Tomorrow the Orthodox celebrate the Forgiveness Vespers. You approach every parishioner in turn and ask forgiveness. It’s an exercise in humility and kindness.

My mother called me to remind me that it’s very important to go to Forgiveness Vespers. She told me to ask forgiveness for her because she’s not going.

It is not easy to recover the religious feeling after it’s broken for several generations.

People are starved for beauty in every aspect of life. Since I decided to express my creative side in my outfits, I get stopped by strangers daily, telling me how much they love the look. Women roll down the windows of their vehicles to yell, “Beautiful!” Support workers plant themselves by the entrance every morning. “Seeing you puts me in a good mood for the rest of the day!” they say. Men are less effusive (unless they are in creative fields) because there’s fear of offending but I can see that people are experiencing aesthetic enjoyment. (Men in creative fields are the best because they give detailed analysis along the lines of, “I like how the eye shadow plays onto the detailing on the blouse. Have you considered adding a bit of green to the ensemble?”)

I go for the ultra-feminine look with flouncy skirts, frills, sparklies, and soft velvet dresses with bows. I have this one skirt, it cost me $22, and it looks like a flower with many soft petals that swirl when I move. We are truly fortunate to have access to cheap yet beautiful clothes. I’ll wear that skirt for at least 10 years which is $2 per year. Totally worth it in positive emotions alone.

I’m an extremely messy person in a constant state of expansion and with piles of books everywhere. My only two investments into beauty are the outfits and the dining room table decor that I change monthly.

People often coach precisely in the fields where they are most unsuccessful. Single marriage coaches, business coaches whose only business is their coaching business, academic writing specialists who don’t publish academically. These people go into coaching precisely because they feel a lack in their chosen field. They use clients as a bandaid to put over the suppurating sore of their deficiency.

It’s not true that people who are successful in their field don’t coach. It’s normal to want to share your skill and help others. There are absolutely business coaches who have sold multimillion businesses, for example.

Choose a coach who does it out of abundance and not out of lack is my advice.

Every time one of Klara’s friends sleeps over, I wake up to discover that they have created yet another business idea. There’s a logo, a jingle, a price list, and often uniforms. Of course, they wake me up at the ungodly hour of 7:30 am to sample their wares but it’s a small price to pay for fostering the true spirit of American entrepreneurship.

I’m sick as a dog, my friends. We are experiencing extreme weather changes, and I missed the turn from “wow, very hot, summertime is here” to “bloody cold today again, I’m turning into an icicle.” Went out underdressed, and here’s the result.

In my highly morose state, I had to do blind review for an article. I tried hard to give it a chance but do you know what the absolute walnut of the author did? He quoted the same secondary source 41 times. Long quotes, too. A full 15% of his entire article were quotes from this single source. And the source is not Aristotle or Kant, to put it mildly. I might have expressed my opinion a little too sincerely in the review.

I tend to reject a lot, to be honest. Even when I’m completely healthy. Usually, it’s for these very obvious things like today’s article.

I’m running a little behind on my Q&As, so here’s a good one:

Yes. I had a mentor in my first couple of years on the tenure track. It’s Jonathan, a longtime reader of this blog. He was so helpful. He worked with me on my first book. I had no idea how to make it good enough to publish, and he gave extremely useful suggestions. I had to rewrite parts of it completely. It got a prize from a scholarly organization as their book of the year, so it worked. I still have a two-page list of his foundational principles of academic success that I reread for inspiration every time my enthusiasm dips.

Of course, Jonathan isn’t some random coach. He’s an extremely successful academic who even back then  was already widely published and recognized. It was actually really funny how I met him. I came across his blog that he ran under his own name, and I thought it was some academic follower of his and not Jonathan himself.

Such memories this great question brings.

But make sure you don’t go for some individual who couldn’t hack it in academia and is now trying to be a coach in a pursuit at which he failed. Get the person’s CV and ask yourself if that’s the record of publications you want to have at their rank.

The best part of the interview is when Huckabee says, “The Jewish people have a right to live in their own country.”

“Do the Irish have the right to their own country?” Tucker asks.

“As long as they can defend it, yes,” says Huckabee.

I wept.

As we used to quip in the USSR, everybody is equal but some people are equaller.

Friends, if you want to have a big, stonking laugh, do watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Huckabee. We all know I don’t like Tucker because he’s anti-Ukrainian and says the most moronic things about Russia but in this interview he cooked Huckabee. He made mince pies out of Huckabee. There’s a new special on the menu called Hucka-hash.

This isn’t because Tucker is some sort of a genius. He’s not. He blew the interview with Putin who is not known for high IQ, let’s put it that way. Tucker slayed Huckabee because Huckabee was advancing a narrative of Israel’s statehood that is a losing narrative. I’ve been saying this for years as somebody who is quite friendly towards Israel. Also, Huckabee lied a lot, in a very clumsy, bumbling way but whatever.

The narrative of statehood I’m referring to is “we’ve been here for 3,000 years, so we have a right to have a nation-state here.” To Americans who most definitely haven’t been in their land for 3,000 years, this does not sound cute and endearing. This sounds like their own nationhood is being denigrated. It’s always a good idea to consider how your argument comes across to the people hearing it.

And by the way, I say the exact same thing to Ukrainians when they start on who lived where in the BC and the Sarmatians and who’s the real Slav and who’s actually a Finn. It’s moronic, I tell them. Kharkiv shouldn’t be bombed today entirely outside of whether the inhabitants of the Kyivan Rus considered themselves Ukrainian. Which they didn’t because people didn’t think in terms of today’s nationhood a thousand years ago.

The nation-state is a historically new formation. Even the nation-states that don’t look new very much are. France, for example, was stitched from very different ethnicities and brutally destroyed the linguistic, ethnic and cultural communities that existed on the territory of what is France today. Are we going to start doing DNA tests and reordering the planet accordingly?

There’s much more but I don’t want to torture people with an excessively long post.

The School of Engineering lost its entire graduate program. As a voluble professor from that school explained to the Faculty Senate, 100% of the students in the program were Bangladeshis who had zero interest in studying engineering and used this program as a way to get visas into the US. Once the visas started getting denied, the “students” stopped coming.

I’m not surprised about the situation but I did find it shocking that this is so openly and casually admitted by the professors themselves.

“Why don’t you try to attract American students, then?” asked a faculty senator.

“Oh, they won’t come here,” explained the professor. “People with the actual brains to become engineers will go to a good school with a real program.”

See my previous post for an explanation of how we are doing everything to not be a real school and instead remain a visa scam. The only person who routinely votes against these measures and measurettes is me. Sometimes I’m joined by one other person, who is always either a Middle Eastern or an Indian professor with no fucks left to give.

I’m on the Faculty Senate, and we constantly work on approving a large number of small or smallish measures. If you only work with each individual little measure, you can easily miss the big picture. But if you see all of them at once, it becomes clear that they all aim to make the university less academic and give as much power over assigning college credit to people who are not professors but poorly educated and miserably paid staffers.

Yesterday, for example, we passed a measure that will give a random staffer the authority to assign college credit for “experiences.” Students will bring “portfolios” that explain the value of these “experiences” and will be assigned credit for them as if they actually took college courses. One person voted against, and of course that was me.

I asked the random staffer what will prevent anybody from getting AI to generate a completely fake “portfolio of experiences”. She got very upset and told me that she “took a training on evaluating portfolios.”

The staffer was very emotional, shaking, and acting extremely insulted. I wasn’t, and of course, everybody sided with the measure. We are rapidly moving towards a model in which professors are unnecessary. Staffers will assign credit and hand out diplomas in exchange for payment. Any argument against this is greeted with, “don’t you trust that I know how to do this?” and tearful declarations of emotional distress caused by my doubts. Then everybody feels bad for the wounded, crying individual, and the measure passes.