OK, since I refuse to go back to the “your baby is a chicken breast” pregnancy Bible, does anybody know: is it normal that all of my first trimester symptoms have come back with a vengeance in week 19?

This is the closest I’ve been in the entire process to throwing up. Of course, this had to come over me in the midst of a class on Quim Monzó, a writer I never taught before and really really wanted to teach.

And I feel like somebody stabbed me in the side. Which is probably how the stretching ligament feels.

I have to tell you, folks, the entire thing is quite creepy. Whenever I realize that there is a head inside me, I feel very scared. A head, and feet, and toes, and elbows. And if the fetus is female, there are 7 million primitive eggs inside her who is inside me. But not to worry, by the end of the pregnancy, she will only have 2 million eggs inside her. I’m trying not to think where the other 5 million eggs will go in the meanwhile. Poor N. almost fainted when I told him about the eggs.

The whining session is now over. I hope.

‘”Any time bombs are used to target civilians, it is an act of terrorism,” Obama said, adding that it remained unclear who carried out the attack and why.’

But I don’t think this is right: I think it is important to differentiate a terror attack, which has a political aim, from mere psychopathy, where someone just wants to kill lots of people because it excites them.

Yes, I’m sure this difference matters hugely to the victims. The quality of terror must be entirely different in these cases. “My friend / relative has been murdered by a mere psychopath! What a relief! I feared this was something serious but, whew! I feel so much better now!”

 

When I read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s article titled “My So-Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts and Letters“, I felt really bad for the author. Copaken Kogan shares her frustration with the patriarchal literary establishment that ignores and trivializes her work because she is a woman and a feminist. I decided to show solidarity for the author and bought her novel Between Here and April.

And this is what I have to say after reading it: if your books don’t get reviewed, if your articles don’t get published, if your CV always ends up in the trash can, if you are always passed by for a promotion, if you are denied tenure, etc., there is a possibility – just a possibility – that this doesn’t happen because you are a woman, a Muslim, an atheist, a religious person, a Jew, a Ukrainian, an autistic, a parent, a childless person, a man, an immigrant, etc., but simply because your books are no good, your articles suck, your CV is bad, and your tenure dossier is unconvincing.

Between Here and April tells a story of Lizzie, a very immature, inept woman who, at the age of 41, speaks and acts like an 11-year-old, and who makes a half-hearted attempt to jump-start her dying career by investigating the suicide of another immature and inept woman. Lizzie is incapable of making any decisions of her own and always needs some man to tell her in detail what to do. A former employer tells her that she needs to drop everything and go on  a journalistic mission to Iraq, and she starts to prepare for the trip. A former lover lectures her on why it will benefit her not to go to Iraq but to investigate the suicide of a woman who killed herself and her children, and Lizzie forgets all about Iraq and starts to investigate. Another man tells her to stop investigating, and she does.

Lizzie’s life is a mess. Her marriage is a disaster and she feels extremely resentful that she has to invest any energy or time into bringing up her two daughters. Yet instead of letting these daughters develop normally, she stunts their growth to render them completely dependent on her. This gives her a fresh round of excuses for her miserable life and crumbling career.

Lizzie’s explanation for her ineptitude is that, as a woman, she is the victim of her female physiology to the degree that makes her practically incapable of functioning. This is where the “feminist” part of the novel resides: in the belief that all women are subject to “hormonal fluctuations” that never happen to men and that render women completely incapacitated.

The novel ends in a manner typical to Harlequin romance fiction: the protagonist solves all of her problems by having another baby. The message of a novel that tried to demonstrate that many women hate being mothers is that all these women who hate their children to the point of planning their murder should make everything right by. . . having another baby.

“Women, keep having babies and that will solve all your problems!” seems to be the novel’s conclusion. Yes, I’m sure that the patriarchal literary establishment was extremely scandalized by the powerful feminist thrust of this ultra-subversive message.

“It’s career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they’ll smear you,” Copaken Kogan writes in her article. I’m sure that it is a lot more flattering to think of oneself as a brave, solitary feminist who is persecuted for her views by an all-powerful sexist establishment than to recognize that you are a very bad writer whose literary talents stand somewhere a little below Jodi Picoult’s and a little above E.L. James’s.

Quebec has become so pathetic that it is now turning its most prestigious university into a vocational school to service some completely spurious budget crisis.

A new curriculum being introduced this year in the faculty of medicine at McGill University has some doctors worried that McGill will lose its edge in the world of research and become a “family doctor factory” that will diminish the university’s status.

Some physicians who have been involved with teaching at McGill oppose the direction of the new curriculum, arguing that it cuts back on the foundational science required for medical students and will jeopardize McGill’s long-standing ability to produce high-calibre clinician scientists — doctors who also do research.

Instead of receiving actual instruction from real doctors, McGill’s students will now be offered “problem-solving sessions” where they will waste their time diagnosing runny noses. Where they are supposed to acquire the basic knowledge needed to forma un understanding of medicine remains a mystery.

With the insane amounts of money that people in Quebec pay in taxes, any conversation about there being not enough funds to continue the university’s research agenda and paying the doctors who used to teach students is completely stupid.

Shame on you, McGill University, for lending yourself so gladly to pleasing the brainless bureaucrats who bleed you dry and then take away everything you thought these taxes were supposed to  provide. This move will not only deprive you of quality education in the field of medicine, it will also make the problems with obtaining quality healthcare in Quebec even greater.