Day: April 10, 2019

Here is another little glimpse into the people who are reading my research:

I’ll keep posting these for as long as my social media remain cluttered by weepy posts by academics who believe that nobody reads our research and we are wasting our lives. The student from Saudi Arabia, by the way, keeps accessing my feminist book on the female Bildunsgroman. So I don’t feel like my work is useless.

Academics should stop feeling sorry for themselves.

If a guy did that, I’d think he’s a rude prick. If I knew he did that for my supposedly fragile mental state, I’d assume he’s a rude, condescending, sexist prick.

But even the woman who is writing this would probably think, if a guy actually did it, that he’s pretending not to notice her because he despises women.

Ideally, people would use the basic principles of convenience. Shorter people should go first because they can’t see over the heads of taller people. Instead, people bring their neuroses to basic actions and confuse everybody.

Everybody uses FB to share trivial details about their lives. But I use the blog for that. I tried moving the trivial details to FB but I feel weird and self-conscious doing that. The posts about daily life get a very good response on the blog, though. Like yesterday’s discussion about eggs and butter. Or the soda water.

I don’t know, it seems to work.

People “code-switch” with me a lot. They think that if I have an accent, they need to talk slowly and use simpler vocabulary. Even in professional settings this has happened to me. There is absolutely nothing but condescension behind it.

I “code-switch” into a broken Russian when I’m mocking uneducated speech patterns or when I’m trying to affect an uneducated persona for fun. It can be gentle mockery but it’s still always mocking or condescending. It’s never a way of showing respect.

If I literally could’ve nuked Microsoft when my work Windows 10 machine at a previous job ran forced updates 5 minutes before a very important, millions-of-dollars-in-the-balance meeting, I would’ve. Since it was my work machine, I was not permitted to change its settings (though I easily could’ve despite all the “security” software on it).

God, so true. I don’t have meetings where money is at stake but I often have a very tight schedule at work. If I have 15 minutes between classes to rub back to the office, do what I need on my computer, and run to the next class, it’s seriously aggravating to have a forced update start happening.

I don’t feel hatred a lot but I did hate the creators of the forced updates. The disregard for people’s work process was deeply obnoxious. And I don’t have admin privileges on my work computer, so I can change nothing. It’s all about a ridiculous exhibition of power: I’ll screw you because I can.

I’m happy the forced updates are going away.