A woman in her eighties tells me at the gym, “When I was your age, one just went to the gym and worked out. And these days there is so much stuff people seem compelled to carry around with them that one practically needs to move in every time one exercises.”

“Yes,” I said, removing  from my locker a backpack, a handbag, a briefcase, and a plastic bag with an enormous bowl I’m returning to a colleague.

This woman was my age half a century ago. I find that absolutely fascinating. She also swims about three times faster and better than I do.

University of Washington President Michael K. Young says:

Somebody once asked me how many professors work for me, and I said if you can ever find a professor who thinks he or she works for anybody, let me know.

I work for the State of Illinois. It’s a great state, and I’m happy to be working for it. I have no idea what this administrator is getting so pouty about.

If you are a professor, who do you work for?

WordPress has introduced this completely bizarre system of blog security where you have to:

• install a barcode-reading app on your cell phone,
• scan a barcode that appears on the screen of your computer with this app,
• write down a list of 10 long sequences of numbers that appear on your screen,
• carry the sheet of paper with the number sequences with you wherever you go to avoid losing access to your blog.

I can imagine few things more ridiculous than requiring people to carry notes with sequences of numbers.

WordPress can’t stop messing with the best and most popular blogging platform in existence. They keep trying to “improve” it in increasingly bizarre way. First, they wanted to shut down people’s Dashboards but had to cancel that plan in view of users’ rebellion. Now, there is this bizarre “security” feature.

A reader left a comment telling me that IKEA sells vegetarian caviar. I love IKEA for making furniture accessible to students and low-income people but what they sell in lieu of food is scary. I remember once trying one of their $1 breakfasts and a week of heartburn I experienced after that. And the way IKEA perverts the noble dish of Swedish meatballs?

If they are now doing to caviar what they did to meatballs, that’s simply criminal.

I have the best courses next semester:

• Spanish Drama of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries;
• Introduction to Reading Literature in Spanish;
• Hispanic World in the New Millennium.

All three are completely new preparations. I can’t even say which one I’m the most excited about. There will be tons of readings (in Spanish, of course) in all three of them.

And I only have to be at work two days per week from 11 to 3:15 pm.

My father looked at this picture of me with Rebecca Schuman and said, “I’m sorry, which one is you?” He says I look completely different in real life.

Before I had my nervous breakdown yesterday, I had a really great time with a fellow blogger. There is this inventive way of meeting new people that I came up with a while ago: I bark at them aggressively online, after which we meet and become good friends.

Here is a post about the encounter. It includes photographic evidence of the fun that was had.

So after everything that happened yesterday, I decided to have a restful day today, sleep in, relax, and try  to recover.

But at 8:35 in the morning, my cell phone rang.

“What?” I croaked into the phone.

“I missed the final yesterday,” a chirpy voice rattled out. “Ha ha, I just forgot about it completely, which is, like, totally silly of me. I wrote you an email to ask if I could take it this morning but since you never wrote back, I decided to call.”

“Who are you?” I cackled, trying to awaken. I’m an old person and tend to expect that people start a conversation by greeting me and telling me their name.

“Oh. I’m Janet. From your course?”

When I looked at my emails, I saw that Janet had, indeed, sent me an email. At 11:47 pm. Since there was no response from me between 11:47 pm and 8:35 am, she found my cell number (which, as you might imagine, I do not share with my students) and  called me.

The funny thing is that I would have certainly let her retake the exam. I’m the most laid back professor in the world and always accommodate students’ needs. The student, however, could not have found a more antagonizing and obnoxious way of going about the whole thing.

I understand that students are young but do they have to be this inconsiderate and rude?

I swear, if another . . . well-meaning person sends me another . . . well-meaning email with a link to the  . . . well-meaning speech by David Simon about his  . . . well-meaning comments on Marx, I will beat my head against the wall.

It’s good that Simon is reading Marx. Reading is always better than not reading. I’m just wondering if he has had the time to get to Marx’s writings about Jews and what he has to say about them. I’m thinking specifically of:

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is the worldly god? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.

I would be really interested in what David Simon and his father, the same father who spent his life working for B’nai B’rith, would have to say in defense of their worship of huckstering and deification of money.

So I got on the bus in St. Louis to go home, settled in with my new copy of the biography of the Brontë family, and all of a sudden experienced a bout of gut-wrenching, intolerable depression. It felt like everything just went dark and it took all I had not to start screaming and rolling on the floor in pain right there on the bus. This was one of the most horrible experiences I’ve ever had in my life and it was all the more painful because there didn’t seem to be any reason for it.

When I thought I was going to collapse for sure, my sister called me on the phone (we have a connection, so she was bound to call). We talked, and that helped me to get home in one piece. After the fog cleared a little, I started to analyze what could have happened. As I remembered how my day had gone, it became clear what caused the depression.

I’d had the entire day planned out but almost everything I’d envisioned got derailed. One store I wanted to visit was closed because it was Monday, another one was undergoing repairs. I wanted to take a cab but there were none. I took a bus instead, but it was the wrong one. In the meanwhile, I was receiving endless calls from work because people who were supposed to proctor my final exams kept getting confused. I went to Macy’s and discovered it had closed down.

These were all little, insignificant things. Of course, I normally don’t fall apart because I didn’t get to shop, I’m not that insane. But this feeling of planning something enjoyable, looking forward to it, and then seeing all of it collapse around me reminded of a similar yet much greater undoing of all my plans when Eric died.

When I realized what was happening, the pain started to recede.

The reason why I’m writing all this is that it helps me to put things down in writing. However, there is also a lesson we can derive from what I experienced because, depressed or not, I’m still a teacher. All of this blabber about depression being a result of genes, chemical imbalances, hormones, etc. is garbage. There is always a reason. When our psyche tries to tell us something, we should listen. If we disregard its message, there will be hell to pay later on. All week long, I had been stifling my feelings about Eric because it was the last week of the semester, there was a ton of work to do, and I didn’t want to face pain.

“I’ll think about it later,” I kept telling myself.

I’m not an idiot, so I kept wondering whether this avoidance strategy might not be dangerous but I still continued avoiding. And today I got to realize what a mistake this had been.

And now I’m going to sit in Eric’s room and cry until I get it all out. For now.