Klara put on my shower cap – which, I admit, is a tad garish and vulgar, but it’s a shower cap, I don’t wear it for public speaking occasions – and started walking around saying, “I’m clown. I’m funny. Look, mommy, I’m funny clown.”

And I’d been hoping that she’d wait to start criticizing my fashion choices until she’s at least 15.

I used to come to the office in my first year on the TT when I had no idea how to organize my time. I never had to do it since then but I started again this semester. I have a two-year-old, so the office is now the place where I go to rest. And grade. And work on my new book.

It’s good to be at the office. I did a mountain of work. But I’ll probably have to come back tomorrow because it’s the end of the academic year, and it’s hard-core.

The university has bought an enormous number of posters that say “Hate Has No Home Here” in English, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and Spanish and papered the campus with them. It makes a very bizarre impression, and as always, returns me to the same issue of the university paying the pathetic salary of $24,000 per year to the administrative personnel and exploiting them like there is no tomorrow while splurging on an enormous number of saccharine initiatives like this dumb poster. If you add up all this crap – the mellifluous posters, the Constantly Connected Citizens workshops, the diversity newsletters and seminars, the personnel brought in to teach the poor underpaid secretaries to put “Pronouns: she, her, hers” in their signature, etc – it comes up to quite a bit. I’d so much rather we took that money and, I don’t know, gave a one-time bonus to the janitors who have been really mistreated throughout the budget cuts and who are great hard-working people.