I know that all our lives should be dedicated to the sacred goal of raising enrollments but I’m convinced that the honest and decent thing to do is to tell some students that they should drop Spanish as their major and go do something that they actually care about.

A good indicator is that if you have gotten to the fourth (and last) year in your major and you still don’t know how to say “His name is Pedro” in Spanish, then this is not a program for you. Everybody who cares even a tiny little bit about Spanish has already found an opportunity to discover that it’s “Se llama Pedro” and not “Su llama es Pedro.”

I get it why people end up in STEM in spite of having zero interest in STEM. They have heard that untold riches await them at the end of the road, so they are suffering it out. But Spanish? In our region that is totally bereft of Hispanics? If you’ve got no love for it, then what can it possibly be that makes you do it? If you’ve got to suffer, then go into dentistry. There’s a chance of getting paid for the pain, at least.

Never ceases to amaze me.

You know what would be great? If babies were born with the capacity to blow their noses. 

Does anyone know at what age this crucial skill develops?

There are few expressions I’m more allergic to than “I tried so hard.” One quality that people routinely lack is self-awareness. Everybody sees themselves as extremely hard-working and cruelly underappreciated. The way to identify the laziest, most entitled folks is by their love of the phrase “I tried so hard.”

“Professor, I try SO HARD but you aren’t even giving me a passing grade. You keep saying that my Spanish isn’t good enough even though I try SO HARD to improve.”

“Let’s see. Have you been in touch with the free tutor, as I recommended?”

“Well, no, I forgot.”

“Have you been going to the conversation hour?”

“Not really.”

“How many times did you use the dictionary when reading the text assigned for today?”

“Erm. . . I didn’t.” 

“Did you use the websites I suggested to practice the grammar?”

“No, I lost that email from you. But what I don’t get is why my grade is so low. I try SO HARD!” 

“Can you give an example?”

“Well, for today’s class, for instance, I looked at the assigned reading!”

The really hard-working people actually never “try hard.” They go and do it. 

Said another way: if 1000 people went to a lot of trouble to do something, and they all tried but 990 of them failed to do it, would we decide they had made the choice not to do it?

Yes, absolutely. Words and declared intentions are nothing. The only way to know the truth is to look at the result. The result is the truth. 

Example. Remember how actively Republicans- politicians, journalists, ideologues – were insisting they were “never Trump” and they’d never let Trump be elected? 

Trump is in the White House. This means that no matter what they declared to others and even to themselves, they chose him as their president. He is their decision and their responsibility. 

The truth is in the result, and the best way to know what people want is to look at what they got. 

I’m not a huge admirer of novelist Rosa Montero, so I never considered reading her first novel Cronica del desamor published in 1979. If her mature work is not that good, I mused, the very first novel must be quite weak. Critics were unanimous in their dislike of the novel, which strengthened my reservations. 

And then I was forced to read the novel (for my research) and discovered that critics are idiots. It’s extremely good. It’s just the kind of writing I enjoy. A wonderful, wonderful novel. Sadly, the writer’s later work didn’t live up to this first novel.

What’s really funny, though, is how similar the novel is to the literature that was written in the former USSR immediately after its collapse. It’s as if the end of totalitarianism produced the same literature in entirely different places. Somebody could write an article on this. Not me, though, because it’s not the kind of stuff I care about. 

1. Wrote and submitted another abstract. 

2. Made fregola and spring greens soup for Klara. 

3. Finished Cronica del desamor and started Wasted Lives by Zygmunt Bauman.

4. Went to the gym.

5. Made another atrocious Soviet dish.

This has been a great spring break. I feel very rested and ready to start another spring break immediately. There won’t be one, of course, but I’m ready. 

There is a very weird class at the gym on Sundays. Women on huge transparent heels and in tiny little shorts stand in bizarre poses. Then they shift slightly and stand in different yet still bizarre poses. It looks like they are preparing either for a beauty contest or for a career in prostitution. 

The class is not listed on the brochure and I feel too shy to ask. 

It’s great to be unsociable because the time not spent socializing goes into your intellectual growth and family life. But there are drawbacks. For instance, nobody tells you about the time change, and you end up getting up at six and milling uselessly about the house, worrying why the baby is not getting up and is she unwell and why the cell phone is showing the wrong time and is it broken again. 

Another huge problem with the Clinton campaign were the endless fundraising emails. They made her look dishonest  (because they were dishonest) and made her sound like a telemarketer. Trump wasn’t doing the fundraising carpet-bombing. He was getting the coverage on his own, with his own media presence. That made him look stronger and more capable. 

The whole Clinton campaign was beyond outdated. I hope these lessons have been learned and future Dem candidates ditch these old-time practices.  

And by the way, the supremely obnoxious Monica Vernon who spammed my mailbox with half a dozen of teary emails A DAY for over a year and who made me hate her name forever and ever lost the election to a Tea Party freak. 

So candidates, please, enough begging. Go do things yourself, show that you are not a bottomless money-guzzler. 

It took me until now to discover why people around here are so delighted by Reza Aslan’s new show on religion. I registered the widespread joy but had no idea what it was about the show that was causing it. Folks were high-fiving it at the gym, at the store, and at work.

I wonder if Aslan will now compound the jubilation by showing Muslims engaging in something atrocious. Even more Muslims, I mean. Christian fundamentalists might actually throw a parade.