Another ridiculous article has appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education. Its author promotes the “fake it till you make it” mentality. This is a slogan of people in telemarketing companies, and the hapless academic suggests we apply it in academia:

And all is not lost if you have crossed over the line to disliking teaching. It is still perfectly possible to do a good job, even an excellent job. In fact, it probably happens on your campus every semester. The trick is as simple as it is human: Hide your dislike. Effective teaching is, after all, a set of behaviors. What students need from us are clear presentations, careful selections of course material, engaging discussions—in short, the right behaviors. One of those is hiding your dislike. Students don’t learn by peering into your mind to see if you are enjoying teaching. Why would it matter to them if you feign it?

No, it doesn’t matter to the students. It matters to you, doofus. You are destroying your own mental and physical health by forcing yourself to do something you don’t like doing. What is this, a Masochist’s Manifesto?

If you keep doing something that doesn’t make you happy, you have a good chance of pleasing others. But is the cost to yourself ever worth doing a good job, being effective, and giving people what they need? We only have one life here. Why waste it on self-torture?

Here is an intelligent response from a blogger whose writing would be a much more valuable asset to an academic publication.

I think it’s great that Putin is getting divorced. This tradition where politicians pretend to have good marriages and then entertain the entire world with their miserable little affairs is too ridiculous. Remember how stupid the Clintons looked because they forgot to get divorced on time?

Also, Putin’s divorce will put a damper on the attempts by the Russian Orthodox Church to control the country. With only 2% of the population actually practicing, it is a disgrace to see the priests become ubiquitous in the country’s politics. Putin’s declaration that he is getting divorced comes immediately after the priests tried to push through the legislation that would make everybody who wants to get a divorce pay a fine. It’s as if Putin spit in the face of these nasty Russian Orthodox priests.

Remember, Russian Orthodox priests collaborated with the KGB throughout the existence of the USSR by revealing the things people confessed to. Since 1991, the priests have enriched themselves beyond what you can even begin to imagine by selling vodka and tobacco and not paying any taxes. They also sell any religious service you want to have performed. If you are a criminal who needs a priest to sprinkle Holy Water on  the walls of the room where you kill your enemies, this can be arranged.

At the same time, the priests want to impose on all women of the country a uniform that will cover their bodies. They say this will be done to prevent women from provoking men into raping them. They are also pushing through legislation that limits reproductive freedoms and rewards people for procreating massively.

In short, I’m happy to see Putin stick it to these hypocrites by announcing his divorce.

Yesterday’s lecture at the community center about the economic crisis in Spain went very well. These lectures are attended by the local retirees, and I really love American retirees. Older people in my own culture are always completely beaten down, miserable, decrepit, and extremely mean. The only hobby I ever saw them pursue is spreading vile rumors about their younger neighbors. In the US, however, people in their 70s and older are energetic, engaged, extremely interested in the world around them, eager to learn more about politics, arts, foreign affairs, etc., receptive, and kind.

They always listen to the lectures with such deep attention that I keep wishing my 20-year-old students were capable of such breathless concentration on the material.

The really positive thing about the lecture was that the projector didn’t work and I couldn’t put on my PowerPoint presentation. So the talk had to be given in the old-fashioned way: without any flashing screens to distract people from what I was saying. This worked very well for the retirees. They already knew a lot about Spain, and I didn’t have to spend half of the time narrating the basics.

Everybody always says that if you want to know a country’s potential, you should look at the young people. I, however, believe that we need to look at the older generation instead. In this country, you constantly see people of very advanced ages living full existences and in no way feeling left behind by the times. We are all moving in the direction where they are today, and it’s good to see that the place where the older people find themselves is exciting and intellectually stimulating.

From an essay:

Before encountering the indigenous people Columbus probably had never even seen a naked person. It isn’t surprising he had a shock when he saw them!

I arrived too early for my lecture on Spain’s economic crisis at the local community center and had to go inside this really ratty bar where people smoke illegally and drink from plastic cups.

Then I proceeded to freak everybody out by drinking a Coke and reading a book for 40 minutes. People must think I’m insane to visit a bar in a visibly pregnant state for such a strange purpose.

I just found the most blatant example of hypocrisy I have seen in a long while:

Reproductive coercion is an abusive dynamic in intimate relationships in which one partner “pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant.” The instinct behind reproductive coercion is not primarily (or at all) a desire to create a baby, but to create a dependency in their partners. A woman (and it is overwhelmingly women who are victimized by reproductive coercion) is easier to control, if her independence and ability to make choices that exclusively prioritize her own needs are compromised in some way.

You have really got to be a dishonest and nasty piece of work to write something so obviously and offensively wrong. Does this stupid freakazoid somehow manage not to know how many pregnancies occur because women unilaterally decide they should occur? The differences in male and female physiology make it completely unnecessary for a woman to pressure or threaten the man to make a pregnancy happen. She can just quietly make her choice, and the man will have to accept it.

I don’t even want to tell you how many women aggressively and obnoxiously suggested to me that I get pregnant without asking for N.’s consent. (For some reason, they all assumed that I had no children at 30-35 because N. was unwilling, not because I might have been unprepared or uninterested.)

“That’s how I got my baby!” they would respond angrily to my suggestion that it was wrong to do something like this. “Would you have preferred for my son or daughter not to exist?”

This reality, however, has no space in the “women are always victims of everything” that Melissa McEwan and her crowd of self-righteous idiots like to promote.

P.S. For the especially gifted, I will reiterate that the way a child was conceived has no bearing on this child’s entitlement to child-support.

Today is the 6th anniversary of the day N. and I met, and I wanted to share this touching story from the early days of our relationship.

In the first 2,5 years, we had to live apart. Initially, we lived in different countries, and I had to take the Greyhound bus from Montreal to Indiana to stay with him. I’d remain in Indiana for 6-8 weeks and then come back to Montreal for the same period of time. And then the journey would be repeated.

The first time I was staying at N.’s place in Indiana, I soon noticed there was a very unpleasant smell in his small apartment that kept intensifying. I felt bad about saying anything because I didn’t want to hurt N.’s feelings. (Yes, I can be sensitive when I want to.) N. also noticed the bad smell that appeared right after I arrived. He didn’t say anything either because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. So we both suffered in silence for weeks.

Finally, when the heat became especially high and the stench got to the point of being intolerable, N. broke the silence.

“So. . . maybe we should investigate where this funny smell comes from. . .” he volunteered.

“I know! This is disgusting!” I exclaimed, relieved that the subject was finally broached.

We walked around the apartment, trying to trace the stench and soon both arrived at the same closet.

“What do you have in there?” I asked in a whisper.

“There is nothing there but your suitcase,” N. whispered back.

“The suitcase is empty, though.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

So we went over the suitcase and eventually found a small hidden pocket that I didn’t even know existed. We opened the pocket, and the smell almost knocked us both off our feet.

In the hidden pocket of the suitcase, we found. . . several pieces of pickled fish. They had spoiled and looked even more disgusting than they smelled.

The situation was extremely bizarre. How did those pieces of fish end up in my suitcase without me knowing it?

I started sharing this weird story with people, and soon the answer was found.

“Oh, I put this fish in your suitcase,” my mother said. “I though you would eat it on the way to Indiana.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you put it there?” I asked.

“Didn’t I?” my mother asked. “I was sure I did.”

Imagine the state of this poor fish after I traveled on a Greyhound bus from Montreal to Indiana and stayed there in hot summer weather for 6 weeks.

Also imagine the strength of the romantic feeling that developed in spite of being surrounded by rotting fish.

And if you are wondering why my mother was filling the secret pockets of my suitcase with food, remember that Ukrainian people share the kind of history that makes it necessary for us to have food around us at every moment. Filling every pocket in sight with food is a reflex that we developed in response to our historical legacy.

We’ve always had these very aggressive Canadian geese on our campus. They leave their droppings everywhere. In the last couple of months, the administration cut the janitorial services in anticipation of the imaginary funding cuts that an administrator invented to force everybody to be “more creative.” As a result, the campus has been drowning in goose shit.

The geese have long made entering buildings on campus a difficult endeavor, especially during the mating and brooding season. They make their nests right in front of buildings and attack anybody who approaches. People have been bitten by the geese, the disabled students and faculty members have been prevented from entering the buildings, older and pregnant people have been scared out of their wits by angry creatures rushing at them.

The geese are such a burning issue that I use them whenever students stop paying attention in class. To get them involved in a discussion, I ask them to share their geese stories. Five seconds later, everybody is awake, engaged, and yelling at the top of their lungs.

This week, everybody noticed that the geese were not around. Immediately, a rumor got started that “the government” was removing the geese and killing them. Endless emails circulated, outlining the horrible scenarios of what was happening to the geese. They were slaughtered, starved to death, tortured, and killed.

I was cursing every time I had to open my university mailbox because I now needed to weed out legitimate, work-related emails from underneath the barrage of horrifying stories about tortured and persecuted geese. Gradually, the tone of the emails became extremely confrontational and descended into, “Oh, you are so egocentric” and “Would you just kill me off if I had cancer?”

Finally, “the government” responded saying that nothing has been done or will be done to the geese. They probably just left temporarily because of the tornado.

If you have been reading my “campus drama” stories, you probably understand that this announcement has done nothing to diminish the virulence of the Goose Drama debate.

Loving a person means seeing him according to God’s plan that his parents didn’t manage to carry out.

– Marina Tsvetaeva.

The great Modernist poet was right. Love allows one to see a person in the still-undamaged state that only exists very deep inside the person.

“My new favourite blog is by a Ukrainian-born scholar of Hispanic Literature named “Clarissa” – she doesn’t reveal her surname or some other would-be identifying information, like her university’s name – whose work I first encountered on Jonathan Mayhew’s Stupid Motivational Tricks (Scholarly Writing and How to Get it Done) blog, where she frequently posts tart, uncommon-sounding comments.”

” No other academic blog I know of so beautifully conveys the author’s love of academia, specifically the love of being a professor.”

“Her prose is a jumping, her tone is unsparing, and her focus is wide.”

And you thought nobody liked me! Well, maybe that wasn’t you but somebody surely thought that.

P.S. Finally, somebody applied the word “pellucid” to my writing. For somebody who used to hear that her writing is clunky, Germanic, and pedestrian this is a big deal.