I’ve been doing this activity where we meet incoming students and hawk our programs to them for 6 years. And this was the first year when several students stopped me right after I started waxing lyrical about the benefits of our language courses and said, “I’m interested in literature. Language is great but I want to study literature.” Usually, we lure students in with language and then spring literature on them. But things seem to be changing, and that’s very heartening. Maybe we will soon be able to stop apologizing for doing literary studies.

At a recent faculty event, I met a new colleague who immediately made me suspect that she was one of “us.” Her English was flawless but she had such a big presence that she seemed to occupy the whole room.

She asked the presenter dozens of questions, never looked or sounded apologetic, didn’t make her affirmative statements sound like questions, never faded away by the end of the sentences, and behaved as if the whole event existed to serve her purposes. She was loud, oblivious,  and occupied half of the table with her stuff. In short,

I couldn’t get rid of the insistent suspicion that she just had to be one of us even though her name sounded anything but familiar. And then I met her again today and discovered that she is Mongolian and got her education in Novosibirsk.

My cultural radar is infallible.

If I ever get another urge to go for a year without a vacation,  please do me a favor and hit me over the head with a Teflon frying pan.

I have no idea what possessed me to do it this year but I’m now seeing that this was a really stupid thing to do. I feel completely exhausted, I have trouble sleeping, on Sunday it got so bad that I could barely stay on my feet.

” But look at all of those people who go for years without vacations, ” N said yesterday. “Maybe we should become more like them.”

” Why would we want to do that?” I asked.

” Well, maybe they are tapping into the inner resources that we haven’t learned to access.”

“Or maybe they are idiots,” I countered.

Right now I can’t even remember why skipping this year’s vacation seemed like a smart thing to do back in summer.

The only time I get to meet students’ parents is this time of the academic year when prospective students visit campus.

I always volunteer to represent our department at this event because I have an unexpected and rare gift of making people feel very comfortable around me. Often, people come up to the table to enquire about French or German but after talking to me ask, “So what are you teaching?  Oh, Spanish. My daughter has never taken any Spanish. But maybe she could start now because I’d like her to take courses with you.”

This is a very fun activity because the parents are even more terrified than the prospective students, and I enjoy putting them at ease. I’m not naturally a warm person, especially not around strangers but I can turn the warmth on like heating.

If the system of higher education collapses, I will not be averse to trying a career in sales.

I often encounter articles where fussy old people of my age project their fear of the increasing liquidity of life onto the younger generation. They hide from their own anxiety behind misplaced and dishonest worrying about the young people’s chances at finding good jobs or managing to fashion a good life for themselves.

In itself, the belief that the young people will suffer and live in misery is a sign of nothing other than the terror of aging. The reality,  however, is that the young are super comfortable with liquidity. When students talk to me about their life plans,  it is obvious that they are not only aware of the liquidity but are joyfully embracing it.

We should just stop fussing and helicoptering and let the young people enjoy their liquid lives even if we can’t do the same.

So we finally got our tree. And it’s a mimosa! Here is how it looks right now:

OK, this is obviously not much to look at but do you want to know what these trees look like when they are in bloom? Here it is:

Not too shabby, eh?

Kotkin on Russia ‘ s proto – fascist movement (called the Union of the Russian people) of the early XXTH century:

The Union’s members and leaders… we’re antiliberal,  anti capitalist, and anti – semitic. They emphasized the uniqueness of Russia ‘ s historical trajectory, rejected Europe as a model,  preached the need for Orthodox primacy… and demanded restoration of Russia ‘ s traditions. .. Union members held that the autocrat alone must rule (99).

Remind you of anyone?

You could post endless lists on how being you is impossibly hard.

Or you could go to a psychologist.

As I keep saying, I am yet to meet a single male chauvinist pig who’d manage to insult me as much as these damsels in perennial distress.

Just received a question as to whether I believe that it would have been better for Ukraine if John McCain had been elected back in 2008.

The only answer I can give is that it would have made zero difference. What Putin is doing is not reactive but proactive. I have no idea why it’s so hard for people to understand that all of his bluster about him doing this or that because Americans did that or this is a lie. He’s not doing anything because of Americans. He’s doing stuff because he has his own reasons. Tactics might change but the strategy remains.

Putin is smart and he knows that if he feeds Americans this bunch of silly stories about how they caused his actions, they will be only too happy to believe him.

Of course, everybody is entitled to their own reading of any text but I find the following reading of Gilmore Girls (one of my most favorite TV shows ever) to be very puzzling:

The obvious one Phoebe overlooks is Gilmore Girls: a very young mother who raises her daughter as an equal, the daughter is growing up much more responsible and mature than her mother.

The character of Rory in the TV show is anything but “responsible and mature.” She finds it extremely hard to separate from her mother, she can’t handle school, at the slightest contretemps she hands her life over to her rich grandparents, she can’t preserve any identity of her own in relationships with men, she turns into a mirror image of whatever guy she happens to date at any given moment. This is an extremely infantile character, and it is no mistake that an actress with such a childish face was cast for this part.

Rory’s extreme immaturity can easily be traced to two main causes: a very infantile absentee father and extremely wealthy grandparents. They are in the habit of pouring huge sums of money on top of every minor issue she confronts, so she never feels the need to grow up.

The final episodes of the show where Rory refuses to marry her domineering rich brat of a boyfriend and finally departs away from her relatives to work as a journalist covering the campaign of the yet largely unknown Barack Obama are very hopeful because they indicate that the 23-year-old Rory is finally ready to start growing up. 

OK, I now want to drop everything and go watch the entire show from the start.