OK, you’ve got to see this, folks. A kind reader just sent it to me:

The guy who posted the tweet is Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and in charge of Russia’s defense industry.

By the way, Putin’s love of getting photographed with wild animals has already led to torture and death of several animals that belong to the protected species. I don’t care much about animals but even I was practically in tears when I heard the story of the snow leopard tortured for a long time to please Putin.

At least, the “effeminate Obama” isn’t snapping the puppies’ necks after getting his photo taken with them.

I have this probably annoying habit of exclaiming, “Praise be to Allah!” to signal relief. I do it in a variety of languages and at least once a day.

I need to bring some paperwork to campus but I’ve been leaving it at home for weeks. This neurotic game has been going on for at least two months, and today I arrived on campus and had a horrible suspicion that I had left the papers at home yet again. But then I reached into my handbag and discovered the paperwork there.

So I’m standing in the university parking lot, bellowing, “Praise be to Allah!” when a young man approaches me.

“Yes, me, too!” he exclaims. “Muslim! From Pakistan! Muslim! Nice to meet you!!!”

He looked like he had tears in his eyes, so I didn’t want to disappoint.

“Assalamu alaikum!” I said enthusiastically.

“Student?” the man asked.

“Professor,” I said with a quiet dignity that must have looked a bit preposterous in somebody who had recently been speaking loudly to herself in a parking lot and who can’t manage to bring a stupid piece of paper to campus for two months.

“Oh! Oh!” the young man exclaimed, beaming. “This is a GOOD university.”

“The best,” I responded with conviction.

Wow, my small town has become really yappified. Something called “a social gastropub” is scheduled to open close to where I used to live.

There are several people protesting in front of the future social gastropub. They are standing facing the highway and holding placards. The placards are filled with a long text printed in tiny letters which nobody driving on the highway can possibly manage to read. I drove by twice and managed to catch a few words. It seems that the protest has something to do with the local union.

I have never even been to a gastropub, so the town is becoming too chic even for me. Does anybody have gastropub experience?

In a curious twist, Putin now has an actual separatist movement in Russia: Siberia wants out of the Russian Federation. And as somebody wrote on Facebook, “one word that it is really dangerous to say in the Russian Federation is federation.”

As if I didn’t have enough to do already, I was just informed that the textbook I ordered for my students back in March will not be available. Our students rent the textbooks we choose from the university.

I knew that clerks are useless so I confirmed whether they had the textbook at least six times since March. I asked about it once a month and recently every two weeks. The last time I asked was on Friday. Every single time I was told that yes, the textbook is available and is “waiting for the students in neat piles.”

Of course, today I was told that the textbook isn’t there and won’t be there. And the classes start in less than two weeks.

I asked them about any old textbooks they have available for this course. They have one but are refusing to show it to me because desk copies should be ordered from the publisher. Obviously, I can’t order it from any publisher because I’ve never seen this book. I have no idea who the publisher is, who wrote it, or whether I will be able to use it in my course. To make that decision I need to see the blessed book. But the Textbook Services are refusing to show it to me.

This is all happening while I’m trying to complete my tenure dossier on time.

And before I edited out all of the very inventive profanity it originally contained, this post was much longer. When anybody tried to mess with me doing my job, I get very enraged. And I mean, very enraged.

I’m really bored with the unintelligent idea that Putin is crazy. It is shameful that our political leaders despise us so much that they think it’s OK to offer this ridiculous explanation to us.

Putin is not in the least crazy. He is expressing the interests of an overwhelming majority of people in his enormous country. And they love him for that.

Many – or probably even most – people in the FSU countries have not accepted the fall of the Soviet Union. They don’t like the capitalist system, they can’t manage to learn to live in this new reality, they perceive the values and lifestyles that go with it as deeply alien. They didn’t have a chance to learn capitalism and civil rights gradually and slowly. Instead, they were thrust into a way of being that they will never master as well as everybody else does. And this makes them feel constantly and painfully inferior.

This is a shared experience in the FSU countries but the non-Russian republics have received something in return for relinquishing the USSR that compensates them for this suffering. Their humiliation at the hands of the much closer Russians rankled more than the feelings of inadequacy when comparing themselves with faraway Americans. Nationalism is a potent force, and people will choose it over pretty much anything.

With the fall of the USSR, Russians saw their opportunities to feel good by humiliating Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Latvians, Georgians, etc severely curtailed. Instead, they found themselves constantly humiliated and made to feel painfully and constantly lacking. This does seem like a really lousy trade off: give up the pleasing feelings of total superiority and in return get to feel inferior and receive a system that you have no use for.

What we are seeing now in Russia is an intense acting out against this trade off and an effort to return to the status quo. And the only people who are crazy are those who are dismissing these efforts as nothing but an act of insanity.

“So when are you going to write a novel?” my psychoanalyst asks.

“I’m not!” I exclaim, alarmed by the question. “Never.”

“I can feel a novel brewing in there,” the analyst says.

“No,” I say. “I’d rather die than be one of THOSE people.”

“Novelists?” he asks. “What have you got against novelists?”

“No, I mean THOSE PEOPLE. The ones who entertain the childish dreams of being rich and famous rather than recognize that they hate their lives.”

“I’m not convinced,” the analyst says, looking very unconvinced. “I’m pretty sure that one day I will see your name at the bookstore, in the fiction section.”

Of course, now I’m wondering if the analyst is trying to suggest that I’m a really talented liar. I have a huge issue with thinking that everybody suspects me of dishonesty, and he knows it. It takes everything I have not to run after each colleague who casually asks, “Coming from class?” and yell, “Yes, yes, I’ve been to class, I swear, I have 23 people who can prove it, and here are the homeworks I collected, and here is my class plan, so yes, I’ve been to class, and how dare you suspect otherwise, you mean, nasty evildoer?!”

But what else can this insistence that I can write novels mean other than suggesting that I lie really well?

Whenever a national identity is formulated along the lines of “We are more spiritual than everybody else,” that should be translated as, “There won’t be any food, so just get used to it.”

Franco did that back in the 1940s and Russians keep doing that since they became a nation.

OK, why are all of the 8 candidates for the Family Friendly Leave committee women? Our male faculty members also tend to have families.

I’m always disturbed by ghettoization.

People have started to receive my book in the mail. One of them says it’s

a most elegant and intelligent book, as one would expect from its elegant and intelligent author.

Another recipient says ,

WOW, it’s very real. :)))) . . . Congratulations – it’s a beautiful REAL book!

A reminder to those who want to purchase a copy of the REAL book for $15: please send an email to Dra. Carmen Urioste <carmen.urioste@me.com> expressing your interest in doing so. The money doesn’t go to me, in case anybody is wondering, but to the noble cause of supporting our professional association of Hispanists that actually does an amazing job of mentoring beginning academics in our field.