The airplane was very tiny, and the gentleman sitting next to me was not. Neither am I, so when he reached for his seat belt, his hand brushed against me.

“I’m not trying to do anything!” the poor guy exclaimed. “It’s the seat belt! I’m trying to get the seat belt!”

I understand his stress. At any moment one can run into a crazy person who would start posting TikTok rants about “feeling unsafe” on airplanes.

✅Congress has passed $113bn of Ukraine-related aid

✅63% ($69bn) was spent in the U.S., in our defense industrial base, creating well-paying jobs in Missouri, Alabama, Arizona, etc

✅39% ($44bn) of this has gone *directly* to support the U.S. military

That’s what you oppose when you oppose aid to Ukraine.

Yesterday, it took us exactly an hour to sign the hiring paperwork for our new ASL instructor. This wasn’t because of his deafness. We had an interpreter. This is what it’s like for every hire.

We are starting off with just one section of beginner ASL. An hour. Not to prepare the paperwork. That took much, much longer. Simply to sign. The pile of documents was ankle-deep. Sign here. Initial every page. Tick boxes here but not there.

There’s something deeply wrong with how this works. There is a paper testifying that I evaluated the candidate’s oral proficiency in English, which is really relevant for a deaf person. There is a paper where he confirms that he knows he’ll need to do the sexual harassment training. And a paper where he confirms he knows he’ll have to do the ethics training. Which he won’t have to do because it’s completed in October and he’ll only teach in spring. And a paper where he confirms that if he were a retiree of our university (which he isn’t), he knows he has to file paperwork with the retirement system. And don’t get me started on the diversity paperwork. Or citizenship / immigration status paperwork. Or the paperwork which I don’t even comprehend because it’s endless and weird.

But we’ll get our ASL course. I’m planning to add Swahili next Fall, so this will be 3 new languages I brought to the department.

At the convention where I’m going, we will have an 8-hour meeting of the executive board. 8:30 to 4:30. People keep saying “corporatization” but in the corporate world nobody does this crap anymore. Nobody. Expecting people to sit on their asses all day is ridiculous. Useless. Stupid. Only in academia are we outdated enough to do this kind of an insane exercise. I’m already in a shitty mood, and I’m not even there yet.

We used to have 3-hour department meetings but I put an end to that when I became “the hiring manager of this esteemed unit”. My position is, if you can’t get it done in under an hour, you suck.

We all need to spread the word that people should stop using AI to write cover letters when looking for jobs.

Today, I received 6 cover letters from applicants, and they are all lengthy, unreadable mush. I have no idea what any of them say. I’m not even going to respond. They call me “dear hiring manager” and promise to “do my best work for your highly esteemed unit”. My “unit”, can you believe it? I’m a nameless manager running a unit.

And yes, of course, my job ad had my name, title, and department.

One of the most unpleasant things at today’s Palestinian talk was how happy everybody in the audience was to hear the phrase “almost everything bad that ever happened in the world came from Europe”. I think this self-hatred is at the heart of every problem here in America.

You say “Native Americans”, and everybody goes googly-eyes because Native Americans are supposed to be creatures of unblemished perfection. But everything that’s their own culture must be evil, horrible, worthless.

Klara never trick-or-treated. We always go but she’s too shy to actually come up to anybody and say “trick-or-treat”. It’s a heavy burden to be shy and end up excluded from things by that unfortunate trait. I know that only too well.

Finally, today,* in year 7 of attempted trick-or-treating, I found a way to get her over the hump and into the land of successful, enjoyable trick-or-treating.

She told me this morning that she probably won’t trick-or-treat because she’s feeling shy. In response, I whipped out a 5-pound bag of candy and dropped it in front of her.

“Here,” I said. “This is all for you. You don’t need to trick-or-treat. This is enough candy to last you two years. You can go ahead and be shy. It’s a wonderful quality which gets you all this great candy.”

This removed the pressure, and she trick-or-treated up a storm.

“This is not a great house,” she’d say pensively. “They gave me a handful of candy but paid no attention to me. The house across the street, on the other hand, gave me a lot of nice attention.”

It took me years but I found a working method.

* We trick-or-treated on the 30th because my town is weird.

Since we started talking about great-grandparents, I want to share a story about my other Jewish great-grandmother, Grandma Rosa.

On that side of the family, nobody was fancy. Nobody had their own airplane or a pot to piss in. Grandma Rosa never even fully figured out the phone. She treated it like a postcard.

I’d call her and say, “Hi Grandma!”

And she’d respond with, “Hello my beautiful flower! We are fine. Grandpa’s leg is acting up a bit but we still go for walks. The weather is lovely, so we can spend time outside. We had zrazy for breakfast today. They turned out very nice. I’ll make you some the next time you come over. Give my best to mom and dad. I love you and miss you, tons of kisses from your Grandma Rosa.”

Then she’d hang up.

When we went over to her place, it was very similar. She’d talk at us very cheerfully while stuffing us with food and ignoring all our attempts to respond, and then would say, “Oh, you have to leave already? It was so great seeing you. Come back soon. Bye!”

Now that I’m telling this story I’m realizing how similar this is to my own strategies of sociability.

Canada is far, far gone:

18 months of lockdowns where people were badgered by loudspeakers all day to stay inside and then the nutty campaign about the imaginary indigenous children murdered by the Catholic Church – all this turned people’s brains inside out.

Since we are back to Daddy wars on this blog, I’ll tell this story again.

My great-grandmother’s second husband raised three generations of children in my family, including me. And he wasn’t even really her husband. They lived together for almost 60 years but great-grandma refused to marry him.

Great-grandma was very severe. She was a fancy career woman, and she never had time for her only daughter. By the time I came around, she reconsidered and was the best great-grandma. But with her daughter Klara, she was hardly ever there.

Klara was raised by the stepdad. He never had any kids of his own, and he easily could have passed Klara off as his daughter. This was almost 100 years ago, and the manliness thing was huge. Raising somebody else’s kid with a woman who wouldn’t even marry you because you weren’t good enough couldn’t have been great for the ego. Great-grandma would have been fine with pretending that Klara wasn’t her first husband’s daughter. She wanted to exclude Klara’s real father from her life completely. Nobody was allowed to mention his name in her presence.

But Klara’s stepdad cared not about his status and what others thought of him. He cared about Klara. For years, he secretly took her to see her real Dad. And then he secretly took Klara’s son to see his real grandpa. Great-grandma, as I said, was severe. She hit him. Even in old age she did it. I saw it many times. Plus, she worked for the KGB and, unlike her husband, was a member of the Communist Party. She was not a woman you wanted to cross. And he still defied her for decades to make sure his stepdaughter had her real Dad in her life.

This was all during Stalinism. Think about what the guy was risking by defying a woman who had her own airplane to take her to top-secret military installations she was building in Siberia. What can possibly motivate a person to take the kid he’s raising to see her real Dad in these circumstances? Many people can’t be assed to do it without Stalin, Siberia and all the rest of it hanging over them.

It’s love. This is what you do when you love a child. You don’t use a child to feed your ego, prop up your relationship status, or prove anything to others.

This is the kind of love with which I was raised. This is the love that feeds me my whole life. A child deserves to be loved like this and not to serve as supporting cast in a parent’s performance of a flattering, self-serving fairy-tale.