I don’t believe in supplements but somebody I know who is in healthcare strongly recommended a magnesium (glycinate) supplement. I tried, and wow. Great sleep, great mood. It makes me feel really cozy and calm. I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with it because it’s kind of too good.

The candidate for the top administrative position at my school is horrid. He’s all into Big Data, dashboards, and gadgets. He said the words “Big Data” so many times during his talk that I felt I was at a Silicon Valley meeting of venture capital for techie startups. The words scholarship or research didn’t appear at all. (Obviously, the big data he loves isn’t for research but for administrative purposes).

He also said that the physical appearance of of engineering graduates tells him we don’t have equity.

Here’s a quote from the novel June by a famous Russian writer Dmitry Bykov. It’s the Stalinist era, and the main character, a Jewish college student, has been unfairly accused of unseemly behavior. An experienced apparatchik tells him this:

Please understand that it doesn’t matter if you are guilty or innocent. You’ll get it one day. Take it as a mandatory requirement. Everybody should experience being guilty at some point or other and happily accept the guilt.

You’ll get it one day for sure.

Is it true that there are 20 million jobs in this country that can’t be filled because there aren’t enough people with college degrees?

I’m listening to the talk of one of the candidates for our top administrative position and he’s saying this.

Both candidates we have are from California. Lord have mercy on us. They fucked it up over there and now want to flock here and fuck us up.

People who stand there filming are aliens. If I saw this in real life, I probably wouldn’t survive it. I’m very impressionable and my nervous system wouldn’t be able to process the overload. Even the video is too much.

Are there any people here who are interested in contemporary Russian literature? Specifically, twenty-first century stuff? I’ve decided to find out what’s been happening in the Russian literature in the past 20 years. In the 1980s and 1990s there was nothing. There were great entertainment genres but no serious literature. But who knows, maybe it all got better since? I read Russian with lightning speed. Something like 100 pages an hour. (In Spanish I do 40 and in English 60). I can plough through stuff fast.

If nobody is interested, I’m fine with not sharing my impressions. But if some people are, I’ll be glad to share. I’ll be doing fiction and nonfiction, novels, essays, and short stories.

I found this list but if anybody has a better one, please share. The creators of the list really love the words “conceptual literature,” and I’m a literary critic but I still have no idea what that is supposed to mean.