Turned on the news and saw the video of Walter Scott being murdered.

The fuck.

Can anybody send me Eagleton’s article in the Chronicle? I don’t mean the link but the actual article.

I promise a post on the article in return.

In case you have never had two-inch hail hammer on your head as you are running through ankle – deep puddles feeling your carefully done hair and tasteful makeup disintegrating, let me tell you: it’s not a whole lot of fun.

P.S. The title is a pun of my own making.

My friend from Ukraine, let’s call her Basia, is similar to me in many ways. We are both passionate pro-Ukranian agitators, we’ve had a very similar life trajectory, and both made the decision to emigrate at the age of 14. And now we are teaching at the same university and soon, hopefully, the same course. Basia says that one of her grandfathers survived the Holocaust and the other one survived Holodomor.

There is one thing, though, that sets us apart. Basia is as kind as I’m not. So when we got an email from a Russian guy we’ve never met asking us to come to his elderly mother’s birthday to give her the joy of speaking Russian on that single festive occasion, I came to work and announced to Basia, “Did you see the email from that Russian weirdo? The guy’s just the limit! Trying to offload his old mama on total strangers!”

“Don’t tell me you are not going!” Basia exclaimed. “I already agreed thinking that it would be a great thing to spend some time with you.”

So now I’m going to the Birthday of an old lady from Russia.

Basia and I worry that the family might turn out to be Putinoid. I’m thinking of wearing my Ukrainian patriotic scarf to make it clear what’s appropriate in my company. The only problem is that it’s a heavy knit scarf and I might look like an idiot wearing it in hot Illinois April weather.

I also need to bring a gift. Any ideas?

“She achieved great success in life,” a student writes about a character I’d call anything but successful, “because she moved a lot and lived in several different countries.”

While we fret about the erosion of the nation-state by the flows of the increasingly liquid world, the young people are embracing the new reality. We, the members of the older generations, see the nomadic lifestyles which require one to be endlessly on the move, chasing temporary employment as torture but the young shrug off our concerns and discard the concept of a career altogether. Success is uncoupled from professional fulfillment and the satisfaction of building a career is substituted with a search for new experiences. Precariousness of employment becomes an advantage.

And I just erased the conclusion to this post because I don’t want to be an ancient spoil sport.

Sometimes students just slaughter. A student handed in an essay on the nature of an exile’s experience that is so true, so profound, and speaks so deeply to who I am as a human being that I’m almost in tears.

He’s doing this in a foreign language, mind you.

And now my colleagues are engaging in a passionate discussion of who should be fired first to accommodate the budget cuts. The discussions are conducted in the “Crucify her first, since she’s more expensive!” mode.

Note that nobody in the administration has proposed that people should be fired. This is simply a servile way of anticipating the possible future desires of the higher-ups.

Solidarity bites the dust.

After almost a year of driving, I found out that my car’s seats have the heating function. And there is a defogger for the rear window.

N keeps telling me that people usually read the instruction manual after purchasing something, and I’m discovering he might be right. I now feel like a total idjit after spending the entire winter moaning about the cold car seat.

It seems like the whole world is reading the blog. Ten minutes after I posted my recent denunciation of bad journalism, I got an invitation to speak to future journalists and discuss why I’m so unhappy with the state of contemporary reporting.

I’m not sure if I will have time to mention the Rolling Stone debacle but it’s a great example that not only the foreign affairs reporting sucks.

This will be fun.