This sign reminded me of an old Soviet joke about a bed for three sold at the stores for newlyweds and called “Lenin is always with us.”

I don’t have time for a full-scale link encyclopedia but I have these two really great links that I want to share with you.

The first link is to a piece on the horrible damage caused by spanking. The author doesn’t want any comments and I think we need to respect her wishes. I only want to say that I deeply admire somebody who finds the strength to speak out so poignantly and powerfully against a widely spread form of abuse:

Spanking completely eliminated my parents’ trustworthiness and credibility in my eyes. It never once even occurred to me that they might want to protect me from outside threats.  It never once even occurred to me that they might have my best interests in mind.  It never once even occurred to me that there might be a good reason for any rules they set out.  It never once even occurred to me that if I was having a big problem with other adults I could go to them.  I never saw them as an ally, always as a threat or an obstacle.  All in the name of…what?  I don’t even remember what the alleged infractions were that I was being spanked for in the first place!

Let’s stop using the coy word “spanking” and call this brutal and abusive act what it is: beating, child abuse, brutalization of a small human being.

The next link is a very powerful and intelligent piece on Bradley Manning. This is definitely the best article I have read about Manning. This is what the author has to say to the people who have been chirping about how they are disappointed with Manning’s apology for his actions:

And some people dare to be “disappointed” or “puzzled” or “upset.” I cannot properly express the depth of my contempt for such people. Do they honestly believe that, against the background of Manning’s remarkable, incredibly courageous actions and the fate he now faces, anyone gives a shit about their feelings? That any decent human being gives a shit that they’re “disappointed”? Fuck your disappointment. Fuck you. To express “disappointment” and the like is to confess that you may have grown to adulthood physically, but that you have allowed yourself to become fossilized emotionally in a state one might expect from a pathetically narcissistic, very badly damaged adolescent, with no understanding of how human beings actually live their lives or how societies function.

I can only say: a thousand times yes. And it’s time we started seeing a difference between a Hollywood movie and life.

The only problem is that I will not be able to move around the classroom and will have to teach these courses from behind the teacher’s desk. Our classrooms are not nearly big enough to accommodate enormous bellies moving around among seated students.

I have no idea how to teach language courses while sitting down. Normally, students do group activities while I walk among them and participate. What do I do if I can’t walk around? Sit behind the desk staring at the students mysteriously? Pretend to be busily searching something on the computer? Does anybody have experience of teaching while sitting down in courses where everything is based on group work or work in pairs?

I know some people do amazing work with teacher-centered language learning but I’m not one of those people, and this old dog is way too ancient to learn a bunch of completely new tricks between today and tomorrow. I just want something I can do while students engage in their activities and I just sit there like a monument to myself.

Guess who will be teaching 3 courses she never taught before, using a textbook she has never seen, based on the syllabi somebody else created, five times a week, in weeks 37, 38 and 39 of her pregnancy, interspersed with visits to the hospital for testing 3 times a week? And guess who is not in the least stressed out or bothered by the prospect?

Yes, that would be me.

Where did the ridiculous expression “to validate somebody’s emotions (or feelings)” even come from? I keep encountering it and it makes me cringe in vicarious shame to see people use it.

Come on, folks, even Dr. Phil made fun of the expression and dismissed it as meaningless psychobabble. Surely, you don’t want to be dumber than Dr. Phil’s intended audience. Your emotions are your own, and it is nobody’s business to proclaim them as valid or not. Nobody needs a permission to feel things.

Didn’t I tell you years ago that Julian Assange was an idiot? He has no confirmed my belief by suggesting that the only hope gore the US is to elect Rand Paul for president. Rand Paul and Ron Paul are politicians he admires deeply. I can’t link at this point but you will easily find the news through a web search.

I always said he was nothing but a silly airhead on the quest to become rich and famous. Trying to attach some progressive ideology to him is a waste of time. He is too silly to have an ideology which is why the favorite politicians of immature teenagers appeal to him.

I know I promised no pictures of the belly but I have got to post at least one where it is fully clothed.

 

Yes, it is very big. This would have been a C-section even if I hadn’t chosen it at the very beginning. And see the sausage-like fingers? And the haystack hair that I haven’t been able to comb through for two months?

I can’t tell you how much I want to get my body back. And to stop hiding in bathrooms with needles and weird paraphernalia like some drug addict.

Somebody told me that in North America male identity is formed through competition with other men and female identity is formed through serving and pleasing other people. As a result, male identity thrives on being disliked (as a result of winning the competition) and female identity thrives on being liked.

I have no idea how much of this is true because I’m not North American. And we all know how badly I suck at pleasing anybody.

Some people progress in their development while others regress. See this example of somebody who infantilizes herself and stunts her own growth between the ages of 17 and 25:

You see, I had an abortion in 2004 when I was 17-years-old and [my parents] found out about it nearly a year later when my mother read my diary. They confronted me about it, and while we eventually got past this rough spot in our relationship, we didn’t really ever discuss all our feelings with one another. At the time, I was so furious that my privacy had been violated that I had absolutely no regard for their feelings. In fact, I didn’t even think they had a right to have feelings. It was my abortion and my secret and it had been shared without my consent. If they were sad or upset then well, that was their punishment.

It has been eight years since that all happened, and while I can still relate to the teenager in me who was so enraged, I have come a long way in forgiving my parents and finally understanding that the friends, family, and partners of women who have abortions also have complex reactions to the abortion and deserve an outlets through which to process them.

I don’t blame this woman for “growing down rather than growing up” (I’m using Annis Pratt’s apt terminology). With this kind of horrible parents one doesn’t stand a whole lot of a chance to develop into anything but a beaten down, zombified creature. The story of female Bildung over the course of the last 100 years has been this: a woman tries to grow and liberate herself from the constraints of her patriarchal environment, discovers that the task is insurmountable, and willingly infantilizes herself. This is how stories of female development (or, rather, stunted development) always end:

I’m so glad that I finally got a chance to clear the air with my folks. As it turns out, they’re pretty insightful people, and I learned a lot from what they had to say. I also got a chance to apologize for being defensive and resentful when they needed love and support.

The poor idiot has her privacy violated in the most egregious way, and she is the one apologizing because she allowed her personal issues to matter more to her for a second than her parents’ need to cannibalize her existence. Instead of parenting them, she dared to take care of herself and has now repented of this grave sin against the patriarchy.

I have read over 100 female Bildungsromane in the past 6 years and, starting in early XXth century, they are all like that. This tendency towards self-effacement and stunting one’s own growth becomes more and more pronounced with every victory of the women’s liberation movement. Simply put, a heroine of a 2013 Bildungsroman sacrifices her growth and stunts herself far more easily and willingly than a heroine of a 1913 Bildungsroman.

As you might or might not remember, the name of my department was changed to a more PC version because everybody except me and one other person voted for the change. People agreed that the word “foreign” in the department’s name was offensive to foreigners and the word “literature” was alienating to students.

Yesterday, the Chair reported that all of the paperwork for the name change had been submitted a while ago but the bureaucracy is moving very slowly so we still have our old name.

“I’m sorry, does anybody remember what the new name is?” one colleague asked.

It took everybody quite a while to remember. And I’m not sure we remembered what the name was correctly.

Now we are stuck with a name we can’t even remember just because we are terrified of the words “foreign” and “literature.” And I cringe whenever I imagine that I will have to tell people I work at a department called “World Languages and Cultures” (or something of the kind.)