I’m seriously stupid, people. For some bizarre reason, I decided to use perfume. What I forgot is that pregnancy has made me ultra-sensitive to smells. So now it feels like the universe reeks of this disgusting perfume.

I’m really suffering right now.

I don’t get all these debates on whether the global warming is man-made or not. Who cares? We all know there is global warming. We all know it is already resulting in horrible things. Doesn’t it make sense to do something about it irrespective of what or who caused it?

Let’s say global warming is in no way influenced by human activity and is a result of periodic changes in the planet’s temperature that happen for reasons beyond our control. The last major one took place around 1,000 AD, if I remember correctly (I’m not an expert, so I might be wrong on the dates.) It doesn’t matter for the moment if you agree with this. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume this is the truth***.

Doesn’t it make sense to do something to counteract the detrimental consequences of this non-human global warming? The glaciers are thawing, that’s an incontrovertible fact of objective reality. The planet’s temperature is rising. That is also an incontrovertible fact of objective reality. All we can control is our human influence on the planet’s temperature. So why wouldn’t we control it if it could prevent further negative things? Isn’t the attitude of “We didn’t cause the problem so we will do nothing about it even if we have to die in the process” completely childish?

Even if we can all agree that the global warming is nothing but horrible, rotten luck we have encountered for absolutely no reason whatsoever, how is that a reason to do nothing to reverse its consequences? If your house gets infected with termites, will you pay for an exterminator, or will you sit there, repeating like a parrot, “I didn’t cause this, so I won’t lift a finger to address the problem” as the house crumbles down around you?

*** I don’t think it’s the truth. I’m just making an argument.

I just had my very first conversation of the “Of course, you prefer to have a boy. No, you don’t? Why??” variety. It was hilarious.

OK, I have got to share this because this is too good. From a student’s essay:

These characters mistakenly believe that they can free people from the prejudices about gender roles. However, no human being can hope to liberate other human beings from injustice. Only God can do that.

In the area where I live, we have a place that is especially horrid in terms of its ecology. There is a highway, a gas station, a car parking space, and a convenience store. The whole thing looks like the one in the photo but ours has more gas pumps and a lot more traffic. The stench of the gas and the exhaust fumes is enough to kill an elephant. You will be OK if you duck inside the convenience store really fast and then run out, but spending any time in this spot is unimaginable.

For a little over a week now, the same two women with the same 3 little girls have been sitting in front of the convenience store (facing the cars, the gas pumps, and the highways) and selling Girl Scout cookies. I don’t know what the value of this exercise is supposed to be but the situation of these children seems horrible. They spend hours each day, inhaling the worst kind of stench anybody can think of.

I don’t get this, people. What can possess one to bring one’s own child to such a nasty place and make her breathe in exhaust fumes day after day after miserable day?

And while I’m on it, we live in a residential area where there are crowds of people with small children. Since there is no playground, no sidewalks, and no backyards of the kind where children could play together (the operative word being together), the kids are forced to spend all their time playing in the parking lot, in front of garages, and in the road. There are many kids of all ages. And the houses in this neighborhood are not at all cheap (the one three houses away is selling for $570,000, which is quite a lot for this area.) Yet nobody among these well-to-do folks seems to have any problem with children not having a green, comfortable, safe place to play.

Family values, my ass.

À propos the previous post. I know why people keep writing these hysterical articles about the horrors of academia. I’m not as green-horned as I used to be when I first started out in academia and took every such outburst completely seriously. I have now realized that this is all done on purpose to convince the general public that we are all dying of exhaustion and are on the brink of starvation. The goal here is to avoid getting our exceptionally wonderful lifestyle being taken away.

I can understand that goal, to an extent. The problem, however, is that people read and talk about these imaginary horrors so much that they end up convincing themselves that they are true. As a result, an intolerable environment of endless freak-outs, profound misery, and constant stress is created in academia. People who want to do their work and enjoy their lives get bogged down in this apocalyptic worldview and find it hard to have as good a time as they would without all these collective freak-outs.

In the meanwhile, alongside the drama queens and the stress-mongers, there are successful, productive scholars who can teach others a lot and have really crucial knowledge to share. Take Jonathan Mayhew and Z, two academics from the field of Hispanic Studies whose insightful, passionate writing about academia and research has literally changed my life. I’m now a lot more successful and happy as an academic than I was before I read and followed their suggestions. Such people could enrich crowds of academics with their expertise.

I understand why the mainstream newspapers and websites don’t want to allow productive, powerful academics to speak and prefer to subject us to the spectacle of disintegrating self-hating individuals. Why the supposedly academic publications such as CHE and IHE never ask for contributions from brilliant, happy, well-adjusted scholars is still a mystery.

To people who are only just starting out in academia, I have the following advice:

1. Avoid these misery-promoting publications as much as you can.

2. Find several good, helpful blogs run by scholars who write well and who will not try to discourage you in order to get rid of competition.

3. Avoid spending too much time with miserable people who like wallowing. There are unhappy people who actively work to change their situation. Such people can be an inspiration. But those who whine and whine and whine for years are not helpful.

4. Don’t dedicate more than 1 hour per week to discussions of how everything is horrible and the world is about to end. You’ll have to dedicate some time to them in order to be collegial. But make sure you schedule a massage, come read my blog, or do some breathing exercises after each such session.

5. And most importantly, remember: professions where there is guaranteed job security, huge benefits, little work, no competition, no deadlines, no hardship, no conflict, completely amazing colleagues, absence of obnoxious bosses, tons of money, and tons of free time do not exist. You have chosen to be an adult and develop professionally. This means that you will encounter problems on your way. But you will resolve them, gain experience, and feel satisfaction as a result of doing so.

I know everybody must be sick and tired of me posting rebuttals to these outbursts of hysteria from the academia hating crowd, but I get so many emails from people thanking me for being a voice of reason on this issue after each such post that I believe it is important for me to keep writing.

Here is how this fresh bout of idiocy begins:

Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor.

I don’t know what institution granted any degree to a person so egregiously ignorant that she believes people end up as emotional train wrecks because of getting certain diplomas.

Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor.

Not just tenured. Hello, still untenured here!

Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,”

You’d be an idiot who can’t manage your time well.

and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”

I’d say that you’ ll never publish anything with such a lousy writing style and such profound disregard for accuracy. And if you need all summer to design a syllabus, then I wouldn’t hire you to clean my toilet. With such high productivity, you’d probably need a year to wash a single commode.

What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”

I’d say it’s a shame anybody chose to hire you for any position whatsoever. A Visiting prof who has no time to read? Shame on you, freakazoid!

And I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure—largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know.

I hope you never get on the tenure track because you are a disgusting creature who despises your colleagues.

Don’t do it. Just don’t. I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious.

Finally, something we can agree on. I’m sure you were an obnoxious loser long before you even left high school.

No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct.

Sure you need to believe that. It isn’t like you were ever going to look at yourself and analyze how you have contributed to your own failure. (Hint: a summer-long writing of a syllabus is not normal.)

Continue reading “Another Hysterical Outburst from an Academia Hater” →

So. This student does the following things:

– disregards every single suggestion I offered for the first draft of the essay;

– keeps thinking she can pull a fast one and keep analyzing an English-language movie instead of a Spanish-language novel;

– does not offer a single quote from the novel she is supposedly analyzing;

– does not correct any of the grammar or spelling mistakes I pointed out;

– hands in an essay with no Spanish-language critical sources and ends up with a work where a bunch of Anglos pontificate about a Latin American novel. (I write criticism in English, too, but we have a requirement where students have to use the majority of Spanish-language sources.)***

And then on top of all this, she blames a character who is raped for “letting herself get raped.”

Seriously, she should start writing brochures on “How to Antagonize Prof. Clarissa to the Point Where She Becomes Rabid.”

I still have 6 more pages of that essay to read and I don’t even want to imagine what I will find there.

***The student is a native speaker of Spanish, by the way (Chile).

A very strange (and kind of scary) person is fantasizing about the matriarchal society:

As a child, you would not have to fight with your sisters or brothers for your father’s or your mother’s attention. Both girls and boys would be equally loved and cherished by their mothers and grandmothers and by their uncles and great-uncles. Both girls and boys would know that they would always have a place in the maternal clan. As a boy or a girl you would never have to “separate from” or “reject” your mother in order to “prove yourself as an individual” or in order to “grow up.” You could grow up without severing the bond with the ones who first loved you and first cared for you.

The good news for Carol P. Christ (seriously, that’s how she signs her crap, just go and look) is that such societies already exist and she can move there tomorrow. I grew up in one, so I should know. This is the family structure in all Russian-speaking countries of the FSU. People are not allowed to grow up or separate from the cannibalizing Mommy. They are supposed to serve her needs for as long as she lives. And long past she dies, too. The strangulating umbilical cord is never severed.

Mothers would be helped in the raising of children by their sisters and brothers, by their mothers and grandmothers, and by their aunts and uncles. A young woman pregnant or with a child would never be cast out, nor would she ever be expected to “make it on her own.”

Oh yes. Totally familiar. Irrespective of her age, any woman who gives birth in these countries has to prepare herself for decades of mortal combat with her mother and grandmother for the right to have any say in how she raises her child. Obviously, the father is often chased away completely or, in the best of cases, allowed to be present on the margins in a totally silent capacity.

A young man would not be responsible for “providing for” his children, as this would be the responsibility of the mother clans. A young man would contribute to his clan and would help his sisters and female cousins to care for their children. These children would look up to him as their male “role model.” Men might work with their mothers and sisters in the fields or undertake building projects or take charge of trading with other clans near and far.

OK, folks, this is so recognizable that it’s getting scary. Soviet Union, here we come. This is exactly how it always was and still is in the FSU. Men believe they owe what they have not to their children but to their cannibalizing Mommies.

Whether you were a girl or a boy, a man or a woman, you would always know that you were loved. You would be taught to be loving and generous and to care for others. You would not be taught to compete with others, to gloat, or to hoard.

Yes, yes, yes. No individuality is allowed, no personal space, no life of one’s own. But as compensation, your adoring Momma and Grandma will always be there to teach you and teach you and teach you some more about how better to care for them.

The bad news is that this family structure is crippling and tragic. But hey, I think Carol P. Christ should still go. It ain’t like she is of much use around here.

If you thought we were hopeless country bumpkins here in rural Illinois, think again. There is a celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight on April 12, 1961 going on at a local frozen custard place right now.

If only I knew what frozen custard was, then I’d feel right at home.