Sorry, people, it’s the first day of the semester, I’m busy setting things up. I have 3 lectures today, the last one going until 7:20 pm, so you can imagine.

In other news, I have hit an important milestone: yesterday I confronted a dead car battery for the very first time. The old gentleman who came with the towing truck was probably a Cold War spy. His facial expression remained unchanged throughout the embarrassing scene during which I said things like, “Oh, so it was leaving the rear door open that drained the battery! I didn’t know it would do that. Oh, how interesting!” and “So you are saying that driving will charge up the battery and the battery needs to be charged to be able to drive? That’s so weird!” and “Oh, so that’s what a battery looks like! Oh!”

The only time the man cracked and let out a shocked smile was when I tried shaking his hand in the end of the process.

Klara was happy to see me once I finally got to the day care but what made her truly ecstatic in the literal meaning of the word was when N came home and we sat on both sides of her. The happiness she experiences when we surround her and admire her simultaneously is the most touching thing I have ever witnessed.

I wonder what this woman’s damage is for her to allow some piece of trash guy to piss on her like that. Also, try to imagine what impression this story would make on people from Iowa or anywhere where people are not entirely brain-dead. Who wants to be on the same side with this detritus?

And honestly, who wants to be on the same side with this either?

Funny from Kellyanne Conway.

Starbucks is going sous-vide. But not for the coffee, at least. 

No, lady. Your grandma wasn’t strong. She was a pathetic weakling who abused children to compensate for selling her nasty ass to a freak. 

I can never figure out if people are trying to be funny in such posts. 

“Philistines settled in Palestine in the 12th century BCE, which confirms that Palestine had long been a nation.” I have settled in Illinois 8 years ago, which confirms that the US has been a nation for those 8 years. 

The millennial spokesman is old enough to be my father. 

Laramie, Wichita, Terre Haute, Little Rock, Omaha, Akron, Tulsa, Morgantown – I don’t have to Google these places because I know immediately what states they are in. I’m very glad I got to live in the Midwest because it’s a beautiful, majestic place, and I learned a lot living here. 

Before I understood this region, I used to say idiotic, ignorant things and feel profoundly convinced of their brilliance. If I hadn’t come here, today I might be one of those boneheads who rant about the “stupid racist hicks” who elected Trump. I would still think that the deep-country religiosity is meaningless fanaticism, dislike of government is small-mindedness, attachment to gun rights is sexual dysfunction, and talk about family values is hypocrisy. 

This hasn’t changed who I am. If anything, I’m more pro-gay rights, pro-choice, pro-federal welfare, reparations, affirmative action, etc. The only position of mine that has changed is that I’m no longer against school prayer or religious signs on public buildings. Symbolic gestures are not worth hitting people on something that informs their existence so profoundly. And fostering even more hatred of the federal government for nothing is dumb.

I read all of those rants about flyover rednecks with their crazy jesusy beliefs and poky small-time lives and feel happy that I’m no longer one of the fools who can write such rubbish. Understanding does not mean joining or justifying. It means enlarging your own perspective and enriching your own worldview. 

I’m not judgmental of people who are having beers at the airport bar at 6 am but I’m very judgmental of those who are being extremely loud and cheerful at this hour. 

My plane back to St Louis got in the air on time yesterday but one of the chassis didn’t lift. We flew around for 40 minutes to burn off fuel, disembarked, waited for another 2 hours while the slow-motion workers of American Airlines prepared the new plane, got on the new plane, rolled away from the gate and. . . heard the pilot announce that we had missed our time window and according to federal regulations it was too late to fly. 

Of course, people started screaming “Fuck the fed!” but that didn’t help. So we disembarked again and stood waiting in line for Customer Service for another 2 hours. I had to observe the extremely slow workers first abuse an elderly Jew and then a Muslim woman with a baby. The woman started to cry when the workers began to scoff at her and the baby’s passports.

When it was finally my turn, I found out that they wanted me to stay until next evening and wait for a plane to North Carolina. So obviously I walked away and had N buy me a ticket with another airline for an early morning direct flight. It’s good to be able to afford it since I have zero reason to believe I’ll be reimbursed for anything. 

So now I’m waiting for plane number three. 

And the article by Ta-Nehisi Coates that I actually bought the magazine for turned out to be a dud. His point is that Trump’s victory is “an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president.” Not only is the writing atrocious  (if it’s explicit, you don’t need 20 pages to explain it and “the fact” is entirely unnecessary) but the idea itself is ridiculous. Voters could “explicitly react to the fact” of Obama 4 years ago. And he won comfortably. 

There are also such gems as “the president’s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton.”

January’s Atlantic has a fantastic review by Deresiewicz. It doesn’t even matter what he’s reviewing. It’s just good.

As if it weren’t enough that at this airport restaurant there is an iPad on each table that keeps flashing in front of my eyes and a bunch of huge TVs to distract me from my reading of a paper book with actual pages, there are also groups of men who scream like they are possessed while watching a football game. 

And this was the quietest, most decent place here. As much as I love Philadelphia, its airport stinks. 

The Women’s March on Washington now has an unofficial uniform: a pink, knitted hat shaped to look like two pointy cat ears. Two California-based women and the knitting instructor who designed the hat have released the pattern for free online. They’re calling them “pussyhats.”

Freaks. Hopeless, deranged freaks. In the midst of everything that is going on, they are valiantly defending their right to wear pink hats with ears. It’s like we haven’t debased feminism enough with dumbass slutwalks. 

Crowds of sad people wander around the MLA. They’d love to visit the talks and the book fair but they can’t. They are the graduate students and the adjuncts who couldn’t afford to pay the enormous registration fee. They don’t have the magical conference badge and they are too honest to make one in Word (which would be extremely easy to do.)

It’s a mystery why there is such an effort to exclude them from the book fair. What’s the worst they can do? Look at books? Oh, the evildoers! 

Next year I’m hoping to see my book at the exhibit, and I’d prefer for as much people as possible to see it. 

It would be great if instead of discussing Israel for 3 days we’d pass a resolution allowing our colleagues without badges to look at the darn books and listen to talks.