessed with this idiotic idea. Here is an explanation from an Arkansas Republican:

In his book “God’s Law: The Only Political Solution,” published in April, former Arkansas Department of Human Services attorney Charlie Fuqua explains that he supports killing wayward kids because that’s what a Bronze Age tribe did in his favorite religious text.

“The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline,” he wrote,according to an excerpt published by The Arkansas Times. “Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21.”

Got it? This guy fantasizes about killing children. He is honest and direct about his hatred of children but other members of his  clan are not. So they project their baby-killing fantasies onto Progressives.

P.S. Thank you NG and DB for giving me this link. It has explained a lot.

The Russian-speaking immigrant community is obviously too small for it to be an important factor in any elections, but if you were ever curious who it voted for and why, I will provide an answer in this post.

The absolute majority of Russian-speaking immigrants is rabidly conservative. And when I say the “majority”, I mean everybody except me and N. This is probably the only immigrant group that fully and passionately identifies with the anti-immigrant stance of the US Republicans.

So why does the immigrant group that finds it harder than any other to adapt to the life in the US always vote for the party of people who dislike immigrants?

Here are some answers:

1. Racism. The Aryan Brotherhood would be shocked to hear the amount of racist garbage a quiet, nerdy Russian-speaking immigrant (from here on referred to as RSI) who is a college professor of chemistry or a nurse can unleash within the space of one minute. One of the reasons I avoid RSIs is that I can’t deal with the racist comments that come out of their mouths two minutes after we get introduced to each other.

2. RSIs come share a history that is so cruel and painful that the idea of social compassion is alien to them. It is useless to try to bring up the suffering of the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the needy. The everybody-for-himself dog-eat-dog mentality is so deeply ingrained that the idea that somebody somewhere might get help is rejected out of hand.

3. The Cold War mentality and rhetoric are embraced passionately by the RSIs. The absolute majority of them are miserable as immigrants. They cannot, of course, accept that their decision to emigrate was a mistake, so they console themselves with the myth of American exceptionalism and support the US invasions of other countries.

4. The RSIs lead a very feminist existence yet compensate for that by promoting a passionately anti-feminist discourse.

5. If there is any sentiment that is more vicious than the RSI racism, it is its homophobia. As a result, the idea of gay rights is personally traumatizing to the US RSIs.

6. The concept of paying taxes is historically alien to an RSI. Paying taxes that would go into any form of a social safety net is even more alien.

7. On a more metaphysical level, the RSIs are bothered by the idea of change because, historically, they have experienced too much instability. The greatest personal transformation they have gone through (the emigration) turned out to be a mistake. This is why they cling to conservatism.

8. The words “socialism” and “communism” carry a very personal and painful set of connotations for an RSI for reasons that I hope I don’t have to explain.

9. An immigrant community that is as deeply alienated from its new country as the RSI community will always try to identify with the political movement that manages to sell itself as representing the most authentic local values and lifestyles. Voting Republican permits an RSI to feel like, for that single moment of casting a vote, s/he finally belongs.

10. RSIs very rarely speak English well. As a result, the only English-language TV and radio they can access linguistically is the least sophisticated one. And we can all guess which channels and stations are the simplest to understand on the level of language competency.

After a long and painful analysis of cell phones, I decided that I was ready to move away from BlackBerry.

BlackBerry is my favorite brand that has allowed me to be a prolific blogger. BlackBerry devices have actual physical keyboards and that’s what makes them so special to me. I would have to stop blogging altogether if there were no more physical keyboard phones on the market and everybody switched to virtual keyboards. I very rarely blog at a stationary computer because I never have the time. About 90% of all posts and comments are written on my BlackBerry while I’m between classes, meetings, and errands. Right now, for instance, I’m blogging from a bus that is taking me to my Grad School committee meeting. After that, I will blog some more while I walk from the meeting to my office. I can’t produce this amount of text – or anything larger than 2 wobbly sentences – on a virtual keyboard.

Different models of my favorite BlackBerry have been with me for as long as I have been a blogger. But then something happened to the company. BlackBerrys stopped being sturdy and reliable and became flimsy and annoying.

The BlackBerry Torch (that I have in my hands right now) has finally made me decide that I have to get over my brand loyalty and look for something else.

I got my Torch for free and my heart goes out to folks who actually paid money for the device. I’ve been using it for 2 years and the phone is already practically falling apart. A tab that is supposed to hold the most important front buttons together fell off a long time ago and I’ve had to reattach it with tape. This looks really great on a $600 phone. The battery needs to be charged at least 3 times a day for you to get any good use out of it. A one and a half hour phone conversation depletes the battery from a full charge to dead.

The Torch had a tendency to freeze up for absolutely no reason from Day 1. And the apps would cause more aggravation than help.

So I went ahead and ordered a Samsung Galaxy. I wish my brand disloyalty pays off.

I was struggling with the driving rules and then The Sister stepped in and explained them to me in a way that I needed them explained. Because she knows exactly how my brain works.

Yes, it definitely makes sense to bring up kids.

It also makes sense to blog, and I thank everybody who has been helping me feel better about driving. I promise to whine a lot on this subject in the future.

Blogger Fie is right, the tenure-line academics need to learn to say “no.” It’s hard to refuse service, teaching and sociability obligations when you are afraid to make a bad impression that will negatively impact your tenure application process. However, if you give into the temptation to say “yes” to every task that is thrown your way, you will drive yourself into exhaustion, never do any research, and fail to get tenure in the end.

The best and the most honest thing to do, I believe, is to calculate one’s energy realistically and make sure that one doesn’t promise more than one can actually carry out.

This is what I do to limit the number of obligations that I undertake:

1. Make myself hard to reach. This is the golden rule for all victims of blackmail. If the blackmailer cannot reach you to make the demands, you will not have to take any action and will win time to consider your next move carefully. This is why the only way anybody can reach me is by email. I do not have voice mail and I never answer the phone unless I’m sure that I have a need to talk to the person who is calling me. I never ever ever pick up the phone when I don’t recognize the number. This is a great strategy because when people make demands on my time through email, I can ponder my response at leisure. The pressure of a personal request is not there.

2. Limit the time I spend on campus. It is very easy to get sucked into practically living on campus. In my 1st year on the tenure-track, I would be in my office 6 days a week. Now I realize that it was a huge mistake. These days, I inform students that they can reach me during my office hours and refuse to schlep all the way over to campus to wait for irresponsible students who, more often than not, forget to come by. As a result, I’m on campus 3 days a week in the Fall and 2 days a week in the Spring, and nothing can convince me to change this habit. Of course, this makes it harder for people to catch me and press me into service obligations I don’t need.

3. Don’t stroll. Run. Strolling through campus looking all leisurely makes you look like a tasty bait for people who want you to sacrifice your time to solve their problems. Whenever you leave your office to go to the bathroom, the library, the restaurant, the bookstore, the Dean’s office, envision your final destination and move there as fast as you can without getting distracted. Say, “Sorry, running late!” if people are trying to stop you.

4. Take time to respond. When there are chain emails sent out asking people to volunteer for committees and service obligations, don’t respond immediately. Take out your dossier, grab the operational papers, and try to figure out if you, I repeat, YOU, not somebody else, needs this committee or obligation to enhance your dossier (or to have fun, of course.) Remember that being on several similar college-level committees does nothing to enhance your dossier. Do you know what the tenure committee will say when it sees those 11 similar committees you’ve been on in the past 3 years? “She must be doing all this committee work because she is weak on research.” I heard this with my own ears.

 

5. If people try to guilt-trip you, guilt-trip them right back. Say things like, “Oh my God, I’m so busy, I’m completely overwhelmed.” Start every conversation with a litany of everything you have to do and end with, “I believe my health has started failing me.”

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Don’t buy a momentary alleviation from a meaningless sense of guilt at a price of your sanity, your research agenda, and your leisure. Just say, “no.”