What I really hate is when people substitute analysis with clumsy attempts to fit reality into facile pseudo-intellectual categories. For instance, a colleague declared that the reason why certain departments and programs within a university are considered more important than others is gender-based. Engineering has the majority of male students and professors, so it ranks higher than Sociology and Education, which are almost 100% female.

When she offered this idea to the group, people embraced it avidly. Nobody wants to tell Sociology and Education that they don’t do anything, their fields are a useless waste of time (I mean, there are now fields like “Educational Leadership”, which boggles the mind with its uselessness), so it’s easier to agree with these pseudo-feminist bouts of silliness.

Of course, what we all knew but didn’t want to say to avoid upsetting the Sociologists is that, at our university, the most important program of all whose needs always trump everybody else’s is our highly accredited School of Nursing. And I’m yet to see a single male in that program. One male student I knew applied but was rejected because his grades in biology were not outstanding.

It is obvious to everybody but the most obtuse that a program where people learn to tend to the sick will matter more than a program where people shoot the breeze about how to be educational leaders, whatever that even is. Let’s not hide from that reality behind empty pseudo-feminist slogans.

So I’ve been reading about the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil war, and it’s fascinating stuff, people.

As you know, people from many different countries came to fight against fascism in Spain in 1936-9. Did you know, however, that over a quarter of people in the Brigades were Jewish? And that the language the different battalions in the brigades used as their shared language of communication was Yiddish?

These Jewish fighters were all anti-Zionists because they saw nationalism as the root of all problems faced by the world in the 1930s.

Also, the majority of people in the Brigades had experienced multiple immigrations / displacements before coming to Spain to fight the forces that called themselves “Nationalists.”

My information comes from Helen Graham’s new book.

An Ecuatorian woman struck up a conversation with me while I was eating sushi in preparation for my driving lesson. She said she knew I was from Spain even before seeing that I was reading a book on the Spanish Civil War because my appearance and outfit are very Spanish.

I’m glad, of course, because, among white people, the only women more beautiful than the Spanish are the British women.

My Jewish Ukrainian colleague irrupted into my office and told me in a suddenly heavy Ukrainian accent that the events in Ukraine make her feel like her heart has been wrenched out of her chest. The worst part, she says, is seeing how indifferent everybody around her is to this horrible situation. So I promised her I would write about this so that at least my readers know what is happening. These are some highlights from my long conversation with my colleague.

. . . At this point, the reason why people in Ukraine are protesting in the streets has nothing to do with the EU, Russia, or anything external to the country. People are objecting to the new legislation that prohibits peaceful gatherings of protesters. This is the basic democratic right that is being trampled by the President of Ukraine, the convicted rapist Yanukovich. Many people have been jailed for protesting already, so now the goal of their comrades in the streets is to liberate them.

. . . The special forces are beating and torturing peaceful protesters. Their methods include stripping the protesters naked and leaving them in the woods. The weather in Ukraine is far below freezing.

. . . Over a hundred people have been reported missing and nobody knows what happened to them.

. . . The special forces shoot plastic bullets into protesters’ faces, aiming to hit them in the eye. Dozens, maybe hundreds of protesters, have lost their eye-sight but they can’t go to a hospital because there are regular patrols of the hospitals checking for people who are there getting for injuries received at the hands of the police.

. . . A 72-year-old scrawny little man was arrested for attacking a group commandos with “dangerous weapons.” His dangerous weapons consisted of a loaf of bread, a piece of salo, and a roll of toilet paper.

. . . The protesters’ collectively adopted rule is that there will be no alcohol involved in the protests. But the  special forces guys drink like they’ve been paid to do it. Which they probably have. So every morning begins for the protesters with cleaning the public squares where they gather from mountains of empty vodka bottle and pools of vomit left by the defenders of law and order.

. . . Russian media are engaging in a shameful xenophobic propaganda campaign that makes seemingly normal people writhe in the grip of a racist hysteria. From the intensity of their rage, you’d think we were the ones to keep them as our colony for 300+ years, prohibiting their language and destroying their literature and culture. The argument that is put forward in Russia is that Ukrainians are lazy degenerates. If you’ve done any post-colonial studies, you will recognize this argument.

. . . The so-called Western democracies care about nothing but oil. They will tolerate any dictator and allow him to inflict anything he wants on his own and neighboring countries as long as he gives them their fix of this drug.

I’m pretty conservative politically and especially in what concerns the economy but whenever I find myself among a group of colleagues from my university I feel like the most subversive commie pinko radical anybody can be.

For instance, during the book club meeting, I happened to be wearing my ring with Che Guevara’s portrait (because I had been teaching my class on Cuba on that day and wanted to show the ring to my students) and I also ended up saying that the author of the book we are reading is a tenured professor at Harvard which means that she has high personal stakes in proving that the system works. To me, that’s the most boring platitude anybody can say, but in the book club this was like I’d dropped a bomb. People were fascinated with the idea but terrified of it. They started declaiming loudly and insistently that, “What if she has tenure at Harvard, she is still one of us.”

This, of course, awakened the contrarian in me, and things became quite heated.

At the faculty book club that I joined two colleagues started fighting.

“I’m in Education,” one said, “and we are the lowest of the low in academia.”

“Oh no,” the second one retorted. “I’m in Sociology, and we are lower that even you guys.”

“No, no, no,” the Education  person said. “We are so low that we are downright pathetic. You guys are definitely higher than us.”

I didn’t want to be eclipsed, so I decided to participate.

“Well, we in Foreign Languages are also quite low,” I ventured.

The Sociologist  and the Education person glared at me.

“No, Foreign Languages are totally high up there. It’s like you are on the Moon while we are groveling in the dirt.”

“Are we?” I asked, beginning to feel important.

“Oh yes. And, I mean, Spanish? That’s stardom. That’s even higher than English.”

I was beginning to glow with a newly acquired sense of self-importance where another colleague chimed in.

“Well, I’m in Dentistry,” he confessed.

And then we realized that, compared to Dentistry, we were all in the dirt and could rest easy.

For months, I have been trying to drag myself to the grief support group but it just never happened. Today I  will get myself there if I have to crawl. I know it will be good for me, ultimately. But I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna.

The words “grief management” sound very cold and intellectualizing. But I find them very apt. If this state isn’t managed and even scheduled (at least, in my case), the road to darkness opens ahead of one.

I really wish I were (still) a drinking person. But this was one of the joys the analyst stole from me.

A student comes to my office.

“I think I will drop this class,” he says. “There is too much other stuff going on, so I think I should just drop.”

“Do you realize that you missed the deadline to withdraw without being charged for the course?” I ask.

“Oh, I don’t care,” the student waves his hand dismissively. “The state of Illinois pays for all that.”

The student is maybe a little younger than I am but not by a lot.

Who do you think he votes for?

I have a very very long and difficult day ahead of me, people, so I will be posting all day long because it distracts me. Those who don’t like this – all 2 of you – will have to accept my apologies.

Here is a joke I just heard.

The US President asks God, “God, when will things finally get better in the US?”

“In 7 years,” God said.

“Oh, that sucks because I won’t be in office then,” the US President said. So he started crying and walked away.

Russian President asks God, “God, when will things finally get better in Russia?”

“In 50 years,” God said.

“Oh, that sucks because I will be dead by that time,” the Russian President said. So he started crying and walked away.

The Ukrainian President asks God, “God, when will things finally get better in Ukraine?”

God heard the question, started crying and walked away.

Everybody is shocked by the pictures of shared toilets for the Olympics in Sochi that are making the rounds. Putin’s government has reacted to the international outrage by issuing really funny disclaimers.

However, these toilets are well in keeping with an old Soviet tradition of not using separate stalls in toilets. This is a toilet in one of the Russian cities that is also used by athletes at the local gym:

 

And this is from an opera theater in Vladivostok:

 

People should be grateful that there are actual commodes and not just a hole in the ground, which is what we were using at my high school (and all other schools).