Talking about job security, I think some people are smart while others are me.

What I find very paradoxical is that US Americans are a lot kinder and more compassionate than the Quebecois on an individual level but a lot less compassionate and kind on the collective level.

The same people in the US who will shower you with kindness, understanding and acceptance in individual dealings are against universal healthare, free higher education, and a strong welfare state.

And in Quebec, people who are a lot less accepting of foreigners and are much more severe and abrupt in interpersonal dealings than US Americans are all passionately in favor of a very strong welfare state.

Within the US, there is a similar trend. People in the Midwest and the South vote for conservative politics but as individuals there are a lot more open and kind than people on the East Coast.

My sister in Quebec speaks perfect French and has been living there for over 15 years. Still, she doesn’t feel accepted by the Quebecois and doesn’t even have a single Francophone friend even though she makes her living by her brilliant interpersonal skills. I, however, feel totally accepted and I’d say even cherished by the Midwesterners who often find it hard to understand my not-so-strong accent.

I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Is it OK to use the expression “job security” in a scholarly article (to say that a character doesn’t have it)?

It sounds very tacky to me but maybe it’s just my personal hangup.

“I have given decades of my life and every ounce of my energy to my college,” a friend says. “And now I’m discovering that in a time of need my colleagues will not defend me from being bullied and harassed on campus. The administration doesn’t care two straws. I feel like my life has been useless.”

I’m learning that one shouldn’t think in terms of doing something for the sake of the department, school, college, university, discipline. Collectivity asks for a lot but rarely gives back enough to make the sacrifice worth it.

In order to avoid feeling like my friend 30 years from now, I have to concentrate on my work, my publications, my name, my  prestige, my completely individual gain. If at least I were on the same wavelength with people in my profession, I could hope to do some good. But it is useless to reach out to people you don’t understand and experience as completely different from you.

I’m very sad for my friend right now. I’m a fixer by nature. When I see problems, I need to start fixing them immediately. Seeing so much distress in somebody I care about is very difficult.

It looks really silly when people try to explain the political movements they dislike using their own very limited vocabulary of political terminology. See the following, for instance:

For Democrats are the Party of Government. They believe that government is more nobly motivated than a private sector that runs on self-interest and the profit motive, and that government can achieve goals private enterprise could never accomplish.

To liberals, government is us, the personification of the nation.

It’s really hard for the author of the linked article to realize that not everybody is haunted by the urge to invest “Government” with human characteristics and relate to it as a Good Daddy or a Bad Daddy. I happen to know quite a lot of Liberals. The only Conservatives I know are members of my own family and they are only conservative for Quebec. Everywhere else, they would be a bunch of irredeemable Lefties. So when I imagine any of the Liberal / progressive folks I know coming up to me and telling me that “government is more nobly motivated” and “government is us, the personification of the nation”, I’d think my friend was running a high fever and would offer hot tea / medicine / chicken soup / to accompany the sufferer to the doctor. People just don’t think in these terms (or express themselves in  this embarrassingly cloying language).

I always tell my students that English does not translate literally into Spanish. The same is true about the language of politics. You can’t take a bunch of terms and concepts that are meaningful to you and say, “The other guys think the exact same thing but in reverse.”

You know what I really really want to do on this long, tiresome and rainy day? Put on my orange nightgown, put my favorite Beauty Diary masque on my face, get into bed and reread Manhattan Transfer.

I first discovered this beautiful novel in a class on American Modernist literature back at McGill. There was no pre-registration for the courses in those times, and the professor expected the usual 20-25 students to attend. The material was so exciting, though, that he discovered 150+ students waiting for him in front of the classroom on the first day of class. At first, the professor was confused but then he realized we were all there for his course and practically bloomed with joy. I can just imagine him going back to the department and saying casually, “Oh, and my class on Modernism? I need a classroom to seat 150 people and 4 TAs, please.”

Actually, the class was not that amazing. The professor was enamored of the pathetic fallacy and kept talking about it for hours. He was also very much into counting rhetorical devices to see which ones were used the most. But everybody loved the course anyways because the readings were so damn good.

I was taking 6 courses that semester (and every semester during my BA), so I didn’t have the time to dedicate as much attention as I would have liked to Manhattan Transfer. Isn’t that a good excuse to re-read it? Or is that still too indulgent? I have a pile of new books I need to read urgently from here to the skies, so can I justify re-reading something I don’t need for work?

The temptation is strong.

The worst kind of guilt, though, is that which you feel for things that you didn’t actively cause. When there is no opportunity to tell yourself “I did what I had  to do to survive in that moment” because you didn’t actually do anything, it’s extremely difficult to get rid of the feelings of guilt.

Take my situation, for example. I didn’t do anything to make Eric’c heart stop beating but I feel an exhausting guilt because of the suffering his death caused to everybody. I know I didn’t do anything to make people feel sad but they are suffering and will continue to do so for a while.

The only thing to do here is to realize that this kind of guilt is not situational. It existed long before Eric was even conceived. It is something that I had been carrying inside me as a potentiality which was waiting for an opportunity to come out. Now I have to go back in time, looking for the early causes of this guilt and deal with them at the root. That is very hard to do because this form of guilt offers a way of exercising control over one’s life. “I’m to blame” feels more powerful than “this happened to me.” The feelings of guilt exist, in part, to safeguard the belief that life is ultimately controllable and manageable.

Using “because” as a preposition was mildly amusing when the trend first started but now it has become too precious and affected.

I only hope I don’t have to battle this fad in student essays.

Guilt is the most destructive of feelings and it makes absolutely no sense to entertain it.

If you did something that makes you feel guilty, remember: you did what you needed to do to survive at that particular moment.

Human beings are in a constant state of flux, they change every second. So even if you did the thing that makes you feel guilty five minutes ago, you are not any longer the same person who did it. You are somebody completely different who might not even be able to understand why this very different person did what s/he did. And since you can’t understand, why should you judge?

Close your eyes and imagine this other person who did the wrong thing. Imagine this is your friend who confesses something that makes him or her feel very guilty. Try to comfort your friend. Try to let your friend know that you are not being judgmental, that everything is OK.

Imagine your life as a road that moves forward and takes you away from the person who did the bad thing. Turn around and wave good-bye at this version of you that you are leaving forever in the past. Imagine your guilt as a backpack that you take off and lay at the feet of this person. It doesn’t belong to you, so you shouldn’t be taking it with you.

See this old version of you receding in the distance.

Now turn around and move ahead.

Benjamin Prado, my new favorite writer, says that there are people who are looking for somebody with whom they can be themselves and there are people who are looking for somebody with whom they can stop being themselves. I’m definitely in the latter category.