At the class for Dads, every couple’s spokesperson is a woman.* Except for us. We get introduced and spoken for by N. I believe that it is never too early to butt out of a father’s relationship with a child. So I truthfully informed N that I’m as clueless as he is and I will not be managing his fatherhood.

* There are no gay couples here but there is a single mother with her own parents as a support group and a couple accompanied by the mother’s twin sister.

I think the following is absolutely spot-on:

White  people don’t think Zimmerman is white. He looks mostly Mexican. But for the purposes of race warfare he will come in handy as a kind of intermediate between “real” white people and blacks. That way white people can keep their white hands clean and comfort themselves that people they think of as goons are doing their dirty work for them. 
Mexicans have got to reject this role of “enforcer” for The Man.

The efforts to co-opt Hispanic people for the lousiest, shittiest, vilest causes in this country should stop.

I now have 12 peer-reviewed publications altogether. Seven of them have been done since I started my tenure-track four years ago. I also have 2 pieces out awaiting decision and one under construction.

Two more years to go until tenure.

Also, 7 1/2 more weeks to suffer with this horrible rash. This is why I need to be listing my achievements in this obnoxious way.

I’m suffering so badly with PUPPPs (search for it in Google Images but I warn you, this shit is scary, don’t look at it before you eat) that I was overdue for some good news. And good news I got: a long-standing dream of mine has come true, and I will finally have a publication in French. This will be possible thanks to my dear friend Ol., a French-speaker from Montreal, who graciously offered to translate the piece for me.

Thank you, dear friend!

Speaking about Yale (where Ol. and I met), I finally figured out why I did the following odd things while living in New Haven:

1. Refused to accept that the heating control system in my apartment wasn’t a barometer and preferred to suffer from cold, barking angrily at anybody who tried to turn up the heat in the freezing apartment, “Leave my barometer in peace already, shall you?!?”

2. Convinced myself that the door to my apartment was too narrow to allow me to buy a sofa or a couch and bring it inside, even knowing for a fact that everybody else in the building did manage to buy a sofa and bring it through the exact same kind of doors.

3. Complained for 4 years that there was no bathroom cabinet in the apartment instead of checking and finding out that there was a really good and spacious one.

4. Managed to disregard the existence of 3 stores selling fresh produce on the very block where I lived and instead complained to all and sundry how I couldn’t buy any fresh produce anywhere in town.

I now know that I wasn’t acting irrationally when I did all these things. I had a very powerful reason to do them. Being at the department was so disappointing, unpleasant, and hateful that I needed to motivate myself to leave the house and go there every day. The only way of doing that was to make the home environment so intolerable that I’d have no choice but leave home.

I have come with some really bizarre motivational mechanisms over the years.