I’m reading Vargas Llosa’s autobiography, and the part where he describes his presidential campaign platform from back in 1990 is absolutely fascinating. I mean, it’s a failed presidential bid from a quarter of a century ago in Peru, who can possibly care? 😪 💤💤💤 But Vargas Llosa is so damn talented that it reads like a mystery novel.

He is the kind of writer that I don’t even care what he says and on what subject because the writing itself is so good. I’ve been out of active Spanish usage for a year (I read but there’s nobody to talk to) and Vargas Llosa helps me stay emotionally attached to the language.

A truly great writer. 😍😍😍

I’m terrified of jinxing it but the current nanny seems to be happy here. And that makes me very happy, too. 

The penultimate nanny I interviewed almost caused me to seek narcotic oblivion. I wanted her to come over for an interview on Friday (I pay people for the time they spend on coming out for interviews, by the way, because I don’t want to be exploitative) but she insisted on interviewing on Sunday. I really didn’t want to do that because Sundays are my family time but the nanny insisted and I agreed.

Of course, she never showed up. And two days later she called me on the phone.

“I waited for you on Sunday,” I said.

“I was at church!” the nanny exclaimed.

“But you were the one who wanted to interview on Sunday,” I reminded.

“I WAS AT CHURCH!!!” the nanny repeated loudly and aggressively. I felt like a heathen who was getting in the path of the truly righteous and ended the conversation. 

The lady I finally did hire seems suspiciously normal. And that is freaking me out.

 

To answer reader Cliff Arroyo’s question, Spain tried once again to elect a government and once again was not fully successful. Conservatives got more votes than the first time around but not enough to just go ahead and form the flapping government already. The new left-wing party Podemos failed to keep its promise and become the most important leftist party of Spain. To the contrary, it managed to disappoint many of its original supporters by unending bickering over trivial issues.

For now, everybody’s hope is that yet another re-vote can be avoided because voting in the same election many times around is getting boring. This whole situation is a warning to those who believe that the two-party system here in the US sucks. Spaniards were bored with their two-party system*, too, so they introduced more parties to the mix and now haven’t been able to form a government since 2015.

*There are several smallish parties in Spain but they never offered any serious challenge to the two major players, Conservatives and Socialists. Until 2015, when serious challengers to the two-party model arose for the first time.

The reason why I teach Spanish 101 is not that anybody at the university is an evildoer and is thwarting my teaching ambitions but simply that there aren’t enough students to fill 6 advanced courses per year just for me.

And it’s not just here, it’s the same everywhere. Why do you think tenured professors at Yale teach one course per year? They wouldn’t be able to scare up enough students to fill six courses per professor no matter what they did.

Most of what we do in college is remediation. Students come to us after taking 6 years of Spanish and can’t say “My name is Jack.” I mean this literally: they don’t know how to say it. And it’s not only Spanish, of course. They don’t know continents, they don’t know what Israel is, they don’t know who fought in WWII, when and for what reason.

In four years we do manage to get some of them to the point where they can benefit from my expertise in my actual field. But before that happens, somebody has got to teach Spanish 101, 102, 201, etc.

Of course, we could solve the problem by giving Spanish 101 to eager part-timers and leaving me in peace to work on my research. But it’s impossible to explain to the general public why what I do out of the classroom matters. I’m hoping that my blog, which is a sort of a rough draft for my research, will help people see how what I do can enrich their lives with insights and ideas. I’m not saying the world needs an army of people like me but having a certain number of folks who read, think and generate ideas is crucial for all of us.

I highly recommend this article by an entitled, snooty little brat with zero self-awareness. It would be hilarious if it weren’t tragic that such silly twerps are infecting academia with their whiny brattiness.

His parents need to start writing about their parenting strategy so that everybody else can avoid doing whatever it is they did to produce such a son.