Opinions, art, debate
People, I promise this is not a joke. This is literal truth. Prepare yourselves.
My Dean called a meeting tomorrow to discuss how we feel about what we discussed in the previous meeting.
Which took place on Friday.
The gap between meetings and the meetings to talk about the feelings evoked by other meetings is growing ever smaller. I have no idea why we let a whole weekend pass without a meeting. We should have had a meeting 30 minutes after the Friday meeting to catch those feelings early.
After a protracted struggle, I managed to open a course called “Deaf Culture” at my department. It will be taught next spring. I’m going to audit because I know absolutely nothing about deaf culture and since I’m the first person at the university to ram the course through and make it happen, I should benefit from the fruits of my labor.
The professor is deaf, so we’ll have an interpreter.
I’ll share what I learn here. I’m so excited, I’m practically floating. None of it was there before I assumed command, and now we have many sections of ASL on different levels. I’m trying to make a whole program in Deaf Studies happen but the bureaucracy is daunting. I’ll wrestle it eventually but while the fight continues, it’s good to celebrate victories along the way.
Am I the only person who can’t move on and accept the new prices on everything? Just a couple of years ago, it cost between $15 and $20 to get lunch around here. Now it’s $30-35.
A shawarma place opened this weekend. I’ve been pining for a shawarma place for years. And I’m glad it’s here but a plate of chicken shawarma with a juice and a tip cost me $36 today. It’s an OK shawarma but why am I the only person who thinks it’s crazy to pay this much for lunch?
Again, not being ungrateful for the existence of shawarma. God knows, I’m a loyal fan. But it’s like this at every place.
I was at the HOA meeting yesterday. It was held outside. The weather was beautiful. Some people brought kids. Four little boys, aged between 6 and 10 or thereabouts, spent the entire 1,5-hour meeting sitting on the ground and staring at their phones. Not playing, not riding bikes, not running around, not even looking at each other. I had no idea boys even had the capacity to be so silent and immobile while awake.
These aren’t the children of the dregs of society who don’t know any better. These are people who can afford a house in our subdivision. Nice, orderly people who mow their lawns and get to work on time.
It’s always boys, too. I’ve never even seen a girl under the age of 12 glued to a device in a public space. Even within the same family, the female sibling is likely to have a normal childhood while her brother is hooked to a device. It’s a behavior management tool. Boys are active, rambunctious and loud, so they bear the brunt of over-medication and anaesthetization with technology.
Until yesterday I kept wondering how come our neighborhood only produces girls because I haven’t seen a boy on a bike for several years. Girls on bikes criss-cross the neighborhood constantly. I literally didn’t know these boys existed, you know?
My next-door neighbors have boys who grew up right in front of me. They are now in their late teens but as they were growing up, we heard them a lot, running, trawling the little river in the backyard, digging for treasure, skateboarding, yelping, making noises. Gave me such joy to hear the sounds of normal boyhood. And only a couple of years later, boyhood looksb and sounds very different.
These aren’t schools or politicians or any outside forces doing this. These are parents who make this choice out of convenience.
In our hunger for all things true, we make the facts irrelevant.
David Shields, Reality Hunger (2010)
It’s kind of really funny that all of these articles, books, conferences, public appearances, editing scholarly journals, serving on dissertation committees, etc have zero effect on my salary. I’m only doing it as a personal whim. If I stopped today, did nothing except teach beginner Spanish, and had no life of the mind at all, nothing would change for me in terms of salary. Nobody at work would notice. Except the students, obviously.
Right? It’s like her account was hacked by some other Kamala who isn’t in the WH right now and hasn’t been the vice-president for years.
That there are still people who want to vote for this will never be not funny.
Also:
As Vice President, there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she couldn’t do and so I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.Joe Biden, 9/25/2024
Just in case people begin to argue that Biden didn’t let her do all this fantastic stuff.
In Canada, young people went overwhelmingly conservative after observing the Left in power:
It’s going to be really funny when only the most irredeemable oldsters vote liberal (or far-left, which is the NDP).
We went to an art fair today. I bought this piece:
Loved it at first sight.
Klara chose these little plants made out of Japanese clay:
The funny thing is that the artists who made these very different products turned out to be husband and wife.
After all the bluster and unpleasantness, somebody persuaded Trump to meet with Zelensky and make nice. Trump had the perfect reason not to that even I would respect. But the meeting still took place.
I’ve noticed a long time ago that there’s somebody very pro-Ukrainian close to Trump and that person has influence. I’m fascinated to know who that is and what his endgame and reach might be. We know the name of Trump’s pro-Israel pressure point but who is the engineer of the pro-Ukraine bent?
I’m also glad that Zelensky chose not to reveal the real war plan to the Biden administration. It’s useless, as we’ve seen many times, and often counterproductive. Also, we are all seeing how Israel, the developed country that is holding on to the nation-state model more strongly than any other, is achieving massive victories. It’s way too early to hold the funeral for the nation-state.
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