Yes, David Gilmour is a douche. But can you name any other literature prof that people not in academia know by name? Harold Bloom? This just proves my point, which is that nobody notices our existence unless we go completely batty in a very public way.

Kate Losse, the author of last year’s Boy Kings, which outlined the early culture at Facebook from her experiences as employee #51, has accused Dave Eggers of stealing her book idea for his forthcoming novel The Circle. “Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook,” she writes on Medium today.

I find the suggestion that one can steal “the idea” behind a novel to be completely bizarre. It is even more ridiculous when the Big Idea in question is the hugely original “a person is excited to get a prestigious job at a huge company until she realizes that the way the company does business is suspect.” Wasn’t there a movie starring Tom Cruise based on the same Big Idea sometime back in the 80s?

The main philosophical issue both books claim to address is the eminently boring,

Would Facebook improve our social interactions?

I have almost died of boredom by the time I finished reading just this one sentence. The author of the earlier book seems convinced that she came up with something hugely original when she addressed this question in her writing but people have been bellyaching about the evils of Facebook for years.

Of course, the funniest part of the whole brouhaha is the following:

“From all appearances, it is the same book, and I wrote it first (and I imagine mine is more authentic and better written, because I actually lived in this world and am also a good writer),” she adds. Losse, in an email to The Atlantic Wire, admits she has not read his book.

Not reading a book is definitely an inventive way of engaging with its content. At least this Losse character is original in something.

Last night, I had to go to the pharmacy. I’d been avoiding all places where I was likely to run into people who might ask questions or offer congratulations, and the pharmacy was one of such places. The doctor gave me a prescription for new contraceptive pills, so I couldn’t keep hiding at home any longer. Of course, I could have changed my pharmacy. But that would lead to changing the grocery store, the coffee-shop, the convenience store, the favorite restaurant, the walking route. . . and that way lies insanity.

The pharmacist was on the phone when I approached the counter. She reached into the box with my name (in the course of this pregnancy, I had been assigned a box all to myself at the pharmacy) and got out the pills.

“Wait, this must be a mistake,” the pharmacist said. “These can’t be yours.”

“Yes, they are mine,” I responded.

The pharmacist tried to peer over the tall counter.

“Wait, have you given birth already?” she asked eagerly.

So I told her.

She dropped the phone and stared at me. Then her face crumpled and she grabbed me across the counter and pressed me to her chest.

“This happened to me, too,” the pharmacist sobbed. “It’s been almost 30 years but it never goes away.”

As I walked away, I heard her sobbing and wheezing.

OK, how bad exactly are things in UK’s academia? When professors put lengthy quotes from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in their automated signatures, including the verses “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” and “Their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors, departed, have left no addresses,” I begin to worry.

T.S. Eliot is a genius. But his poetry doesn’t normally make it into one’s signature unless one is very depressed. Or am I mistaken?

Everybody is linking to this story by a Canadian who claims to have lost his tenure-track position because of an error by an HR employee that made it impossible for him to get a green card.

Given that my sister heads a recruitment agency, I spend hours each week listening to horror stories about the incompetence of HR people. Still, the linked story makes absolutely no sense. I’m also a citizen of Canada who got the green card through my university, and this guy’s story sounds completely fake. Nobody re-advertises your position if you don’t apply for a green card immediately. As a citizen of Canada, you can continue working in the US for years on work visas or TN visas.

The real reason for this person’s troubles is, I believe, that he refused to pay for his own green card process. Universities normally don’t pay for employees’ green card application process these days. I had to pay for my own and believe that my university did more than in enough in sponsoring me.

I have no idea why the university in question was so eager to get rid of an employee they initially liked well enough to let him apply for early tenure. My guess is that they were put off by his dishonesty. When he says,

In the end, bottom line, because someone in HR missed a deadline, my job was taken away,

this is simply a lie contradicted by the information contained in his own post.

The linked post claims to have as its goal helping non-American academics in the US. The only thing that will help us, though, is knowing the following: those of us who want a green card, should prepare to pay for it with our own money. There are exceptions but they are very very few and getting fewer.

I just read in this new book I’m reading that defeated people bleed out through three wounds: guilt, shame, and fear.

This sounds just about right.

I have to go to the doctor’s office today so that she can evaluate how I’m recovering from the operation. This will be very very hard because it’s been exactly 3 weeks since I went to the same doctor at the same office and heard the horrible news. I have to see her, though, because she is the one who performed the C-section.

All morning I’ve been searching for a way to frame this visit in a way that will make it bearable. The way we narrate the events of our lives to ourselves is what we can control, and that becomes especially important when we face scarily unpredictable things.

So I’m telling myself that this visit is not a continuation of a tragic story that I protagonized but the beginning of a completely different new story. This should get me through the visit.

People are using this method for all kinds of things:

Commit to a small, productive block of time. I suggest a minimum of 30 minutes and a maximum of 60 minutes at the beginning. This block of time is not a huge commitment–surely, your job search deserves 30 minutes of hard work! If you do this correctly, you will find one of two outcomes: 1) you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish in 30 minutes of uninterrupted hard work, and 2) once you get your momentum in those first 30 minutes, you will want to continue your progress. Suddenly a minimum commitment of 30 minutes turns into an hour and a half of focused productivity.

I wrote my most recent article in daily 30-minute sessions. I wasn’t feeling too good, so 30 minutes a day were all I could manage. And this strategy still worked. It took me 46 days to write the article from start to finish. I have to say, though, that there was a very lengthy preparation process. I had a detailed plan of the article specifying what I would say in each paragraph before starting the actual writing.

OK, how is one supposed to treat a company that refers to translators as “trannies” and editors as “eddies” with any degree of seriousness?

I know that the blog has become completely bipolar with sad and tragic posts coming right before funny ones and right after hopeful ones. But that’s how I feel these days.

Today, for instance, was the very first time that Eric’s death was integrated into my dreams. Before today, sleep was a refuge from what had happened because nothing connected to the pregnancy was ever featured in my dreams. Tonight, though, I dreamt that I was buying baby clothes. Huge quantities of baby clothes. I knew Eric was dead but I still had to buy all these clothes.

When I woke up, I felt completely exhausted because now I couldn’t use sleep to hide from sadness. But I also know that it’s good that this happened because this is a sign that I’m beginning to come to terms with the tragedy and learning to integrate it into my life experience. Sleep is the time when our subconscious resolves the problems we accumulate during the waking hours. Today’s dream is a sign that my psyche is no longer perceiving Eric’s death as so destructive that it has to be ignored.