Turns out we’ll need to give up any of our inherited titles or orders of nobility at the naturalization ceremony. This is definitely giving us pause. We have already renounced participating in acts of genocide or crimes against humanity, and now this.

Identity is only and always about editing out parts of self.

On the positive side, the DNC decided to support Ossoff in Georgia. I just received an email signed by Tom Perez, asking for a contribution to the campaign.

On the negative side, the only argument that is being advanced is “let’s stick it to Donald [sic]”. Which to me sounds like saying that Ossoff is a shitty cnadidate who stands for nothing whatsoever. I mean, I’m sure it’s not true and he stands for something but the DNC is failing to communicate what it is.

The relationship between parents and children is always ambivalent and conflictive. The role of parents is to inscribe the children into the social order. And the social order is a system of limitations on freedom and desires of an individual.

Since infancy, parents teach children to contain themselves physically (potty-training, clothes, shoes, etc) and emotionally. They play the role of border control agents in the child’s journey towards civilization. Civilization is great but the price of access is relinquishing the right to unconstrained existence of the kind animals enjoy.

If this conflict never comes to the surface and parents and children seem to exist completely peacefully, this is a situation where parents are either not doing their job and not teaching self-containment or it’s a situation of extreme emotional abuse. A child who grew up without yelling “I hate you!” (or doing / saying something in that direction, and God, do I hate these disclaimers for the exceedingly literal) at the parents is not on the road towards anything nice.

I hope nobody interprets this as an endorsement of abusive relationships where children exist in a constant war zone. We all know how I feel about those. 

A loss in Kansas, a loss in Georgia. I don’t care if it’s a red district or not. I don’t care that the numbers look promising. I stared at promising numbers in red states throughout 2016. I don’t want promises. I want results. 

I can’t believe we are still hearing the ridiculous spiel about how great it is that this particular loss is smaller than it could have been. 

The games Klara loves the most involve fitting together small objects. She likes to take pens out of a pencil pouch, take off the caps, put them back on, and replace the pens in the pouch. She can go a good 15 minutes taking off the caps and putting them back on. (She’s 14 months, so it takes an effort.) 

She also loves it when we work on an art project. The art project involves her choosing a sticker sheet out of a bunch and giving it to me. I unpeel a sticker and stick it on her little fist. She takes it off and sticks it on a large sheet of white paper. This can easily take over 40 minutes. It’s amazing how hard she can concentrate on something like this. 

She is a very fascinating child. 

Children should not fulfill the parents’ emotional needs. Other adults or objects or pursuits should fulfill the parents’ emotional needs. Which is easier said than done, eh? Because it’s so darn easy to get emotional fulfillment out of children. It’s like having a huge, beautiful cake in front of you and not eating it and instead baking your own cake from scratch. 

So what can one do to avoid plugging their emotional hole with a child?

It just occurred to me that the first step should be to figure out what one’s emotional needs are. Because until you know for sure, you can’t guarantee you are keeping them well-fed and not straining at the leash to devour a child?

So what are my emotional needs? Let me tell you, folks, it’s very unpleasant to have to think about it. I dithered and doddered until I finally managed to recognize that my greatest emotional need is to have my intellectual potency recognized. I need to be recognized as an intellectual authority almost as much as I need to eat. I’m guessing this is common to many teachers, which is why teachers’ kids often tend to be academically underachieving. And doctors’ kids tend to be sick a lot more than others. 

I need to keep thinking about what my emotional needs are even though it’s very unpleasant. 

I answered two surveys at work today, both of which listed as answers to the question of “What is you gender?” male, female, and transgender. This is one of those cases when people try to be politically correct in the most superficial way possible and end up being offensive. Transgender people are male or female. They are not a separate gender.

It’s my birthday today. I’m now very many years old. 🙂 But I have come by a lot of (kind of one-sided but still) wisdom in my dotage, and as a birthday gift (to me rather than to my readers, to be honest), I want to share it. The best gift for me is to be able to dispense advice to people who haven’t asked for it, so bear with me.

The advice is for those of us who work from home. Working from home is hard, and it turns many people crabby and miserable because they end up feeling like they are at work all the time without getting much done. Feelings of guilt and a sensation that one lacks productivity are ubiquitous. So how to be super effective while working from home? Take this advice from somebody who wrote a book and 3 articles while managing a high-risk pregnancy (that would be me) from home.

To be effective, work at home should be structured to look as similar to work at the office as possible. Set up work hours that always happen at the same time and inform everybody – in as strong a manner as possible! – that between x and x hours on XXXXX days you are at work. Memorize the phrase, “No, I can’t run this errand / hang out / talk / make these phone calls for you / do anybody a teensy favor BECAUSE I’M AT WORK” and repeat them like a mantra. Prepare to repeat the sentence, “So do you know how you are at work every day between 9 and 5? Guess what? SO AM I!!!” many times.

Everything that has to be done every day should be planned in as detailed a way as possible in advance. This summer, I have to finish an article, write a chapter for an edited volume, write another article, write an MLA talk, and write a grant application. I have calculated the number of words this will entail in total. Then I have divided them by the number of working days I will have this summer. Now I know exactly what I will write every day in summer and at what time of the day. Instead of a vague “I have to work on my research”, I now have “I need to write 400 words on Russian immigrants and criminality on May 4th.”

My work at home ends at 3 pm, after which I don’t do any work, don’t look at work emails, don’t think about work, and concentrate on having summer fun. I also have 2 weeks in May and 2 weeks in July when I will not be working because I’ve scheduled them as vacation time.

Many people will balk at the idea of being so structured that they have planned in advance where they will be at 2 pm on August 10. But to me it’s comforting, which is why I work very well from home.

And the most important thing: lists of things to do are not the way to go. Forget lists and start thinking numbers instead. How many work days can you realistically have each month? How many words can you realistically write each day if the kids refuse to sleep, the weather is nuts, the spouse chooses this time to become high-maintenance, the best friend has a crisis, there is an unexpected large expense, and as a result you feel completely exhausted every day of the summer? If you don’t know, conduct an experiment. Choose a very bad day and sit down to write to see how many words you have been able to squeeze out. (For people who are not in the writing professions, it will be phone calls or whatever their measure of productivity is.)

Counting is fun, I promise. Happy Birthday to me and happy summer working to all of us.

Does the whole darn university read my blog? The moment I wrote about the welcome flouting of the smoking ban, the butt cans were removed.

Colleagues, stop reading. You are creeping me out. Go do something else.

Sessions went to the border and gave an impassioned speech about narcos. What I don’t get is why it has to be Sessions. Why couldn’t Hillary go there and say that narcos are horrible and bring death and devastation? Good luck getting better results with Hispanic voters without that. 

Unlike many people, I don’t mind recognizing my mistakes. I was wrong when I thought Hillary was a good candidate. She wasn’t. She neglected the most basic things that her campaign needed. I so wanted her to win that I made myself blind to the most obvious things.