So I’m done with my secretarial duties for the day and am ready to start celebrating the best marriage known to humanity*.

Students look very disturbed when they encounter me at the secretary’s desk, stuffing envelopes. I have a feeling that seeing somebody of my intellectual caliber and impressive qualifications engaged in such a task messes with their heads. I dig that because it’s funny to observe.

The only downside of sitting in the secretary’s office is that it is located at the entrance to the Chair’s office, and my colleagues suspect me of eavesdropping on their fraught discussions with the recalcitrant students they are obligated to bring to the Chair. I’m getting tired of explaining that I have a hearing problem that prevents me from listening in on these discussions even if I wanted to do so.

So I told the Chair I was hungry and was leaving for the day.

“Ah, so you are human!” he exclaimed.

N is at work so I started celebrating on my own by visiting the Indian buffet. Now I will go buy some gifts for myself.
And it’s still snowing intermittently which, I believe,  is a great sign.

I can’t explain it but I feel like this difficult semester ended today even though there are still weeks to go.

* Your marriage is amazing, as well, of course. I’m just talking from my own perspective.

A few years ago, I would have said he is slandering Western feminists:

So much for the idea that I’ve seen many Western feminists promulgate that Islam and Islamic countries with their restrictions on women’s behaviors “protects” women from rape.

But now I know better.

Am I going nuts or has it just started snowing??

Wow, that’s an amazing wedding anniversary gift. Snow before Thanksgiving (or before February, really) is unheard of in this region.

You know what’s horribly unfair and corrupt?  Mandatory car insurance. I never had a chance to think about it before but now it has become obvious that this is nothing but a form of taxation where the revenues go directly to private companies. And it’s a pretty high tax.

In this week’s New Yorker, Allen Kurzweil details his forty-year-long hunt for his childhood boarding-school tormentor, and his discovery that the former twelve-year-old bully had grown up to be a convicted felon. He has also written a book about it, called Whipping Boy.

People will truly go to any lengths to avoid placing their parents under critical scrutiny. Forty years is small potatoes. There are those who throw their entire lives away to avoid putting in words the intolerable truth.