Once, I went to bed and within several minutes fell asleep. It was July of 2014. I’ll never forget the experience. Went to bed and within literally minutes was asleep. Minutes, not hours. So weird.

Some people say it happens to them frequently. This is like a completely different lifestyle that I cannot even imagine.

Truly, it takes all kinds.

That’s how I know this person is not in academia. “White people” is used as an insult by my Jewish brothers and sisters in academia. Even though they are completely white themselves and consider themselves as such. It’s their version of Catholic guilt.

I will not participate in convenient lies even at a difficult time for Jews. All those rabid pro-Hamas crowds, all the “anti-colonialist” campus protests – it’s kosher chickens coming home to roost. This is half a century of leftist open borderism, race baiting, and feeling oh so bad for the perennially victimized “black and brown bodies.”

Nothing will change unless we become honest with ourselves.

After being addressed by prospective employees as “Dear Sir/Madam” and “Dear Hiring Manager”, I thought I’d seen it all.

But that was before receiving an application today that opened with “Good morning, Proposal.”

The word proposal appears nowhere in my job ad, so I’m quite intrigued.

Today, as Klara was getting ready for school, I jokingly reminded her to carry the one during the math lesson.

“Mommy,” Klara exclaimed, looking pleasantly surprised. “You know about carrying the one! You must be pretty smart.”

I have finally managed to impress my 7-year-old with my intelligence.

This is exactly what happened to my Ukrainian grandparents in the USSR.

I looked at the primary finalists, and it’s sad, folks. I’m very politicized but aside from DeSantis, I don’t know who these people are. Were they put on the stage for diversity reasons? Because they don’t have national name recognition for absolute sure. Most normies have no idea who DeSantis is, let alone the rest of them.

Where are people with executive experience? Governors, mayors? Yes, again, DeSantis, great. But where are the alternatives? DeSantis can’t win. Where is the alternative that can?

That Nikki Hayley person. God. If you want to run a woman, that’s fine but the woman can’t simultaneously be a diversity candidate. Democrats played this game with Kamala Harris, and look what it is costing them. And they are Democrats. Their voters love diversity for its own sake. And even then it’s been impossible to sell Kamala to anybody.

The Tim Scott fellow. I’ve been following US politics maniacally for 20 years, and I have zero name recognition for him. The Ramaswamy guy, what is this, some sort of a joke? Yes, it’s possible to run a no-name candidate with a weird name and have him win. Obama, obviously, is an example. But to do it successfully, your candidate needs to be a powerful symbolic figure for a large constituency plus have a strong charismatic personality. It’s very hard to overcome zero recognizability in politics. It’s possible but hard. You need to have a personality that pops off a screen. You need somebody who can become a brand.

The fact that the field is enormously worse on the Democrat side is not an excuse. Democrats hold the press and the entertainment industry. They can afford to run duds. We can’t. We have nobody electable, and we are not even trying.

It turns out that the ladies at church call me “the flamboyant one.” I have no idea how I’m managing to be flamboyant at church. We aren’t Protestants. We are Orthodox, which means that parishioners stand in complete silence for 3 hours during service. We don’t speak, loudly confess our sins, exclaim “preach, brother!”, speak in tongues, wriggle on the floor, or lift our arms even when the choir sings “let’s lift our arms up to the Lord.”

My perception of myself has always been dramatically different from how others see me.

My event today went phenomenally well. It was the university’s annual languages day that never in its entire history had my department participate. But this year the whole event was completely ours. Because I know people and I got them to agree to give the event to me.

We had 9 booths, one for each of the languages we teach. Each booth had language-related activities, games and prizes. And there was free food!

The second best part was that my department didn’t have to pay a dime for any of it. I got the diversity office to pay. They are rolling in money, and I brought them African music, Chinese hieroglyphics, Mexican bingo, Ukrainian art, and so on. That’s mega diverse.

I think we had at least 300 students come through the booths. The professors were in heaven because they love being the center of attention and having students crowd around them. I don’t but I’m unusual.

The actual best part, though, was that I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t conduct any activities at all. I delegated everything. It’s paradise. We had a reporter, a professional photographer, 15 volunteers. It was so good.

The Provost came, looked around, left, and when the event was wrapping up I received an email from her granting my entire hiring request for the next semester. Now I don’t know what to do because I had inflated my request massively on purpose. We are in a hiring freeze, so I was hoping maybe to have 25% of the request granted if I was lucky. Now I’ll have more people than I know what to do with.

I can’t believe that I’m now this person who organizes big events. It’s very funny if you think about it.

Our students created this collective artifact as a culmination of our very first semester ever of teaching Ukrainian:

The big, bold writing in the middle is, of course, mine.

“Analyzing this text in the context of Professor Bulochkina will help the analysis of the neoliberal subjectivity in the text.”

As Professor Bulochkina, I very much object to things being analyzed in the context of me.

Also, do people not realize that “text-context-text” sounds atrocious in the same sentence?