So you know how this was supposed to be the best semester of my career? I handed in my tenure dossier, there is zero research pressure since my book came out this year, and the worse my student evaluations are at the end of the semester, the better for me.

But it turned out to be a really crappy semester, and the worst part is that I’m not sure why. The courses I teach are all higher-level, and I love them. The students are the best ever, active, engaged. There is almost no service. Well, that’s always the case but still. I don’t have to wait for the bus and can get everywhere easily.

For some reason, I constantly feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and drowning in work. And I’m not like that as a person. I don’t like such people, so how come I’m one of them, and for no discernible reason, too?

It’s gotten to the point where I’m greeting my husband’s arrival home from work with, “I’m afraid the house is about to explode, quick, do something!” And all that because I’ve been haunted by images of gas leaks and explosions.

My only guess as to the reasons for this bizarre state of affairs is that I have accumulated exhaustion. And there is no immediate remedy for that.

To counteract all this whining, I want to share that I just discovered that somebody has already written the exact article I was planning to write, and this makes me very happy. Since the argument already exists out there, I can build upon it and take much further.

Yesterday I read a post that quoted a very famous book on narcissism. The success of the book demonstrates that many people are trying to survive the trauma inflicted on them on the narcissists in their lives. However, the following quote demonstrates that the book in question is a load of stupid and vicious garbage:

Successful narcissists have a whole lot of sex, which means they’re statistically likelier to have a whole lot of babies—at least compared to everyone else. This highly adaptive component of narcissism gives it a big edge over other disorders in getting passed down to the next generation.

First of all, there is no connection whatsoever between narcissism and sex. The only connection exists in the Puritanical brain of the sexually unhealthy author of this book. Second, the number of sex acts correlates with the number of babies only among the most Orthodox religious fundamentalists. Everywhere else, there are crowds of people who’ve had and are having tons of sex yet who have one, two or no babies. Narcissism is not a genetic disorder. It is a personality disorder that is a result of early childhood traumas. Children of narcissists can also develop narcissism. However, they are just as likely (or more likely) to develop a different series of disorders: addiction, low self-esteem, broken mechanism of motivation, depression, anxiety, etc.