On the negative side, Klara picked up “where is it AT?” with an emphatic AT that drives me up a tree. I hate the AT more than double negatives.

I’m trying to reach something on the top shelf.

“Mommy, pull up a chair,” Klara says. “Otherwise the box will drop on your head.”

I didn’t teach her the word “otherwise.” I guess I use it automatically and she picked it up.

For the first time in my life, I decided not to give in to the OCD and didn’t manually count all of my syllabi. And of course, the copy center messed up and didn’t give me the number of copies that I requested. I’d much rather have none at all than to have copies for all but 5 students. So now not only do I feel sick, stuffed up, and confused, I also feel embarrassed.

And yes, I always order extras. OCD here! I ran out after distributing all the extras plus my own copy.

I know that this sounds like a very minor drama. But again, OCD. I need to have everything just so. If you’d seen the level of detail in my syllabi, you’d understand.

As I said from the start, the idea that it makes sense to have any interest in the bizarre sex lives of the glamorous set is ridiculous. They are not “just like us.” They live in a world of their own:

In the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

This is why I didn’t care for this ridiculous scandal from the start and warned everybody not to get hooked. There is no “metoo” because we are nothing like them.

Even if you get a TT job at an R1 straight out of grad school and then get tenure, you are still a victim.

You aren’t a good enough entrepreneur of the self unless you have learned how to market yourself as a victim. This is discussed at length in Eva Illouz’s book, so I won’t say more.

I was feeling so sick and weak that I took Klara to campus. We went to Starbucks, had lunch at the student cafeteria, played with magnets in my office, and decorated every surface on campus with penguin stickers. While we were doing all that, I felt perfectly healthy. The moment we got into the car to drive off campus, all the symptoms returned.

I’m not allergic to work, in case that’s what people suspected.

Every year before the beginning of the Fall semester I catch a cold. It’s been 15 years since I first started doing it.

This is very annoying because, I swear to God, I was super excited about the upcoming semester. And now I’m all sick and useless.

An example of necessary myths. I believe that my husband is the most beautiful, intelligent, and wonderful man on the planet. It’s completely unimportant whether it’s factually true. What matters is that I believe it because that’s what guarantees my happiness and the survival of our marriage.

Similarly, it’s utterly unimportant if America is factually the greatest, the Ukrainian language is really the most melodic, the Russian soul is truly mysterious, and a dry piece of ugly desert was actually promised to Jews by God. You can’t prove any of it definitively one way or another. But it’s absolutely crucial that people believe this stuff passionately if the nation-state, with all the goodies it offers, is to survive.

Remember the hyper-rational freak from Illouz’s book? He’s not a happy person.