So people who like Mad Men, what is your explanation for why Betty left Don?

I see following possibilities:

1. She fell in love with the gray-haired guy – This is the one I like the most but I have a feeling I’m just seeing what I want to see.

2. She decided to leave him back when she found out he was cheating and was only putting up with him until the baby was born – There is evidence that this is Don’s explanation.

3. She is disgusted by his low social origins – This doesn’t really work because she always knew he grew up on a farm, so what really changed?

4. She discovered that they never had a real relationship because he concealed his origins from her – This is the sappiest explanation and it bores me but hey, this is American television.

Or do you have other explanations?

All I know about sororities comes from the movie Legally Blonde, so for my first encounter with the representatives of my sorority yesterday, I decked myself with the most expensive jewelry I possess, plastered on half of my entire (and very plentiful)  makeup supply, and constructed a vaguely Greek-looking outfit from a long, flowing powder-blue skirt and a velvet top organized around several inventive folds. The most elegant shawl from my collection was placed on top of all this.

I don’t know what impression this made on the “young ladies” from the sorority (I learned during the meeting that the right way to refer to them is “young ladies”) but this get-up had  the unexpected effect of inspiring two very young men to try to chat me up (separately, I mean, not at once). I’m definitely not old enough to be attractive to 17-old-boys, so this was disturbing. It was especially disturbing since I was never popular among 17-old boys, not even when I was 17. Twenty years later, I have definitely lost all need to be found desirable by this age group.

This is what happens when one joins a sorority: suddenly everybody wants you. Life is complicated for us, beautiful young ladies.

OK, I promise this is the last post about watches, and I promise to keep my morbid interests to myself from now on.

Reader Kathleen mentioned Tikker, a life expectancy watch, and I decided to research it:

The principle behind Tikker is very simple. It estimates your life expectancy based on a questionnaire and converts the answers into a countdown display in years, months, days, minutes, and seconds until your appointment with the Grim Reaper. It can even compensate for leap years.

I think I’d wear one, although this might be a dangerous toy that can do damage to one’s mental health.

By the way, do you remember how I said the other day (and yes, I have started quoting myself, this is scary):

We live in the world where there is a soaring number of people whose skills and time are so precious that they hire career management services, employ life coaches, attend networking events, participate in mentorship programs, download endless productivity apps, and schedule their lives in 10-minute increments. At the same time, the gulf between such people and the functionally illiterate / unskilled is widening. There used to be a middle-ground between these two classes but it is disappearing.

Tikker and the 5-minute watch we discussed recently arise precisely from this phenomenon.

OK, I just read the first post from that weird sex-advice website, and it’s even more disturbing than the second one. Do you think these letters are manufactured or do you believe real people write them? Because it’s the second letter in a row that makes zero sense. See here:

Question: My husband and I have had an open marriage for the last two years. Up until five months ago, it was working beautifully. At that point, however, I was sexually assaulted by a former partner. Since that incident, I cannot stand sex with my husband. I completely flip out when he tries to initiate sexual contact. My skin crawls. I become panicked and feel repulsed. I just cannot handle it. Those times when I go along with it anyway leave me feeling enraged and disgusted.

I don’t think this is completely unheard of for someone who was relatively recently assaulted, and I am considering therapy to help me work through it. The immediate “problem” is that I have no difficulty having sex with my boyfriend. In fact, the sex with him is amazing and leaves me feeling loved and whole and wonderful.

This is breaking my husband’s heart. He has become incredibly jealous of my relationship with my boyfriend. He’s depressed. He’s angry. He accuses me of no longer loving him, and he wants me to stop sleeping with my boyfriend until our marriage is back to normal. I feel like a horrible person, but I just can’t do that. I need that outlet. I need that support. And I admit I have a hard time believing that my husband and I will ever be able to go back to the way things were before.

I feel like I’ve already lost my former partner (fucked-up though that may seem) and my husband. It kills me to think about cutting out the one positive relationship remaining. On the other hand, I do love my husband—very much—and watching him suffer like this is unbearable.

I know this is longish and people hate long quotes. But just look at the underlined part. If “this” is breaking the husband’s heart, one has really got to ask, how is the husband discovering all “this.” Is this person actually telling him, “You know, sex with you is disgusting but sex with my boyfriend is amazing and leaves me feeling loved and whole and wonderful?” None of this makes sense.

This is the second advice-seeking letter in a row that is plagued with contradictions and makes zero sense whatsoever.

Do you think  these letters are all fake?

What is really strange is that the sex-advice blogger from the previous post seems to think her “close your eyes and take it for a higher good” advice is somehow progressive and even transgressive.

Bizarredom.

You know what really, really gets to me?

If I were to share with you, my readers, something like, “I have this persistent cough that just wouldn’t go away. I feel like my chest is constricted and I wake up at night drenched in cold sweat.” What would your advice be?

I’m guessing that any person in their right mind would say, “Go see a doctor!” I’m also guessing that nobody would start diagnosing me over the Internet and telling me how to cure this ailment sight unseen.

If I told you about a dysfunction in any system of organs in my body, the advice would be the same: talk to a specialist. Several years ago, for instance, I complained of a chest pain on the blog, and a reader who happened to be a nurse told me in no uncertain terms that I had to go to the ER. And this turned out to be amazing advice: I had pericarditis and needed to be treated. But even that reader – an actual medical professional – was not presuming to prescribe treatment for me online. I think we can all agree this is the right approach.

There is, however, one area in our bodies where every Tom, Dick and Henrietta thinks it’s OK to diagnose and prescribe treatment left and right. Here is an example for you. A person asks:

Other than a recent, brief and dissatisfying encounter, my SO and I haven’t had sex in a very long time. At the beginning of our relationship, we were very sexually active but my desire over the course of the last few years has completely tanked. I still very much love and am attracted to my SO, but I worry about our future. How do I regain my mojo and how do I know if this is a sign that our relationship is reaching the end?

Obviously, nobody but a specialist can even decipher what “I’m attracted but don’t feel desire” means. All anybody can do is gently suggest that this person take this query to a sexologist. Sadly, there are many other people who would benefit from seeing such a specialist, too. And it is those people precisely who are interested in projecting their own deeply Victorian views on others. Here is an example:

Many of us have these romantic visions of what our sex lives are supposed to be like: spontaneous, plentiful, void of drama or misunderstandings, and perfectly matched in libido to our partner(s). That just ain’t reality, especially for the long haul.

Translation: “My sex is infrequent, routine, filled with misunderstandings, and always leaves either me or my partner unsatisfied. That’s my reality and the price I pay for the all-important privilege of being in a long-term relationship, and don’t anybody dare suggest life can be different.”

From the viewpoint informed by her own dysfunction, this dispenser of advice exhorts the poor reader to “keep trying” in a way that reminded me of “close your eyes and think of England.”

What really gets me is that people who identify as feminists keep offering this extremely outdated kind of advice. Years ago, I wrote about another feminist who blithely dispensed sex advice of the most offensively patriarchal and anti-woman kind anybody can imagine. It seems like there is now a re-incarnation of that woman-hating sex specialist. (Or is it the same person? I don’t want to believe there could be two of them prowling the world, dispensing their sexual wisdom.)

Thank you, dear Cliff Arroyo, for this great link. And just out of curiosity, how is it possible for a blog that has exactly 2 posts to have 296 followers? If somebody tells me this blogger is a bot, that will be a relief.

College Misery has a hilarious thread going on where people have to answer the following questions:

When did you lose your naive and dewy eyed view of the profession? When did you lose your academic innocence?

The answers are priceless. This one, in particular, almost made me weep with laughter:

Let’s see…I think it was on my last couple of years as a grad student, when I suddenly understood I was completely on my own. Not in the sense of being responsible for anything that happened in my career (or didn’t happen), but in the stronger sense that the people around me–advisor, department, research group, fellow graduate students–were all completely indifferent to whether I stayed in the profession or was never heard from again. That’s the reality of the career, maybe every career. The Universe does.not.care

The poor baby realized it was necessary to grow up. How totally tragic.

For some people, however, even that realization is yet to happen. Here is an example of somebody who is still sore over some grade he got a bizillion years ago:

I lost my innocence while I was still an undergrad, in my 4th year. At the end of term profs put the marks for all of the assignments, midterm & exam, on the course bulletin board (yes, this was before the Internet et al., and this was how profs “communicated” with students about a course). In the “final mark” column I noticed an enumeration error. A really big one. So, I went to the prof’s office, introduced myself, handed him a handwritten copy of my marks, and noted the error. The prof’s face drained of colour, and he angrily sputtered out “This is a big change. So I actually have to fill out paperwork to get your grade changed. DO YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH FUCKING PAPERWORK YOU ARE MAKING ME DO???”

It’s very heartening to see people who have experienced no greater tragedy that a grade mess-up during their BA.

Of course, I’m yet to lose my “naive and dewy eyed view of the profession,” so I’m biased. I’m also in a playful mood today, so let’s not take this post too seriously.

Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the country’s foremost authorities on puberty, thinks there’s a strong case to be made for this idea. “It doesn’t seem to me like adolescence is a difficult time for the kids,” he says. “Most adolescents seem to be going through life in a very pleasant haze.” . . .

In the 2014 edition of his best-known textbook, Adolescence, Steinberg debunks the myth of the querulous teen with even more vigor. “The hormonal changes of puberty,” he writes, “have only a modest direct effect on adolescent behavior; rebellion during adolescence is atypical, not normal.”

Sweet Jesus on the cross. And this “scholar” works at my dream university, a place were I wanted to work so much that I totally bombed the phone interview. (It was also the only one among the 180+ places where I applied that specifically attracted me. The rest were pretty indistinguishable to me.) I was so nervous that I couldn’t have done worse even if I’d downed a bottle of rum right before getting interviewed. And all that stress was for a place where people of this scarily low intellectual caliber work.

I’m now really glad I didn’t get a job there. This way I don’t have to work with somebody who obviously does his research “in a very pleasant haze.”

An interesting article about smartphone use:

Some of the most highly touted smartphone innovations are barely used at all. A 2012 Harris Interactive poll showed that just 5 percent of Americans used their smartphones to show codes for movie admission or to show an airline boarding pass. Whether that’s because of a lack of interest or lack of know-how (or both) is not entirely clear, but experts who study smartphone use, as well as tech-support professionals who work with the confused, say they see smartphone obliviousness at all ages and for all kinds of reasons.

I’m an app maniac, meaning that I use apps all the time on my iPod, cellphone, and Android tablet. Each device has its own apps that serve a specific purposes. My favorite apps are:

aTimeLogger – the best productivity app in the world that makes tracking the exact time I spend on research, teaching and service a breeze

Feedly – this app helps me keep up with what other bloggers are writing and read Spanish press

PicStitch – this is where I create the collages I keep inflicting upon my readers

WordPress – obvious

Habit List – an app that helps me track my Seinfeld List which, as of today, stands at 56 days of writing

TurboScanner – this is an amazing app that has buried scanners forever. I can scan any text I want and place it on Blackboard with my iPod in matter of seconds. The quality of scans is sensational, and I don’t have to deal with the copy center that bugs me over every text that is even a line over 3 pages

Lose It! – a weight loss app (more about this soon)

Holiday Cove – a game where I create cities and defeat pirates

Westbound – a game where I help a group of cowboys expand to the Wild West.

Of course, there are many more apps I use but these are the ones I access many times a day.

However, I don’t use any apps to show codes for movie admission or to show an airline boarding pass. This puts me in the category of app-Luddites the article discusses. The reason I avoid these apps is because I have a strange fear they will make me look pretentious.

Which apps do you use? And if you use none, then what is preventing you from joining the app craze?

Three of the 14 students in my course had A Game of Thrones on their desks during class. I’m facing very stiff competition here, if they like these books so much that they need to have them close at any given time.

I did manage to win the contest today with the help of one of my favorite contemporary writers Benjamín Prado. But we’ll see how long my winning streak lasts.