This year, a friend went on the job market with a PhD in Germanic Studies. The field is currently in a very bad situation, so the search was not successful. The friend has one more year of funding and if the second job search is fruitless will have to decide what to do next. There are several options people get in such cases:

1. Try to get a Visiting Professor position (the best option of all these because it does not preclude the possibility of a subsequent tenure-track job);

2. Try to get a post-doc (a less appealing option because in the Humanities this is a position that brings zero respect and offers zero added value on one’s CV);

3. Get an adjunct job (the worst option of all because this is pretty much a professional and financial suicide with zero prospects. I would advise everybody to think very very carefully before embarking on the adjuncting path);

4. Look for employment outside of academia (it heavily depends on one’s personality whether this is a viable option. For some people, it is the best choice of their lives, while for others it is an unmitigated tragedy. It’s quite like getting married or having children: phenomenal for some and horrible for others).

My friend, however, is a very original thinker, so she came up with option number five. If her second job search is not successful, she will start doing a second PhD in a different field. Such a plan would have finished me off because I was as unhappy as a PhD student as I’m happy as a tenure-track professor. For my friend, though, this is a great decision. She thrives in the PhD program, travels constantly, has a very rich, fulfilling existence. So a second PhD means five more years of joy for her.

People are coming up with very inventive ways to address the problematic nature of the job market in the Humanities.

Sister: You know, when I go out for lunch or drinks with my employees, they always fall silent and listen with the utmost attention whenever I say anything. Even when I say something completely trivial. And I have to confess that I kind of like that.

Me: Ah, now you get why I dig my job! Remember that I normally have more than six people shut up whenever I speak. And they also write down everything I say. The only problem is that when I leave the classroom, it’s hard to accept that people don’t shut up whenever I open my mouth and never write down every word I say.

P.S. Jokes aside, remember that everybody’s personality is impacted by their profession but people of the highly aggressive professions, such as teachers and doctors, have to be especially careful. Without regular and intense psychological hygiene, they begin to bring their aggression home.

If I read one more silly thing about the mounting tensions between the US and Russia over the possibility of Russia extraditing Snowden, I will get very annoyed.

Obama could not have done absolutely anything to change Putin’s position on the subject. Obama’s “weakness” or lack thereof is completely immaterial here. Putin has his own agenda and could care less about who is in power in the US. He will do all he can to show that Russia is a crucial player on the global arena. Obama or no Obama, he will keep doing this. This is his raison d’etre.

And while I’m on it, Reagan had just as little to do with the decision to disband the Soviet Union as Obama has with the decision not to extradite Snowden. This was an internal decision that had to do with the transfer of economic resources within the USSR. Reagan had zero influence on any of it.

Just try to look objectively at what is going on: a KGB person is in power in most of the former USSR and he is continuing the exact same geopolitical policies that defined the USSR. On the global scale, what changed? And given that China holds most of the US foreign debt, who won the Cold War? I hate the answer as much as you do, but it won’t change until we all look clearly and objectively at what is really going on.

P.S. Who was right when she predicted that soon everybody would forget all about the NSA’s spying on all of us and follow Snowden’s Hollywood-like jet-setting with a lot more interest?

I woke up at 5:40 am and couldn’t get back to sleep, which is extremely unusual for me. And then I discovered that I had forgotten to set my alarm clock and my subconscious was keeping me awake so that I wouldn’t miss my doctor’s appointment at 9 am.

In 1994, the British Union opened a library in my city. This was a godsend because finding books in English in the city of Kharkov, Ukraine was a constant problem. Things had gotten so bad that I had devoured a small library of naval novels and had nightmares populated with fo’c’sles, lanyards, and spinnakers.

The library of the British Union contained a very incongruous selection of books on a wide variety of subjects. I was making my way through them shelf by shelf without leaving anything out because I didn’t have the capacity to distinguish what was good and what was bad. I even pored over thick reference books reckoning that it wouldn’t do any harm to peruse them.

This is how I got to the section with the mysterious name of “Gender Studies.” At first, the books were incomprehensible. They seemed to reflect a reality that was very alien to mine. The main emphasis in them was on women who underachieved while men overachieved. I’d never seen such people, and the analysis of their lives didn’t seem very interesting.

Still, I gradually came to realize that the terminology these books was using could be applied to what I knew. The solution to all the mysteries about the strange behavior of men and women that I had been observing throughout my life was contained in the Gender Studies volumes.

In the books, women kept sacrificing their professional and financial realization for the sake of being in a family, irrespective of how crappy that family ended up being. They cried, yelled, had hysterical outbursts, beat their children, and constantly got depressed and moody. The women I knew found it easy to make money and have careers. Still, they kept sacrificing something equally crucial for the sake of being in a family, irrespective of how crappy that family ended up being. Their sacrifice was their sexuality, their emotional lives, the joy they could take in their female bodies.

There had to be a name for the phenomenon that seemed to compel women to self-mutilate for the sake of an empty concept. From the Psychology 101 course I was taking, I knew that a psychologically healthy individual was the one who was equally well-fulfilled in the public and in the private sphere. A career without a personal life is as unbalanced as a personal life with no career.

Why were all the women I knew bullied at a very early age into creating families they neither needed nor loved? Why were they spending their lives burning with passionate hatred for these families where they were hopelessly trapped and with an even greater hatred for those few women who did not bury their sexuality completely? Why did everything and everyone seem to conspire to stomp out every trace of female sexuality from the earliest childhood experiences of a little girl?

Was it really not possible for women to retain both the private and the public spheres of their lives without having the Family devour either one or the other?

[To be continued. . .]

The talk shows* I prefer to all others are the ones about custody battles and battles over real estate. It’s weird because neither issue has ever been present in my life to any extent.

* They play in the background while I cook or play Cinderella, like today when I’m sorting beans.

As I matured, I formed an image of men as sensitive, fragile, likely to wither under the weight of their health issues and psychological problems. Men were prone to messing up in a variety of ways, and it was up to women to gather and hold long conferences on how to straighten them out.

Whenever a man screwed up really badly there was an immediate investigation aimed at discovering which woman was at fault for not managing his life in a more efficient manner.

“Men! What can you expect from them? It’s our job as women to make sure they stay alive,” I would hear.

Men who didn’t have any women to take care of them were objects of intense pity. I still can’t see lonely old men without an overpowering sense of guilt and compassion. Lonely old women never evoked the same emotions in anybody, however, because it was obvious that they could taken perfect care of themselves.

The women I saw around could do anything. They made money, managed their families, and could bully anybody in sight into submission. They didn’t look happy, though. Just the opposite, they acted like intensely miserable people. They yelled, had hysterical outbursts, beat their children for no reason, and cried a lot more than they smiled.

It took me many years to find out why the women I knew were so unhappy.

A while ago, I posted a link to the recipe that inspired this dish but I changed it so much that it has become a completely different casserole. It is so delicious that since the first time I made it, I’ve been dreaming about it every night.

It has a very light, citrusy taste that is perfect for the summer.

Here is what you will need:

1. A couple of onions if you are a normal person or a couple of potatoes if you are weird like me.
2. A head of Boston lettuce.
3. Some fresh herbs.
4. A salmon fillet, skin removed.
5. A couple of oranges.
6. A couple of tomatoes.
7. A couple of bottles of your favorite beer.

Step-by-step directions are under the fold.

Continue reading “Clarissa’s Summer Salmon Casserole” →

Stupid Lorac destroyed the best product they ever had and substituted it with a completely meaningless alternative. They used to have these really great eye makeup kits that contained everything you needed to create different versions of eye makeup routine.

So now they got rid of half of the ingredients in the kit and substituted it with a useless blush and an ugly lip gloss. So instead of a product that allowed you to create a complete eye routine, you have a product that doesn’t allow you to create a complete anything.

This is the biggest makeup fail since Lancome stupidly discontinued its amazingly beautiful aquamarine eye pencil back in 2003.

Initially, companies hired social media specialists to promote their brand name by any means necessary. The specialist was required to get the brand mentioned online in any context whatsoever as many times as possible.

As social media gained in importance, however, the approach to the kind of specialists who were hired changed. Quality became more important than quantity. Today, companies insist that they only want people who can write well. A candidate is required to provide a portfolio with his or her best pieces for the potential employer to analyze.

I will be mentioning this to students who whine that I make them write too much. Writing is the least developed of their skills. And it will become one of the most marketable skills in the nearest future. Universities need to study these trends and respond to them.

As things stand right now, people don’t want to teach students how to write well because it is too much of a hassle. For instance, a colleague recently sent out a flyer in an English lit course where he promised that students would not have to write more than two 2-page essays in the entire semester. This was supposed to be the course’s selling point].