I took Klara to Olive Garden for the first time today, and she’s in love with their bread sticks. She’s such an American child, it’s funny. Only Americans can be so enthusiastic about these bread sticks. I tried them, and I just don’t get it.

My ASL lecturer, on the other hand, is a dream employee. He wants to start a Deaf Studies program at my department. He told me from the start, “I understand that you are technically my boss. Do you need me to report to you about the steps I take to make Deaf Studies happen?”

I said, absolutely not. Go for it, do whatever you need, I’ll sign everything, just tell me how I can help.

Since then, I keep hearing that he’s constantly in meetings with the Dean, the Provost, the Vice-Chancellor, even the library services. I don’t need to manage the process, hand-hold, or even know about this. In short, the dude is me. He knows what he wants and goes for it. We’ll have our Deaf Studies program in no time.

The ASL lecturer is promising me a course on deaf culture. I’m going to take it as a student because how fascinating?

On my end, I’m bringing Swahili to campus in the Fall. This will be the third new language I’m adding to our department. We hadn’t added any languages for 15 years previously for reasons I don’t understand. My goal is to bring in Hebrew in 2025 so we can offer Hebrew and Arabic in alternate years, and then I’ll happily retire as department Chair.

This is identical to what happened with the administration’s stance on Ukraine. All of a sudden, Biden’s officials are insisting that Ukraine must stop offering resistance and just let Russia bomb indiscriminately. And it all happened at the exact same time. A massive reversal on both Israel and Ukraine.

It’s very sad that political commentary is dead in this country. I’d love to hear an analysis of this. Or, ideally, 3 different explanations from 3 equally interesting pundits. But there’s nothing. All we can get anymore are partisan slogans where people reiterate their party allegiance more eagerly and repetitively than Soviet Komsomol leaders in the Brezhnev era.

Something is happening, and we won’t know why because all people want to do anymore is stand in a dead end, beaming fanatically at a wall.