Folks, this is too funny. The Dean was extremely supportive of the hiring freeze. Then he tried to hire a new Associate Dean and found out that…. guess what? … there’s a hiring freeze. Now he’s stuck answering every email about course schedule changes, office assignments, and so on.

I discussed this with other Chairs and we laughed maniacally.

One of my pet peeves is the habit some people have of putting the due date on their calendar as the date when they should begin to work on a task. “Please submit before October 31” to them always means “Remember on October 31 that you were supposed to be working on this.” Of course, it always turns out that the paperwork they had to submit was due at 8 am on the deadline date, and they start sending out pitiful emails at noon, enquiring how it all happened.

I’m not talking about students. These are adults. If you have a document that takes 3 minutes to fill out, why not fill it out when you receive it instead of entering it into your calendar and then waiting until the absolute last second to do it?

This is particularly dumb since due dates for things tend to cluster around the 15th and the end of the month. You regularly end up with an avalanche of things that need to be done immediately if you confuse “due date” with “to do date.”

One interesting exercise that Charles Cooke suggested at the Republican event (see previous post) is this. Think about the area where you live and imagine that nothing is done in it politically for the next 30 years. It’s 2052 and absolutely nothing changed in the past 3 decades. How would you feel about that?

I thought about it, and if the town where I live and this whole area didn’t change at all. . . that would be pretty bloody amazing. Folks, this is as close to paradise on Earth as it can get. It’s exactly the kind of place where children should grow up and where parents should observe them grow up. I keep taking visitors to our poor area of town and they tell me they don’t see the difference between it and the middle-class area. Here everything is safe, beautiful, great nature, everything is affordable, tons of kids’ activities, great medical services with no waiting times – it’s so good.

I want this to be conserved exactly as is for my kid and her kids and so on to enjoy. It’s extraordinarily unique and rare that a civilization has achieved something like this. I don’t think it can be improved. I think we would be sorely tempting God (or fate, or good luck, whatever you believe) if we tried to fuss with it much.

Today I attended a discussion meeting that National Review holds between its leading journalists and smallish groups of readers. This is my only chance to be somewhere where everybody is a Republican. Everybody! Feels so strange.

It was a great conversation. I’m in academia, so my chances to be in a room (virtual or real) with more than 1 Republican at any given time are nil.

These are journalists and people who read magazines, so the nature of the discussion was elevated. Everything was calm and triumphant. I’m a recent Republican, so everybody was more knowledgeable than I am, and I was content to stay silent and listen.

The journalists were Charles C. Cooke, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Rich Lowry. They didn’t lecture but answered questions. The questions were smart, and so were the answers, especially on the inflation. The explanation as to what caused the inflation and why it’s not going to be fixed any time soon was great.

Best of all, nobody in the group was a victim. Nobody talked about anybody being a victim. Nobody sounded self-righteous or tried to guilt anybody about anything. Nobody said they were exhausted or had mental issues. I’m now on my way to a work-related group, and I know this whole list will be rolled out because it always is.

The group wasn’t as triumphant and upbeat as my Ukrainian discussion groups, but Americans by nature have a more muted affect (this is not a criticism, mind you. I’d kill for a more level affect but it’s physiological, you can’t change it). But it was at the opposite side of the spectrum from Democrat groups where everybody is down in the dumps all the time.

I’m now very energized to vote Republican.

Now that my favorite Associate Dean (called Bill) is gone and we haven’t found a new one, the Dean is trying to sub for him. He doesn’t have the same work ethic, so he cuts corners. And that never works.

Here’s an example. Every October we have to do a mandated ethics training. It’s something the state requires of everybody, including graduate assistants, plant workers, everybody. Of course, many people forget. In the last week of October, Bill used to send reminders to the people who hadn’t undergone the training.

The Dean decided that going through the lists and weeding out those who haven’t done the training is a bore. Instead, he sent a group email to everybody, berating us for not doing the training. Immediately, the people who had done the training started to respond to the entire thread, angrily and self-righteously defending themselves from the unfair accusation. So that you understand the magnitude of the blunder, we have 846 people total. Not everybody has written back but the thread has raged since yesterday and is still going strong right now. People don’t like the Dean, and this is a great way legitimately to spam his inbox.

I received proofs of an article of mine but I can’t read them because now that the article is out in the world it looks weak, pathetic and bleating. It will take at least a year after publication for me to stop hating it.

It’s curious that people who keep repeating like overexcited parrots that “Biden will fight to the last Ukrainian” never say that Putin will fight to the last Russian. Clearly, Putin has more ways to motivate Russians to fight than Biden does to motivate Ukrainians. But that simple thought doesn’t occur because the point is to repeat a soothing talking point and avoid thinking as much as possible.