I’m really glad I went back to work because at work I’m not an aquarium but a human being who dispenses knowledge and exercises authority.

I told the students that we will be reviewing the past tenses and they groaned in desperation. So I promised them that I will prove that the preterit and the imperfect can be fun. By the end of the class, everybody was laughing, shouting, and greatly enjoying the class. I had to make them leave. Most aquariums cannot do something like this.

I feel like I’m attached to an aquarium that has come to dominate my life. People who say they enjoyed being pregnant seem weird. What is to enjoy about being a transportation device for a very fragile aquarium?

Of course, I can’t say that I hate being pregnant either. What I feel is the resignation of a person whose flight has been delayed by many hours and who is sitting patiently at the airport lounge, emptied of all emotion by the fatigue of the wait.

Facebook is one of the most useless inventions of humanity. There is, however, one service that it offers which makes it so wildly popular: Facebook erodes guilt. Instead of feeling bad about losing touch with all those people who used to matter to us but have now stopped being of interest, we can add them to our list of friends on Facebook and pretend that we are following their lives.

The downside of this simulacrum of a social life is that it erases a possibility of self-analysis. Why do certain people stop being of any interest to us? What erodes friendships? As the Facebook list of fake friends remains the same, we never have to notice that our priorities, interests and preferences have changed or wonder why that happened.

In a similar way, Facebook offers a simulacrum of political engagement. People keep posting endless snippets of articles followed by snippets of their own commentary. This superficial approach to the news cycle makes them feel politically active and socially responsible. It also fosters an illusion that one’s fake friends who are not even a part of one’s life any longer form some sort of a community that can promote change. In reality, however, Facebook sociability is as empty and meaningless as Facebook activism.

The most genuine and sincere Facebook users are the ones who post endless photos of kittens. The robotic and senseless nature of this act is a metaphor for Facebook itself: it doesn’t matter which particular inanity you are posting today as long as you post something and keep the illusion of a shared space alive.

I haven’t taught Spanish 101 for 6 years and, apparently, I’ve really fallen behind the times. On the first day of class, I decided to intimidate the students using my favorite method that always used to work for me. So I entered the classroom and said:

Buenos días. ¿Qué tal? ¿Cómo están ustedes?

Instead of being intimidated, though, the students replied in a chorus:

Buenos días, profesora. Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y usted?

It seems that there is no real Spanish 101 course any more. Everybody speaks some Spanish, knows about the regional variations, and can share vocabulary used in Tamaulipas or Bilbao where their best friend, boyfriend or neighbor is from.