“I don’t think it makes sense for me to read your blog,” N says pensively. “Whenever I read it, I see the exact same stuff you tell me every day in person.”

“Wouldn’t it be kind of creepy if you went to the blog and discovered that you never heard any of it before?”

N thought about it and agreed that it’s better to hear the same story twice than to discover you are living with a stranger.

Does your partner read your blog or Facebook page?

Do you know about these websites that analyze your DNA and give you a genetical profile? N. was offered to do this kind of genetic testing at work for free and he agreed.

So what do you think the testing revealed? What I suspected from the start: he has Jewish ancestry. This will show some anti-Semitic relatives how stupid they are and how their deeply cherished hatreds can be rendered even more ridiculous through scientific advances.

Of course, we are both very happy. I always knew I’d end up marrying a good Jewish boy one day. I’ve been telling N. for years that I was convinced he was partly Jewish, and now I’m proven right.

When you get an older student in your classroom, somebody who is older than you are and has teenage children, you expect some level of maturity and responsibility. At least, I expected it. Boy, was I wrong. I just got an email from such a student who didn’t come to the mini-quiz because she had something she thought was “strep throat” but then it turned out not to be strep throat.

What is this “strep throat” deal? Is this what people used to call a sore throat? And is this disease so crushing that it prevents students from showing up for a 15-minute-long mini-quiz?

I’m annoyed because now I will have to create another version of the mini-quiz specifically or this streppy student and I have enough things to do as it is. And this is far from being the only instance when this immature mature student has aggravated me. Adults are annoying and are a lot more irresponsible than us, kids.

I got a promotional letter from a magazine that asks the following question:

Sure, you got better things to do than scrub your own toilet. But are you really comfortable paying someone else to do it?

My answer is yes, absolutely. Just like I’m really comfortable to pay people to clean my teeth, administer gynecological and rectal exams to me, make my shoes, slaughter chicken and cows for me, assemble my computers, and provide any other professional services. There is nothing humiliating or wrong in performing any of these jobs, including cleaning services.

Right now I don’t hire a cleaning person because I have a husband. But if he consented (which he doesn’t for reasons of his own), I would happily do it.

Guess which stupid magazine is not getting my subscription.

 

I’m writing these notes as I watch. This is the only bipartisan account you will ever see! Oh, whom am I kidding? Of course, I root for the cute guy to win.

Obama wastes time on marriage anniversary greetings and so does Romney. Welcome to Hollywood! Who cares about the country’s politics when there are people who have private occasions to celebrate.

Romney threatens to mess with Latin America and kind of suggests that small business owners are starting their businesses not here but overseas. Romney tries to humanize his image by smiling in a weird way.

Obama steals the “close loopholes” line from Romney. People tend to become emotionally attached to this meaningless “close the loopholes” shtick, so good move for him.

Romney says that when your income goes down due to poor economy, that is a tax, too. Jeez, we are only 5 minutes in and I have to hear stupid things right there. How am I expected to go into a classroom and explain what a tax actually is after this?

Obama is using strings of boring enumerations which makes an impression that he doesn’t have much to say.

Romney continues to smile goofily.

Obama keeps saying the word “loopholes.” Probably the goal is to make people so sick and tired of it that they will run away from anybody who mentions it. I have to say, the strategy is working on me.

Obama makes fun of Donald Trump who “doesn’t like to think of himself as small anything.” I have no idea how it is justified to waste time on taking pot shots at Trump at this point. Just for comedic effect?

Romney makes it clear that the tax code is so messed up that even the two presidential candidates really know what it’s all about and how it works.

Obama mentions Romney’s desire to give the military a huge sum of money that it isn’t even asking for. Burn! Mentions Bush’s failed policies but doesn’t mention Bush. A big mistake.

Romney engages in “no, it’s my turn, no it’s my turn” round of whining which makes him look weak. “People are suffffering,” he says, trying to look compassionate.

Romney says that not balancing the budget is immoral. I hate hearing religious terminology in political debates. What next? “Jesus wouldn’t like it”?

To save the budget, Romney proposes to stop funding the PBS. No, Jesus would definitely not approve. I cannot believe how shallow this economic discourse is. Fucking PBS is what is keeping the country in debt. Romney keeps trying to scare people by repeating the word “China.”

Obama also disappoints. He says he will be asking “those of us who have done well to contribute a little bit more.” Thank you for being so damn specific, Mr. President. We have no interest in knowing who you consider to have done well and how little this little more actually is, so keep being vague.

Romney can bat his eye-lashes better than I can. I’m not sexist, so I think it’s perfectly fine. Romney proceeds to bash Spain. OK, now he has made me very angry. Such an egregious and insulting simplification of a very complex issue in a country that has done him personally no ill is unforgivable.

Both candidates keep repeating “this is not what works, this is not how America is.”

Romney is upset that green energy gets more tax cuts than oil companies. He actually said this. How does he get anybody to vote for him at all if he makes this kind of statements? Have you ever heard anything less intelligent?

Continue reading “Presidential Debate #1, Live Blogging” →

I have revised my position on Todd Akin. The guy is not a jerk or a vile freakazoid. He is simply in the grip of a severe mental illness:

Who wants to be at the very bottom of the food chain of the medical profession? And what sort of places do these bottom-of-the-food-chain doctors work in? Places that are really a pit. You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other law-breaking: not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things, misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die.

This is obviously delusional and my heart goes out to a guy whose relatives are friends are too cheap or indifferent to offer him much needed professional help. I’m not being sarcastic here. A very sick person is not getting help he needs, and that is tragic.

I, however, do not revise my position as to the arrant idiocy of stupid losers in Missouri who think this unhealthy man is qualified to run for office. If you identify with insanity to the point of wanting to place a deranged individual in a political office, then you deserve whatever is coming to you. This sucks because I’ve been considering relocating across the river to Missouri.

In today’s most fascinating news story, I have entered my classroom twice, taught my classes, spoke in a quiet, polite manner to the students, and managed to keep my clothes on and my breasts firmly in place and away from the students’ eyes. Since all we hear nowadays are stories about naked, swearing, breast-waving professors, I think that this occasion where a teacher manages to get through the day’s work without any scandalous incident should be noted and celebrated.

My students are watching Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s beautiful film Mondays in the Sun in my class. In one scene in the movie, Santa, played by Javier Bardem when he was still a great actor and not a Hollywood lap dog, reads to a little boy the story of the ant and the grasshopper.

The story goes as follows. The ant was hard-working and toiled all day long. The grasshopper didn’t like to work and only sang and danced. When winter came, the ant had a lot of food and could live in comfort. The grasshopper, however, was starving. The grasshopper knocked on the ant’s door and begged for help.

“You chose to dance and play all summer while I worked,” the ant replied. “So now it will serve you well to die of hunger.”*

Santa, who is unemployed, who lost his job because of his activities as a union organizer and who saw his colleagues’ jobs outsourced, is incensed with the fable.

“No, this is simply not how things work,” he tells the little boy. “In order to live well, you have to be born an ant. If you have the bad luck to be born a grasshopper, no matter how much you work, you are screwed.”

When I showed this scene to my students at Yale and Cornell, there was no reaction. The students watched with blank faces and looked bored. When I showed it to my current students at a state school in an economically blighted area, the reaction was intense. The scene spoke to them in a singular way. There was not one indifferent face in the classroom of 30 students. I had to stop the video to let them discuss what they were seeing.

The moral of the story: remember that people always bring their personal experiences to an encounter with any work of art.

I’m sorry, dear voxcorvegis, for stealing the idea of the moral lesson from you. I resisted as long as I could but my passionately didactic nature won over.

*I’m retelling the fable as it appears in the movie, not the original Aesop version.

I just made a student very upset and I hate making students unhappy. So now I’m wondering if I’m being unreasonable in what I ask of them.

Here is what is going on. I supervise 10 independent researchers who are doing their Senior Assignment with me. Our Senior Assignment program is consistently rated as being among the best in the country, on the par with universities like Brown. We are very proud of this program and are committed to maintaining high standards of scholarship within it.

The student X wants to use Master’s theses as the majority of his critical sources for this research project. The work of literature he is analyzing is extremely famous and there is a humongous body of research on it yet he persists in using this collection of MA dissertations. My own doctoral dissertation analyzed this writer, and I know for a fact that the bibliography of critical sources on it in respectable peer-reviewed journals is very extensive. Also, the MA theses the student wants to use mostly come from very humdrum universities, which, to me, means that we cannot rely on their rigour.

Finally, after protracted and emotionally charged negotiations, I allowed the student to use the maximum of 2 MA theses for the project. He was still very unhappy and disappointed.

Do you allow students to use MA theses in their research? Am I being unreasonable?

P.S. My in-built spell-checker tries to change “dissertation” into “detestation.” Well, at least it isn’t “defenestration.”

The Russian-speaking people have borrowed the English word “friend” to refer to a person who reads and comments on your blog and whose blog your follow. They transliterate the word friend and add the feminine suffix -ess if the blog follower is female. As a result, there are 2 sets of words denoting friendship. One is the Russian drug / podruga which means actual RL friends. And the other one is friend / friendess to refer to virtual friends.

I think it is absolutely brilliant. It is also curious to observe that the global linguistic hegemony English enjoys nowadays robs it of a possibility to make active use of this form of linguistic appropriation.