While I’m preparing for the trip, here is a very good article on how the seemingly innocuous term “neighborhood schools” conceals resegregation of the worst kind.

My husband is so sensitive that I can’t watch my favorite show Law & Order: SVU with him in the room.

Now, however, he discovered Dexter and it’s his favorite show. His explanation is that SVU is realistic while Dexter is plainly comedic. So now we watch Dexter.

I’m not into this show a whole lot but as long as N is happy, I don’t care what we watch. I watched a Russian series titled The Bandits of St Petersburg with him 4 times because it means so much to him.

I dislike Dexter for two reasons:

1. The actor who plays Dexter is so ugly it hurts my aesthetic sensibilities to look at him.

2. The Rita character is awakening murderous impulses in me. I have a visceral rejection of such pathetic, self-infantilizing, breathy creatures whose only goal in life is to have a pair of pants in their useless lives.

The reason why N likes the show so much is because there is a character who is a loving parent (Dexter ‘ s adoptive father) and N has never seen somebody like this. So the show is therapeutic for him.

Only a person who grew up in the USSR, with its extraordinarily messed up familial relationships, can experience a show about serial killers as healing.

We have this administrator whom everybody loves with a swoony, salivating passion. Everybody, that is, except me. I don’t respond positively to his attempts to ingratiate himself with the people by pretending he’s one of us, the man of the people, somebody who recognizes no hierarchies. This is something manipulators do, and I have no use for it.

This administrator is all smiles, jokes, and popularity chasing but work has stopped since we’ve been cursed with his presence. First, he was appointed interim dean. As a result, the college stopped funding travel to scholarly conferences (and by stopped I mean refused to give even a crooked dime to show some good will), started pretending that scholarship doesn’t exist at all, but instead started organizing bizarre parties for our completely useless, overpampered, and endlessly mushrooming bureaucratic personnel where every paper-pusher would get fresh flowers in a vase courtesy of the college.

This administrator distanced himself from any responsibility for the budget cuts by taking the position of, “This is them, not me, I’m one of you, folks, I hate it as much as you do” while sneaking in one destructive measure after another.

Now this tiresome fellow has been appointed interim chancellor. And everybody is happy because people’s endlessly suppurating egos appreciate fake friendliness over any actual work. What nobody wants to understand is that a good administrator  (manager, etc.) is not supposed to be your best buddy.

Workers always pay through the nose for the pretense that there’s no hierarchical distance between them and their supervisor. An honest environment of strictly articulated roles is always less oppressive than the one where the boss pretends to be your friend and disarms any resistance with appeals to this fake friendship.

Jeb Bush on Thursday said “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal”.

His numbers have been in the toilet but this is too defeatist even for him.

What I find surprising is that, out all of the bad legacy his brother left, Jeb only gets prodded on the Iraq war. Nobody is bringing up the recession that George W dragged us into. That’s an enormous mistake the message “Republicans don’t get the economy” should be the central message of this election.

Every 5 or 6 months, I go to the deli and buy some salads, feeling like a concert pianist who surreptitiously catches a Rihanna song on the radio or a psychoanalyst who watches an episode of Dr. Phil. 

Universities have their funding cut, are forced to fire personnel, and now professors have to waste our valuable time on doing the editing of our articles ourselves. This is as productive as hammering nails with a laptop.

I hate this kind of inefficient, pathetic penny – pinching that wastes a lot more than it saves.

N and I have achieved the ultimate degree of spousal closeness: I will be packing his suitcase for our vacation to Florida. If somebody told me just a few years ago, I would have laughed in that person’s face.

Of course, the people who are really screwed by the rapprochement between Cuba and the US are the dissidents in Cuba.

Their only hope was that they had support from overseas in their fight for human rights. And now they have become an embarrassment to the US, and Kerry is studiously avoiding them on his visit to Havana. These dissidents are now completely alone in their resistance to the horrible Castro regime.

Everything comes at a price, folks. The easy decisions of the “let everything be good and nothing be bad” variety are a smokescreen.

I hate verbal sloppiness. My hair stands on end when I read things like, “She was undergoing intensive psychoanalysis with a psychiatrist who prescribed her Thorazine and Paxil.”

Psychoanalysts don’t prescribe. They are not MDs and don’t have scrip pads. And psychiatrists don’t psychoanalyze because psychoanalysis is based on the rejection of psychiatry. The statement makes as much sense as saying that a homeopath performed brain surgery after administering teeth cleaning.

One can either figure all this out – because it’s not that hard – or, alternatively, avoid writing a 350-page book on the subject of mental health treatments.

University of Illinois kicked out one of its useless paper pushers, chancellor Wise. These overpayed bureaucrats are all a waste of space but Wise also caused extreme embarrassment to the university with her offensive scheming and endless intrigues.

The university announced it was going to give her a gift of $400,000 (sic!) for finally buggering off. In a broke state that’s been sending some of its professors – people who actually do useful work – on furloughs, an enormous gift to a dime a dozen bureaucrat who made U of I the laughing stock of the global academic community with its shameful treatment of Stephen Salaita provoked outrage.

U of I announced that the kickbacks to Wise will not take place. I’m glad because the story was starting to resemble news from Putin’s Russia.