Received Klara’s daily report from daycare and had to Google “sloppy joes” to find out what it is that she enjoys so much for lunch. 

Found photos of sloppy joes. Feel very puzzled and confused. 

Klara is in the “no” stage of her life. Everything is a no. She wakes up and the first thing she says is “No!” I say, “No what? I’m not offering anything.” So to preempt me, she now greets me in the morning with, “No what?” 

The second thing she does after waking up is look at my feet and say “Shoes!” She doesn’t like me to be barefoot. We have to go downstairs and pick out shoes for me before we do anything else. Then she picks out shoes for herself and it’s got to be the shoes that she chooses. She has no preference in clothes yet but she does in socks. Last week I put socks on her that didn’t match the outfit. She sat on the floor and refused to budge until I found socks that did match the outfit. How she figured out what matches and what doesn’t is a mystery. 

Have you, folks, noticed that it’s easier for women to bring their husbands into their social class than vice versa? Over the years, I’ve seen a bunch of marriages between people of different social classes, and almost always, if the wife’s social class is higher than the husband’s, she brings him into it eventually. While if the husband’s social class is higher, the difference is never bridged, even if they live together for 50 years. 

For instance, I know this woman who is a professor of gender studies and who married a janitor with a loud booming voice, endlesss sexist jokes, love of something called monster truck racing, and a wardrobe that the Brits would call chav. I haven’t seen them for a while and then I did and wow, what a transformation. He now has 2 degrees, works an office job, speaks quietly, despises Trump and offers me prawns in white wine that he made because it’s one of his favorite recipes. The same face as 15 years ago but an entirely different person.  

But whenever it’s the other way round, a male professor or doctor, etc who married a working class woman, no matter how many years pass, she’ll still belong to her social class. It’s more likely that the professor or doctor will be drawn into her sphere, at least to a degree.  

I’m afraid I might have created a lot of grand expectations about the famous productivity system when it’s not that special.

What happened was that I had so much to do that I wasn’t doing anything. I stared at the huge pile of books next to my bed and read nothing. All I did was trying to decide what to do \ read \ write first. 

So I had to do something to get out of this rut. The new productivity system consists of me making a detailed list of what I need to do tomorrow (e.g. read book X to page 161, buy cabbage for borscht, grade quizzes, write 250 words of the review, etc). Then I take the schedule and stick all these tasks into specific time slots. 

Hey, it works. I started the system on Saturday and since then I have already read 2 books, written 600 words, and done an urgent and time-consuming service task. It feels like an exciting challenge to see if I can cross everything I need off the list. 

The system is nothing special but it’s shaking things up for me. 

A lecture on the Epic of Gilgamesh by Prof. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri at Reed was cancelled because “student activists” declared that it was white supremacist and Eurocentric. 

So while some students are political through supporting their classmates (see previous post), others are political through hassling an Iranian prof who teaches Gilgamesh.

We have a system where a professor can hire a research assistant among undergrads and pay them $750 for their work during the semester. The professor can also hire additional students to work for free. When a prof needs a group of people for their lab, s/he often just randomly selects which of the students in the group will get the money.

This year, the student who won ceded their right to get paid to another student who has great financial need.

Of course, it’s a shame that we created a system where young people have to commit these feats of selflessness.

I just discovered that once you’ve been the boss, irrespective of how much you might have hated it, you can’t be anything else. 

There is this committee that I love and volunteer for every year. Working on it was always a lot of fun. And then last year I volunteered to chair it. I hated it because I’m a shitty leader of people. So this semester I went back to being a regular member. But the enjoyment is gone. Everything seems disorganized and not the way I would have set it up. 

I’ve been corrupted by power and can’t go back to being happy with doing my small share without caring about the result. 

Don’t worry, folks, I haven’t keeled over after eating the salad. The salad was great. But I’m trying out a new productivity system that is keeping me very productive. So I don’t even know what is on the news. It’s actually quite pleasant.

Thinly sliced cucumbers, tiny sweet bell peppers, heirloom tomatoes, a drizzle of blueberry balsamic vinegar, and an egg. 

N and I are watching the series we nicknamed “And You Call This Problems?” In the original version it’s titled Bloodline. It’s about a family of people who want to feel tortured but can’t come up with anything to feel tortured about.

Somebody totally needs to make a series about a family of post-Soviet immigrants. There will be drama, cheating, abuse, exploitation and outlandish behavior to fill a dozen riveting series.