On the way from the airport we drive by a house whose windows are tightly covered with thick black fabric.

“This makes me wonder if a serial killer lives there,” I comment.

“It’s probably a gamer’s house,” N suggests.

There is free wi-fi at the airport of Charlotte, NC. Too many places are abandoning the enlightened practice of offering free Internet access. The hotel where we will be staying in Pensacola charges people $10 per day for EACH device. And do you know many people who travel with just one device? We are traveling with 4, and 3 of them are mine.

Given that unlimited access phone plans are a thing of the past, this is very obnoxious.

I think there should be some sort of a mass movement for free wi-fi coverage everywhere. Companies that sell hand-held devices and apps will profit directly from this.

“So where is it we are about to land?” N asks me as we approach Charlotte, NC.

It is nice to have such profound trust invested into me.

Nobody understands why I fret as much as I do about the possibility of a default. I have every reason to worry, though. My profession is a luxury that only a very rich society can afford. Currently, there is just one such society remaining in the world. I want it to keep affording me.

The point of having a Kindle is not needing to carry a bag full of books on an airplane. Yet I still experience an overpowering need to stuff three books into my bag for a 3-hour flight. I just don’t feel right without them.

Today was very harsh, people. I went to see the doctor, and she said I have recovered from the operation and don’t need to come any more. On the one hand, this is good because I wasn’t hoping to have any complications from the C-section, but at the same time, it felt like this was now completely over. In 2013 I’ve spent more time at this doctor’s office than I did at work, so not having to go there is a huge change. So I had a depressive episode which was no fun. But then N. came home from work, and now I’m much better.

The difference between depression and grief is that depression is unrelenting. It tugs on your entrails all day and all night. Grief, however, comes over you in waves. This means that if pain doesn’t diminish for a significant stretch of time, your state is becoming pathological and you need to seek help immediately. (I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t include a little teachable moment here.)

Tomorrow we are leaving for a mini-vacation where we will try to recover physically and emotionally.

I had no idea people who got PhDs in philosophy did this well in terms of job placement:

Since 2000, approximately 39% of graduates received a permanent or Tenure Track position in their initial placement.  Temporary positions comprise 34% of initial placements, post-docs comprise 13% of placements, and 8% of students do not go into academic philosophy (6% are Unknown).  This means that approximately 61% of philosophy graduates do not receive a Tenure Track or permanent position in academic philosophy their first time around.  However, it does mean that 73% of philosophy graduates are teaching philosophy, and at least 86% of graduates are involved in professional philosophy in some way.

I keep hearing that philosophy as a field is in dire straits but this research shows that 39% of people get a TT job right after they graduate. This is a better employment prospect than in the field of theoretical physics! Back in graduate school we used to snicker at people who were in philosophy but it seems like they are getting the last laugh.

I really like the person who wrote the linked piece because he says the following:

For some people, it is very important personally to attend a prestigious school or work with a certain professor in philosophy, so much so that they are less concerned about getting a profitable job in philosophy after they graduate.  However, for me, getting a job after I graduated was more important than whether or not the school I went to was well ranked or if I studied with a certain professor in the field.

I’m an immigrant, so for me getting a job (and not letting the PhD take more than 5 years) was the only thing that mattered.

One surprising (to me) thing in this report is that the majority of people with a declared field of interest in philosophy specialize in ethics. Is there anything more boring than that? My motto in graduate school was, “I’ll explore any course in any field as long as they have nothing to do with ethics or aesthetics.”

For six years I have lived with N. and I still haven’t figured his logic when it comes to placing dishes in cabinets after he washes them. I just spent 15 minutes hunting for my juice pitcher only to discover that he believes it should be kept in the same place where glasses are. OK, maybe that makes sense but it was literally the last place I looked. I even looked in the freezer before opening that cabinet.

I’m making apple and dragon fruit juice. It isn’t that I think they go together well. I simply have to get rid of everything that can spoil before we leave on Thursday.

I can’t wait for students to start registering for the next semester because I have developed this really hardcore literature course and I’m worried that not enough people will want to take it. We have this departmental culture that is based on the idea that students don’t like literature, that literature is too hard for them, and that they don’t want to take anything but language courses. A course in the XVIIIth-century Spanish Drama sounds hard, and it will be hard. I made no effort to make it sound sexy. There are no hobbits, goblins, sci-fi elements, or anything of the kind.

The course will be even harder than it sounds. A ton of reading, a lot of writing, and I want them to produce a real research paper at the end. This is not even a 400-level course but I was writing research papers in my 300-level courses, so I don’t see why our students can’t. And I know that I can get them there if I’m given half a chance. I’m uniquely qualified to teach XVIIIth century, I really am. I’ve done XVIIIth century Spain until it was coming out of my ears, and this is very rare because almost no departments in North America offer anything worthwhile on it.

Of course, there is the issue of language. The language of these readings is hard but, look, people are teaching Shakespeare everywhere and students deal. And Shakespeare’s language is murderously hard even for English-speakers. I have incorporated many strategies into the course to help students get the language, so it’s all doable. I just need enough people to register so that the course doesn’t get cancelled.

As somebody who mastered two foreign languages to the point where I write research articles in them and nobody ever corrects my language any longer, I know for a fact that as important it is to have a solid base of grammar, a point comes where you need to stop doing grammar exercises and start to apply your language skills to actual reading, speaking, and writing. The best way to figure out grammar is by observing usage and interiorizing it.

In my own learning of Spanish, I took a single language course and went straight to hard-core graduate-level literature courses from it. It was incredibly hard but it worked. When I tell people this story, they tend to dismiss it as a fluke but I don’t think it is. I was very lucky to begin my career in Hispanic Studies at a department that did not believe in offering endless language courses and tweaking language mistakes for years and years. Nobody doubted that we were ready to do literature courses after Intermediate Spanish, and as a result we were ready.

There will be no peace for me until I see how many people register.

My niece Klubnikis will turn 4 in November. She loves to listen to stories about everybody’s childhood: her mother’s, her grandmother’s, mine, etc. So her grandmother was telling her about her mother’s childhood last weekend.

“I would take your mother to kindergarten every morning. We would walk very slowly, looking at the trees, the houses. . .”

“Why no car?” Klubnikis suddenly interrupted.

“What?” grandma asked.

“Why walk?” Klubnikis insisted. “Why not car?”