Reader Anon made the following timely suggestion:

I don’t have anything to promote, but I do have a request. A while back you had a thread where everyone could vent with whatever (often creative) profanity they wanted. It was extremely cathartic to write and a good deal of fun to read, and I could use a good place to rant and some curse-laden humor… So if you’re having a day when you need to vent, I would appreciate it if you reprised that sort of thread! Thanks a bunch!

I don’t know about you, but the end of the semester and the end of the calendar year are definitely getting to me. Normally, when things were getting overwhelming at work, I used to. . .

Papa, don’t read what comes next. Just step away from the computer because this will not make you happy.

. . . swear in Russian in my office. I would give myself about five minutes of good, inventive Russian swearing every couple of hours, and that was good. But now that we have resuscitated our Russian program, I’m afraid the Russian instructor will hear me and feel traumatized. And I don’t speak any language that is not spoken at our department. So this way of blowing off steam is gone.

This is why I think we should do what Anon suggests and start a Blowing Off Steam thread.

Feel free to rant, rave, and curse as much as you wish in any language whatsoever. Feel free to do it anonymously. Just one rule: don’t insult other people in the thread. Curse me instead.

I will make this thread sticky for a while, so scroll down for new posts.

I always wondered why so many professors set the due date for the final essay for the last day of class. I always set my due date before Thanksgiving break, which gives me a chance to grade the essays, return them to students, and get the ones who did really badly to rewrite them. In the last week of class, I have too much things to do to worry about grading.

Now the mystery has been solved. It turns out that people wait until the last moment because they don’t want the bad grades they give out for the essays to influence the teaching evaluations students write.

I, on the other hand, always get great evaluations no matter what, so I don’t need to care.

Please forgive the self-congratulatory tone. I’m very tired, and that’s my way of boosting my energy.

Fewer people watch television nowadays than in the previous decades. As a result, the time-honored tradition of channel flipping is giving way to a new amd equally addictive habit of app skipping. People switch on their tablets, Kindles, and cell phones, and begin jumping from app to app.

Are you more of a channel flipper or app skipper?

When women groom boys for abuse.

“But I seriously don’t know how I’m going to cope with the impending bombardment of smug women’s magazines spawning week after week of nauseating updates about Kate’s health, and well-being, and emotions, and bowel movements, like she’s the first person to ever get knocked up by a balding man.” You seriously don’t know? OK, then I’m eager to help. Stop reading smug women’s magazines. What’s the point of wining about something that is so easy to avoid? “I can’t cope! Magazines are publishing articles I don’t like! What a tragedy!” Yes, poor you. How are you going to cope with something this tragic?

A very good and detailed explanation of that confusing place in the movie Lincoln where the Democrats are racist and the Republicans are anti-slavery.

“While predominant among the ancient philosophers, as well as among some modern ones (Montaigne and Nietzsche, for example), the understanding of philosophy as an “art of living” is far from characterizing mainstream academic philosophy in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Now philosophy is primarily a “job.” When they are done with it, philosophers don’t take it home with them; they leave philosophy at the office, behind locked doors. The work they produce, outstanding as it may be, is not supposed to change their lives. Today philosophical conversions are regarded with suspicion and strongly discouraged; if they do happen, they tend to be dismissed.”

I agree completely that trying to make yourself likable doesn’t pay off and is a huge mistake. This is why in the new year of 2013, I promise to author many vicious and aggressive posts and comments. Between being liked and feared, we all know what I will choose.

Islamic fundamentalists and Christian Evangelicals are exactly the same. They promote the same ideas and say the same things.

A post that just oozes extreme sexual health: “But what I finally realized is that I don’t have to fit my sexuality into any one label or box. There are men I find sexually attractive, and there are women I find sexually attractive. I don’t have to figure out a ratio or obsess over what label I should use.” Giving where she comes from, it is phenomenal that she managed to become so sexually healthy.

Why the future is very bright for the progressives.

A barbaric destruction of churches in Albania with many heart-breaking photos.

“Have you ever heard a single instance of “the rights of parents” being invoked in situation where it wasn’t being used in a blatant attempt to justify child abuse? Because every time these words come up, they invariably seem to issue from the mouth of some fundamentalist dirt bag arguing for his inherent right to beat his children with a belt or deliberately prevent them from learning basic facts about the world.”

Scary: “Apparently, companies are more likely to  “choose new workers much as they would choose friends or dates, zeroing in on shared leisure activities, life experiences and personality styles.” So, if you’re a would-be post-ac with weirdo academic-y tastes, hobbies, and habits and you’re having a hard time finding that new, perfect, nonacademic, exit-strategy job, maybe the key isn’t anything more than getting a personality makeover.”

Disclaimer: Since I keep getting misunderstood these days, here is a disclaimer. This post is not meant as an attack on anybody or a criticism of anybody. IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY. Breathe in deep and try not to take it personally.

I’m such a spoil sport. Whenever I see a list aimed at categorizing human behavior, I feel an irrepressible urge to demolish it. Here is my response to a list titled “How You Can Tell That a Man Loves You.”

He kisses you on the cheek when you’re doing the dishes. – Shit, my husband must not love me at all because he never kisses me when I do the dishes because I don’t do them. He does. I’d say that love is more about sharing household tasks, not rewarding another person for doing them instead of you as if she were a puppy.

You’re a stinky mess and he still wants to do it. – Of course, one would get stinky after slaving over the household tasks while the “loving husband” preserves his energy for sex.

He gives you “thoughtful” gifts just because. – Since the word “thoughtful” is placed in quotation marks, I’m guessing the gifts are not thoughtful at all. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a person in love to give gifts that are actually thoughtful?

He notices the small things like how you curl your toes when you laugh. – Some people are more observant than others. I hear that abusive folks tend to be extremely observant and nit-picky because this is their way of exercising control.

His eyebrows lift up when he sees you walk into a room. – I’m admittedly very bad at reading facial expressions but wouldn’t lifted eyebrows mean surprise? Also, if my husband lifted his eyebrows every time I walked into a room of a house we share, his forehead would wrinkle like a sheet of crumpled paper within two months of our life together.

He makes you chicken soup when you’re sick. – If one has to fall sick to get one’s partner to do something around the house, I wouldn’t call that love.

He gives you flowers just because. – Unless you suffer from allergies, of course.

He watches chick flicks with you and doesn’t complain. – If my husband were to watch chick flicks with me, I would complain because I hate them. Besides, the idea that love consists of forcing yourself to do things you don’t enjoy is very disturbing. What’s next? He agrees to have sex when he doesn’t feel like it to please you?

He loves football, but he’ll keep his eyes on you when the two of you are at a sport’s bar. – What if he doesn’t love football or bars? He must not be fully male then, I guess.

He won’t lie to you about your weight, and he’ll adore all of your “extraness.” – It is not somebody else’s job to get you to have a healthy body image. If you see you own body as having “extras”, you are the one with a problem and, whatever you do, don’t dump this issue on your innocent partner because you have no idea how excruciating it is to answer the endless “Do you think I’m fat?”

He’ll remember the “worst” part of your marriage vows and he’ll honor that. – The only reason why it makes sense to stay together is because that’s what you want to do, not because of some stupid vows.

He throws out the trash without your having to ask him to. – This isn’t love, buddy. This is basic maturity. Marry an adult and you won’t have to see love in terms of who took out the garbage.

He holds your hand inside Home Depot. – Does it count if I hold his? Because in our family, I love this kind of stores and he doesn’t.

Yes, I realize the list is supposed to be humorous. But it’s even funnier with my take-down of it, I believe.

I did so much work today that I’m scaring myself. This is what I did:

1. Created a syllabus for my literature course next semester.

2. Created a schedule for oral presentations in the literature course.

3. Gathered all of the readings for the literature course.

4. Created a final exam for my Culture of Spain course.

5. Created a study guide for the final exam.

6. Planned tomorrow’s lecture.

7. Conducted oral exams for the students in Russian 101 (this is a service obligation.)

8. Discussed the final grades for the Russian students with the instructor and submitted them.

9. Worked on my research. OK, it was only 20 minutes but that’s better than nothing.

10. Sent out exit questionnaires to our graduating seniors.

11. Graded the presentations by my independent researchers and sent out individual feedback.

This isn’t everything I needed to do but it’s a lot.

A friend suggested that all the drama around the “fiscal cliff” is one of the many diversionary strategies aimed at distracting us from the real problem which is the global warming.

What do you think about the fiscal cliff?

We have talked a lot on this blog about the importance of taking into account cultural context when analyzing events in other countries, so when I saw a table of Soviet salary statistics on a blog, I decided to use it to demonstrate this important point. Of course, I could have easily just taken the table and published it here without attributing it to the blog where I found it. But I’m kind and honest, so I linked back to the original post.

Do you think that the linked post’s author came here to thank me for sending some readers his way? Not at all.

Do you think he held his peace and occupied himself with the important stuff I’m sure is going on in his life? Nah huh.

He came here and attacked me in an aggressive and completely unwarranted way. As you can easily see for yourself, I didn’t say anything even remotely unpleasant about his post, his blog, his opinions, or himself. I just used the table and linked back. And in return, I got attacked. Normally, bloggers are happy when somebody links back to them. I know I am. But some folks seem to dislike getting linkbacks from popular blogs like mine.

This is the second day in a row when people throw completely unprovoked tantrums on my blog. What is this? Avitaminosis kicking in? Why the sudden massive bout of hysteria?

The person who transcribes our student evaluations has been looking at me strangely.

“Is everything OK?” I asked her.

“I’ve been reading your evals,” she said, “and now I really want to take a course with you because they LOVE you. Love, love, love you.”

It’s nice to be loved.

 

Here is a small illustration of why the statistics produced by Communist countries cannot be taken at face value. Please look at this table of changes in the monthly salaries that different groups of Soviet people received between 1965-1973:

What you might conclude from this table as a person unfamiliar with the Soviet reality is that the government made efforts to ensure that bureaucrats’ salaries didn’t grow as much as those of the working people. You might even admire a system that prioritized the interests of the working people over those of the Party’s paper pushers. If you conclude that, however, you will be completely wrong.

The actual salaries of the Soviet apparatchiks (meaning the amount of money they were paid every month) were not that huge. However, money in the USSR was kind of worthless anyways because there wasn’t anything to buy. What made the positions in the state apparatus so coveted was the great number of perks that accompanied them and made higher salaries unnecessary. Free high-quality housing, a free car with a driver, regular food packages with all sorts of delicacies that you couldn’t buy for any amount of money, free stays at resorts, free travel, good books, free country houses – all of this was provided to the Soviet apparatchiks by the government.

This system allowed to ensure that an apparatchik would be prepared to stoop to the most disgusting behaviors in order to preserve his job. Losing it would mean having to give up the entire lifestyle provided for free by the state. The bureaucrats who lost their jobs would discover, to their extreme amazement, that they owned absolutely nothing. Losing a job would not just mean the loss of a salary. It would entail the loss of everything the apparatchik had become used to enjoying.

Numbers mean nothing by themselves until you look at the reality that produces them.