Gosh, people, I just can’t get any break with this shit, seriously.

I came to see the STL OB-GYN and there was a heavily pregnant woman there who went in before I did. So while I was doing the pre-appointment stuff  (weight, BP, etc), there were suddenly very disturbing noises and commotion. The nurse looked at my papers, freaked out,  and shoved me into a room.

It turned out that the doctor had to give the woman the bad news. The same bad news I got a year and a half ago.

I know that this woman’s suffering is not about me but this did not make an already difficult process any easier.

Shit. That poor woman. God.

Since people say they enjoy these daily schedule posts, here’s what I’m doing today.

8 am – got up to discover that it finally got cold and rainy, which immediately made me happy

8:00-9:00 – ate breakfast  (whole grain pita pockets with hummus and mango tea) while watching Dr Phil and browsing Twitter

9:00-11:00 – managed my online course, did class prep for Thursday, and answered emails for work

11:00-12:00 – got ready to venture onto the highway

12:00-12:30 –  ran to the car and back trying not to leave any important stuff behind and, of course, left everything behind

12:30-13:30 – drove to St. Louis.

13:30-14:00 – visited Panera for lunch but didn’t manage to order anything because of stress

14:00-14:10 – drove to the Mercy Hospital. I’m not sick or anything, this is just a yearly checkup. I’m understandably incapable of visiting my local gynecologist, so now I schlep to St Louis to see one. And I’m still freaking out.

14:10-15:10 – the doctor’s appointment

15:10-16:00 – I will reward myself for all this drama by driving to the Global Foods for some ethnic food.

16:00 – 17:00 – drive home.

17:00-17:30 – reward myself further by eating borscht

17:30 – 19:00 – work on my book

19:00-20:30 – the gym with N

20:30 – 21:30 – share the drama of driving on the highway with my sister

21:30 – 23:00 – watch the second season of The Wire with N. We are really into this great show.

And that’s about it.

It still freaks me out to drive on the highway, so I yell Ukrainian folk songs at the top of my lungs as I drive to relieve the stress. And when I run out of songs in my limited repertoire, I turn on a country music station.

After decades of detesting country music and beer, I now never listen to anything but country and never drink any alcohol but beer. I do both extremely rarely but it still freaks N out. He’s afraid of these dramatic changes I’m given to.

And this is a picture of an anti – Putin beer created in Ukraine:

While putting on makeup and doing my hair,  I had on one of those true crime TV shows playing in the background.

The show went on and on about how totally submissive “Indian women” are because that’s how “their culture” is.

I don’t know if people are aware of how big India is, how enormous its population is, what a huge variety of cultures exist in the country, etc. I mean, what is it that makes them feel comfortable with talking about “Indian women” and “Indian culture” like it’s some monolithic concept that can be so easily defined?

I don’t know that many Indian women but for the ones I know, the word “submissive” would be pretty much the last among the enormous number of adjectives I know. Of course, I’m sure that among the millions of Indian women, there are those who are submissive. But from there to the conclusion that all women there are like this, the distance is like from here to another galaxy.

And what chance do we, the Russian – speaking women have, if a much more numerous group is stereotyped so dismissively?

One of the very first things our new Governor does in office is close down an early voting location on our solidly Democratic campus. The closure is explained by non-existent (see yesterday’s post) budget constraints.

During the online conference, a non-TT colleague who has nothing to lose interrupted the proceedings to wail, “Oh God, how could anybody have voted for Rauner? This is an absolute disaster! What were people thinking?”

As much fun as I had at the conference, I have to agree that our discussions of how to deliver an acceptable online course through the use of sophisticated technology, smaller classrooms, individualized attention, and a very high time investment on the part of professors were quite pathetic. Rauner and the Illinois Board of Higher Ed don’t want any of this. They want to cram 500 students into a single online classroom and charge them exorbitant prices for a course that fewer than 4% of them are likely to pass under the most lax conditions imaginable.

Yes, we only have to put up with this corrupt big-government loser for 4 years but destroying is easier than building. He can inflict a lot of damage in that time.

The media are conspiring to annoy me tonight. A chirpy victim of plastic surgery and tanning beds joyfully announced on the news that Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown “participated in their own tragic demises.”

Maybe I should just go get a shower while N works on his Java. (That’s a language of programming, not a coffee. He’s not into coffee.)

Went on Twitter, saw people say incredibly cynical shit like “Networking is just talking about what you do, even to a friend or guy on elevator”, got scared and left.

Now I’m revising my entire life for occasions when I thought I was having a friendly conversation while my interlocutor was trying to use me for some creepy networking purposes.

I just saw a very upsetting report on TV about the Cook County jail. Crowds of people are jailed there for petty misdemeanors, such as possession of small amounts of drugs, prostitution, loitering, etc. It costs enormous amounts of money to keep them there. No actual purpose is being served by all this.

Cook County is located in my state of Illinois, by the way. The same state that is refusing to fund its public universities.  There is money to keep poor people in jail, yet no money to maintain the higher ed system that helps limit the number of hopeless, discarded human beings.

Let nobody even try to approach me with the idiotic chant of there being no money in Illinois. There’s more money we know what to do with if we are wasting it on locking up everybody in sight.

Author: Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni

Title: State of Crisis

Year of publication: 2014

My rating: 10 out of 10

As I’m working on my book, I read everything with the word “crisis” in it. State of Crisis is a dialogue between Bauman and Carlo Bordoni, an Italian sociologist and journalist. Bordoni’s contribution is translated really badly by some semi-literate joke of a translator, yet even that does not make the book any less valuable.

Bauman and Bordoni suggest that the phenomenon known in Europe as “the crisis” and in the US as “the Recession” is not, as these names suggest, a temporary state of affairs, but, rather, the permanent state of affairs. The illusion that there is a right set of measures that will resolve “the crisis” once and for all needs to be abandoned if we are to realize that what we are experiencing is much larger than a temporary lack of liquidity experienced by a few banks. We are undergoing an enormous societal transformation and entering into a civilizational model where uncertainty and constant change will be the norm.

Under the fold, there are several interesting quotes from this important book.

Continue reading “Book Notes: State of Crisis by Bauman & Bordoni” →