How can these people run for office if they can’t even make simple hiring decisions without crapping all over themselves? Hillary placed the wife of a notorious and very public pedophile at the center of her campaign. Bernie, as we are discovering, was advised by Putin’s employee. Trump. . . well, I don’t have to tell you. 

“A high-level adviser and operative for the Bernie Sanders campaign” has gone back to Russia to participate in a disgusting political show organized by Putin to sustain his staying in power for several years more. 

I have no words. That’s what we need right now. A Putin scandal attached to Bernie Sanders and Obama. Why the Democrats are so convinced that they need to keep all this Russian trash so close by at all times is a mystery. 

In a campaign where Putin was so openly rooting for Trump, what kind of a bizarre decision is it to place Putin’s employee in the position of your adviser? Isn’t it obvious that all he’ll do is sabotage?
These people. Seriously.

Rauner has announced he’s running for reelection. Folks, this guy is such a clown. Get this: he ditched his famous flannel shirts and posed for his first campaign video in a biker jacket. What a transparent loser. 

If you know people in Illinois, please talk to them or direct them to my blog. I will be covering this election extensively. I get my information from very good sources, and you all know that I’ve always been right on what I shared with you about Illinois politics. 

This committee is slaughtering me, folks. The chair of the committee says, “Please interview person X at such and such time in Building ABC, room #123.” 

So I’m sitting in front of room #123 at the appointed time but person X is not there. The chair of the committee passes by and asks, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m interviewing person X, remember?” I say. 

“He’s not here. He told me later he was going to be at [an entirely different place].”

And she failed to tell me about it because it clearly makes no sense to inform the person doing the interview about the interview.

And it’s all like this, all of the time.

Klara loves describing her actions in complete sentences. She sees a box of Kleenex, takes one and says, “I clean nose.” She cleans her nose and says, “I putting back.” Then she puts the Kleenex back into the box. The nose doesn’t need cleaning. She simply loves to be able to identify actions. 

So some idiot Republican made yet another completely inconsequential speech about Trump. They all discover a profound hatred for Trump two minutes before they are about to croak or retire. After a lifetime spent making Trump possible, they should keep the crocodile tears to themselves.

What a pathetic, undignified spectacle.

Klara loves zombies. We have to walk all over the neighborhood looking for cardboard or inflatable zombie figures. People across the road have one that’s as big as a house, and she adores it. 

Today we went to the YMCA for their famous Halloween decorations. Klara and I climbed to the second floor that has a large open space with workout equipment. Klara saw rows upon rows of people marching in silence on the treadmills and spinning the wheels of stationary bikes in place. They all had bugged out eyes and were panting.

“Zombies!” she exclaimed happily. “Mommy, zombies!”

What is the battery percentage on your phone that makes you feel antsy and gets you to start looking for a charger?

I’m anxious and have a low tolerance for frustration, so I start feeling nervous when the battery gets to 69%.

When I was doing my Master’s, I had a very close friendship with another female student. We are both loud, flamboyant, ultra-feminist women and we are both on the heavy side. So one professor decided we were a lesbian couple. 

Once she overheard me and my friend talking about going out to meet guys and she was very disappointed.

“But I thought you were a gay couple!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been telling everyone at the department how cute it was that you are just like me and my partner when we were young! Please tell me you are gay.”

This was extremely uncomfortable and not because my friend and I have a problem with being considered gay. If it were another student who said it, we’d just laugh and move on. But the idea of a professor discussing her fantasies about our sex lives with colleagues was disturbing. And hey, we were adult women, we got over it. For a teenager who might just be figuring out their identity, finding out that your sexuality is a subject of gossip and conjecture among professors might be quite traumatic.

Gaydar is total junk. It doesn’t exist. You can’t possibly know. Often, people keep figuring this stuff out about themselves during their whole lives. Thinking that you are qualified to guess is presumptuous and can be very hurtful. My principle both in my private life and work is that if a person feels like sharing something with me, they will. Until they do so, I’m not wondering, guessing or assuming because it’s a ridiculous thing to do. 

This is priceless, folks:

“if you self-identify as trans, queer, a person of color, female, or as a member of any marginalized group you’re given priority on the list of people who want to speak – the stack. The most oppressed get to speak first.”

Not only am supposed to guess who is trans and gay – and trans and gay students must surely love having gaydar applied to them in the classroom – I must also assign rank in terms of oppression to them. Of course, there’s nothing at all objectionable in the idea that gay and trans people can be visually identified and \ or interested in declaring their sexual and gender identity to professors. 

And what if you make a mistake? What if there’s a guy who “looks gay” but isn’t? What if he’s bisexual? Or asexual? Or unsure? How do you decide whether a bisexual student is more or less oppressed than an asexual one? What if he doesn’t feel more oppressed? Obviously, you can’t ask students because feeling oppressed is not a good measure of anything (see Trump voters). 

Racial identity is tricky, too. Do you go “She looks swarthy. Is she not really white? But what if she’s Jewish? That would make her very unopressed in an academic context. But what if she’s Hispanic? But then again, she might be a Hispanic Jew”? That really sounds like something we all want our professors to do to us. 

What if students figure out what your system is for calling on them during class and feel mortified? What if they didn’t want to be ranked as oppressed? What if they feel that you are outing them to their classmates? What if they are not ready to come out? Isn’t that a bit more important than a percentage point on a participation grade? 

And finally, while you obsess over the sex lives and the racial identity of your students, trying to judge and categorize, when do you actually teach? 

We all hate it when students or colleagues treat us as a woman or a Latino or an immigrant or a lesbian first and professor second. Why should we do this to them? Why are they supposed to like it when we don’t?