Alain Touraine (the famous French sociologist) says that full-time employment is disappearing in favor of mushrooming part-time / temp gigs because there is a huge demand for precisely this type of change among people coming on the job market now.

I do understand that such enormous social shifts do not happen unless there’s demand for them. But I belong to  a different generation and come from a different world. This is so counterintuitive to me that I get it but I still don’t get it.

I’m playing some weird game with the nurse, the pharmacy, and the doctor.

The doctor prescribes me something but the opinionated Irish nurse believes the medication is “voodoo science” and “forgets” to phone it in. 

I go to the pharmacy and make an ass out of myself, insisting that the scrip has to be there and pharmacists need to keep looking for it.

Then I call the doctor, he tells the nurse to phone in the prescription, I go back to the pharmacy. . . and the whole thing repeats itself.

The fact that my student works at the pharmacy and greets me with a joyful and loud, “Hey, professor, how sick are you that you have to be here so often?!? Hey, everybody, this is my professor!” adds an extra layer of enjoyment to the whole experience.

Russia is building fortifications on the border with Ukraine to prevent the killers it sent there from coming back.

The war with Ukraine is being used in Russia to get rid of the most aggressive, impossible to socialize men who are a great burden on the country’s economy  (don’t forget that this is a country where the enormous majority of families has a woman act as the sole breadwinner) and might pose a threat to the regime’s stability.

These surplus men are being spit out into Ukraine and left there to die or do what they will as long as they don’t come back. This population formatting is not Russia’s only reason for continuing the war with Ukraine but it’s one of reasons.

The women will not miss these men because great numbers of men from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have been imported to substitute them. The importees are a lot less likely to engage in social unrest because they are immigrants, they don’t understand the host culture very well, their own cultures are profoundly patriarchal, and they are terrified of deportation.

I fail to think of a group of people in the last 100 years who have been as consistently sacrificed and slaughtered in huge numbers for such a long time as Russian men. It’s a veritable genocide that’s been going on for 101 years and that nobody is even noticing.

Of course, it isn’t noticed because they are doing it to each other but still, what a waste of human potential!

I found several hedgehog farms in our state but N is against buying a pet hedgehog. He says he’ll feel horrible putting the creature in a cage.

There are many scams these days that try to swindle job seekers out of money. CV formatting services are an example of such a scam.

There is absolutely nothing such a service can offer that will improve one’s chances at employment. The format of a CV is of minuscule importance, if any.

Lucia Etxebarria is a very well-known Spanish writer. She is also one of those people who create drama and scandal with every breath they take. So when she decided to write her very well-researched and serious book about the economic crisis in Spain,  she also managed to get on a reality TV show and then immediately get kicked off it right around the book’s release. So nobody really noticed the book, which is just sad.

Author: Lucia Etxebarria
Title: Liquidacion por derribo
Year: 2012

Poland and Spain held elections whose results moved both countries further down the anti-EU road. In Poland, this meant a move to the right, while in Spain this was a move to the left.

The left / right distinctions don’t matter that much any longer, though. They were a feature of the nation-state and are becoming irrelevant at the same pace as it disintegrates.

I’ve been hoping to see a real alternative to Spain ‘ s two leading parties for a while. And now that this alternative appeared, I couldn’t be more disappointed. The new party chose the lazy way of stoking the useless fires of anti-EU resentment instead of doing the actual work of party – building.

Of course, this is really great for the US because the only real competitor it has on the world stage is checking itself out of the game to chase after a fantasy.

Whenever I hang out with people, I always hear things like, “If only I had your potential / talent / publication record / capacity for research, etc., I would be doing XYZ.”

I appreciate the compliment part but dislike the criticism it introduces. I don’t want “a more exciting life.” I’ve had enough upheaval to last me 5 lifetimes. All I want right now is to be left in peace with my research.

“What possessed you to plant sunflowers?!?” Basia exclaimed. “Sunflowers symbolize Ukraine, and you’ve got to know that whenever there’s something Ukrainian, somebody will try to take it away. So of course the rabbits and the deer are trying to eat them!”

The barriers that exist between full-time and contingent faculty members are very unfortunate. But whenever I try to breach them, I discover myself in the midst of such a negative, overwrought environment that I can’t take it for very long.

I just had to listen to an endless discussion of how everything is horrible and our university is about to be closed down and finally just gave up on trying to reach out to contingent colleagues.