The BIPOC talk is titled “breaking the cement ceiling.” As I look into the mirror, I’m wondering if I’m being invited in the capacity of the cement ceiling.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, so color-wise it works.

Seriously, though. I assumed I was invited as a victim. But was i invited as a victimizer? “It’s because of pasty people like you that we have no opportunities!”

I kept misreading “aromantic” as “aromatic” and wondered why the aromatic people were all so angry.

On the same day, I received a notification that the Provost approved my promotion to Full Professor and an invitation to give a talk on how I’m being denied opportunities in academia as a BIPOC woman.

I’ve been studying my appearance in the mirror ever since. I’m one of the two women invited and, Lord have mercy on my sins, I looked up the other woman’s photo. She does look more BIPOC than me. Everybody does, of course, but I’m still very confused.

How do I respond without getting myself onto any lists of moral reprobates?

I’m walking across campus in a summer blouse and sweating bullets. Just like every stupid pseudo-winter we have around here.

Only a week ago I was happily shoveling the driveway.

P.S. 64°F. I’m wishing I had put on sunscreen in the morning.

Here is a completely serious question. When a child gets vaccinated, nobody tells you “here’s a measles vaccine, make sure you isolate the child to prevent contagion for the rest of her life”. A vaccine is supposed to be the end of the conversation, not the beginning. We get the vaccine to avoid hiding and fearing for the rest of our lives. Right?

So what is the point of this COVID vaccine if it does none of that? If you still have to mask, distance, and quarantine, then what’s the point?

I keep hearing that “yes, the messaging on the COVID vaccine is all wrong.” But is it really the messaging? Or is it the truth? Is the truth that nobody is going to allow us to resume our lives post-vaccine? Are we being told the truth and we refuse to listen because it’s bad news?

Here’s a statement from Fauci. Note that even restaurants are off limits post-vaccine:

“Babies in cages” have been renamed:

Please follow the plot. If Trump does it, it’s babies in cages and fascism. If Biden does it it’s facilities and . . . by the way, did you know that he appointed the first woman of color to something?

In the USSR, our politicians were really bad public speakers. Everybody who spoke in public was really bad at it. There were a million jokes ridiculing the Soviet leadership for their garbled speech. Solzhenitsyn wrote about the ways in which the regime made it impossible to speak clearly because the ideology was supposed to be confusing.

Speaking clearly was very dangerous. The dogma changed fast, and you needed to be able to deny you had said something that had been in keeping with the dogma last week but then was declared completely unacceptable two days later.

Americans always think they have invented the wheel but all of these “lived experiences,” “whiteness isn’t about physical characteristics,” and “inclusive chest-feeding” have been done to death. You have half a continent deathly tired by all this. Yet they plough on, pompously educating the people who heard all this “anticolonial, anti-racist” blabber back in daycare on how important it is.