I just discovered that the elections for the position of the Chair of the department are scheduled for next Friday. Oh Lordy. I feel like bribing a doctor into diagnosing me with a serious condition that prevents me from participating.

Talking about technology, we just got an email from somebody in the administration who is worried that as more students begin to take online courses, we will not be able to teach them good writing. I find this very mystifying because the entire point of both of the online courses that I have developed so far is precisely to improve the students’ writing (both in English and in Spanish.) It seems that people don’t really know what online courses are like. Online teaching has numerous disadvantages but it is great for teaching writing skills.

Being fat is not uniformly bad, people. One good thing is that there is no weight gain during pregnancy. I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight days after the delivery. Everything that I had gained was pure water. The sausage-like fingers, the swollen ankles – that was all water.

Electronic textbooks. We have adopted these new textbooks for our language courses which come with an e-book, an e-workbook, an online testing system, an online homework assigning system, and a myriad more digital gimmicks. And I hate them all with a fiery passion. I also resent all of the obnoxious attempts to make me use these things.

I have developed my own system of teaching the language and have developed a huge number of original activities to go with it. I work on these activities all the time, changing, improving, adding, modifying, etc. I also record grades in a paper gradebook and ask for handwritten homework because that’s the only way to obviate Google Translate.

I know I sound like a Luddite but, believe me, I love technology. I always work surrounded by my two laptops that are always on at the same time, my tablet, my iPod, and my cell phone. (I don’t buy all this stuff, of course. I get it for free.) Still, I don’t see the need to make technology part of teaching. At my school, we have all these workshops on how to use apps, tablets, clickers, and God knows what else in teaching but I avoid them like the plague. If you are a lousy teacher, no amount of gimmicks will change that. And if you are good, then you don’t need to bring anything but yourself to the classroom.

Of course, everybody hires based on personality. Unless we are talking about huge companies with revolving-door personnel working for minimum wage, a prospective employee’s diplomas, qualifications and experience will always be secondary to whether s/he is pleasing as a person.

This strategy is understandable but it is also likely to backfire massively because stellar personal characteristics can result in a horrible first impression.

Take my current job, for instance. During the MLA interviews and my campus visit, my current colleagues made a horrible impression on me. The members of the search committee seemed indifferent and robotic. The Chair was brash, aggressive, and intimidating. She interrupted me during my lecture, behaved like a bratty and obnoxious student during my sample class, and dragged me to see her daughter’s new house at 11 pm, after a day filled with job interviews.

I decided there and then that I was never going to work with this bunch of scary weird folks. Then, of course, I had to accept the position because it was 2009 and 40% of searches in my field were cancelled while 20% more were postponed.

After I started working at this department, I realized that the unpleasant first impression these people had produced was simply an extension of their good qualities. The members of the search committe had looked so exhausted and robotic simply because they were trying to conduct a completely legitimate bona fide search. When done honestly, it is a grueling process, and the search committee was dying of fatigue. The Chair turned out to be a very direct, sincere person who always tells you exactly what she thinks and adopts you in the capacity of one of her children if she sees that you are young and confused. These qualities are precious in a boss but make a really bad first impression.

Today, I love all of my colleagues, and the Chair has become a close friend. After Eric died, she came over and we cried together for 3 hours.

Some time after I started working here, I asked the Chair why I had been selected from the hundreds of candidates that had applied.

“Oh, we really liked your personality,” she said.

One problem with the show is that the actor playing Walt is so weak. Even for an American actor, he is really below par.

Other actors in the show are not bad at all. The actor playing Jesse is obviously channeling Eminem but it works for him. The actor playing Hank actually manages to look like a professional actor, which is very rare in the US. The actress playing Skylar is quite good.

But this Bryan Cranston or whatever, God, is he not made for the acting profession, or what? If he got an Emmy, that was only because he had a recognizable face. His acting is just bad. The image of a bumbling, inept, loserish sort of fellow who tries to escape from that identity has been explored to death in movies and theater. Cranston can’t even repeat what was done before him in this area. Seriously, a cat could act better. He takes every scene as if it existed in a vacuum, completely separate from anything that came before.

George Vanderbilt, a late 19th century heir to the family fortune and builder of the Biltmore Estate, reportedly read 3,159 books during his lifetime (approximately 80 books per year). He kept a list of the books he had read in a diary; his last book was Henry Adams’ third U.S. history volume.

Most of us wish we could amass the knowledge that represents. Books give us insights into the perceptions and perspectives of foreign minds. They widen our horizons, and foster our understanding of beauty. But few of us will surpass Vanderbilt’s reading achievements (unless we inherit large fortunes and thus become able to amass and devour the contents of a 10,000-book library). We lack the time available to Vanderbilt; he had neither work nor Twitter to distract him from his reading.

Oh, come on, quit the whining. I have read 1,227 books since moving to Canada in 1998 (I keep a list, too). And that’s not counting articles and chapters I read for my research. I didn’t inherit anything and instead of a distracting Twitter I have a blog.

Those who want to read just go ahead and read. Those who want to make excuses complain that Twitter ate their library.

For our wedding anniversary, I bought N a bouquet of pink roses and a huge box of chocolates with all kinds of fruit fillings.

“Can you wrap it in pink paper with a pink bow?” I asked the young man at the counter.

“Sure,” he said. “Who is it for?”

“It’s for my husband,” I explained.

“Where are you from?” he wondered.

“From Ukraine.”

“So is it a tradition in your country to give men flowers?”

“Yes,” I replied, “and they have got to be pink.”

“That’s so cool,” the young man said. “I wish I were from Ukraine.”

Is this a form of sabotage on somebody’s part? Surely, there are folks who know how to create a website in this country.

Or is the US government really that inept? I mean, there were the useless wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the pathetic attempts to get rid of Castro, the grievous mishandling of the domestic and global economy, the horrifying fail of 9/11. But, OK, those were all big events, they can get mishandled. A website, though? Really?

And another thing that bugs me is that we all had to witness a complete unraveling of American politics in a standoff over Obamacare only to discover that the whole drama was moot because the website doesn’t work. A website? What is this, 1993? Even my Freshmen have stopped offering me excuses based on non-functioning websites. Ten years ago, such excuses still made sense. Today, though, we all know that websites work.

Or do they?

I know it sounds weird to be discussing a show that has already ended for everybody else but we still only just started season 3. As always, I’m slow on the uptake.

So I’ve been wondering why, in an otherwise brilliantly constructed plot, the script writers had to pitch an absolutely perfect female protagonist against an absolutely disgusting male protagonist. Why not create more nuanced characters?

Of course, it is good to see such a positive female character as Skyler. Not since Buffy have I seen a strong, admirable, non-pathetic woman on American TV. But does this Walt individual have to be so irredeemably horrible? It would have made for an even better show, I believe, if the writers invested him with at least a single not-totally-vomit-producing characteristic. He could have loved an elderly grandma or taken care of a sick puppy. No human being can be 100% bad.

I especially liked the moment when his wife brought him divorce papers and he just stared at her blankly and informed her that he was happily married. This is exactly what happened to me with my ex-husband, and I will never forget wondering how I managed to end up married to a total sociopath.

Why can’t the American entertainment industry get rid of the compulsion to structure every plot on the basis of a tension between a shining, perfect hero and a vicious evildoer?

Otherwise, the plot is very good, and the psychology of the character development is quite consistent. And the feminist message of the show is inspiring. I can see that, in the years that I spent avoiding American TV, it improved dramatically.