In the corner of the tiny waiting room is a huge machine to weigh yourself on. The TV is running non-stop promotional ads for weight loss products. There is a wall of brochures for people to take. I pick up the one which promises that exercise is a “silver bullet” for fatness. Silver bullets are more expensive versions of regular bullets. They are used not because they are cheaper (they’re not) or more effective against regular targets (they’re not), but because the magical silver is the only thing that can harm werewolves and other fantastical hard-to-kill monsters.

My fat body is a fantastical hard-to-kill monster which requires a magical solution to kill. My employer wants to kill my fat body with a silver bullet. I don’t even cry in the car. I just feel numb.

Need I say more?

If woman loses her self-understanding she will become shackled to a civilisation in crisis, transformed into a body, part of decadent femininity. Woman in a crisis of self will always be material. She will be susceptible to bodily outbreaks of corporal diseases and mental disorders which will precipitate pilgrimages in search of doctors, when not to prison, prostitution or the asylum.

– Michael Richards.

Richards is my favorite historian of Spain.

So it turns out that people who voted to hand over all of the power in all of our inter-departmental decisions to a single administrator did so because they didn’t have time to read the proposal and just voted “yes” mechanically. I have no idea how it makes sense to vote in favor of something when you have no idea what that something is. It would make a lot more sense to vote “no” on a new proposal with which you are unfamiliar if the current state of things seems to work.

I will never understand people. How did they know they were not voting “yes” to, say, having their salaries cut in half if they didn’t bother to read the proposal? Where is this unquestioning trust of authority coming from? Why do they automatically assume that everything done by an administrator is done solely for their benefit and can never be detrimental to them?

Hello, this is America. Aren’t we supposed to have an innate distrust of any authority?

Obviously, I like good students but sometimes their very goodness becomes annoying. Today is the last day of class, it snows, I’m losing my voice, and all I wanted to do after class is go buy myself an enormous cup of coffee. But then all of the best students in my course wanted to come to my office to find out what their grade is before the final exam. Because, apparently, getting 98-100% on every assignment can lead to anything other than an A.

Isn’t it funny how the best students are always a lot more worried about their grades than the ones who are about to fail?

So we are collecting money for a Christmas gift to our office support specialist. I put money in an envelope, walked over to the Chair’s office, and gave him the envelope. He looked into the envelope and said, “Oh, thank you for writing this letter of recommendation! He will benefit from this study abroad program because they offer this Intermediate level course he lacks to complete his Focus and start his Minor. Is the text of the exam in the envelope, too?”

“OK,” I though. “The man has gone batty in his dotage and is enacting with me an eerily familiar scene of surreptitious bribe-taking.”

“Yes, it’s all there, the exam, the letter, everything,” I mumbled and backed out of the office.

That was when I realized that the recipient of the gift was standing right behind me and the Chair had simply been trying to prevent her from guessing that we were in the process of collecting money for her gift.

Here is how my kotlety turned out:

To make them, you mix ground turkey meat with ground chicken meat. Add some salt, an egg, and some cooked cous cous. I also add some coarse grained Dijon mustard. Squeeze some fresh garlic and mix the whole thing with your hands.

Now mold kotlety on your hands and roll them in flour or breadcrumbs. Almond flour works very well even if it’s expensive as hell. Here is what you will have as a result:

Heat up some olive oil in a pan and get it to bubble. Then place kotlety in the pan. Do NOT close the lid or lower the heat.

Wait until kotlety get a nice golden sear on one side, turn them over, lower the heat, and NOW close the lid.

Sometimes, you need to turn them over a few times to ensure a uniform golden color. Remember to keep the fire low and the lid closed.

Mmm, tasty!

From Zygmunt Bauman’s new book:

Condemnation of allegedly self-inflicted social inferiority has been stretched to embrace the slightest murmur of demurral on the part of the underdog, not to mention their rebellion against the injustice of inequality as such – as well as any sympathy and commiseration for the underdog on the part of the upper dog.

As I was just telling my father, when I came to class today, I found students sitting in the dark in complete silence.

“Why don’t you turn on the lights?” I asked.

“Lazy. . .” they drawled.

This is why I welcome any sign of engagement with or interest in pretty much anything. Even if I saw students with a poster saying, “Stalin kicks ass!”, I’d prefer that to indifference. If people know who Stalin is and have some – any – sort of emotional response to him, there is a chance to engage them in a discussion and change their minds.

It is much sadder when there are no minds to change.

For the foreign languages holiday celebration, I was planning on bringing these:

I don’t know what to call them in English but they are made of a mix of ground chicken and turkey meat, some cous cous boiled in milk, an egg, some garlic, etc. We call them “kotlety.” A colleague warned me, however, that people at these parties eschew anything that is not very familiar to them.

I wonder what the purpose of conducting a foreign languages party is if all people want to have is pizza. Of course, I will be happy to eat my own kotlety if they are not wanted by others.