Something horrible happened in this town. A 32-year-old mother of 7 shot their father in the head, set the house on fire, and drove into a lake with the 3-month-old youngest baby. 

The baby was rescued from the lake by a paramedic and survived in spite of the freezing temperature. All seven kids have survived, and the town is collecting things and money for them. 

The father seems to have been a total deadbeat. He left the family and moved out of state. The mother divorced him back in 2012 and worked two jobs to make ends meet. But the creep came back and fathered more children while punching around the older ones. There were dozens of 911 calls from the house in the last year. Finally, the woman seems to have snapped. She has recently given birth and was probably not in a good mental state. 

This is all going on literally next door. 

The chair of the MLA panel I applied for sent me such a beautifully written, typically Spanish, extremely florid and convoluted response that I have no idea if the proposal has been accepted. 

Maybe I’ll use the email as a classroom assignment and ask students to decipher it. 

We are having a family outing at a mall because Klara is teething and keeping her at home with no special entertainment would be cruel. But while we are being typically American, here is a photo of a car with weird wheels for your entertainment. 

I find these typically American Midwestern weekends to be indescribably enjoyable. We are at a Barnes and Noble now. Then we’ll go for weird ice-cream, visit Yankee Candle, a Teavana and an Ulta. And we’ll have lunch at Olive Garden because we want to be typical until the end. 

The added enjoyment is derived from the game we call “Imagine if we saw this while back in the USSR.” Good times. 

The Big Brother described by George Orwell was obsessed with inclusion. His goal was to get and keep everybody in line, never letting them depart from the common fold. The USSR, which was the climactic achievement of this form of Big Brotherhood didn’t let people leave its borders at all.

Today, this kind of Big Brother is not dead. He resides in prisons, in urban ghettos, and in places where it’s still needed to keep people under control. 

This Big Brother now has an even Bigger Brother. This new species of Big Brother is all about exclusion. Who should be discarded, thrown out on the rubbish heap of history now? Which profession has become obsolete? Which group of people is superfluous? 

We all assist Bigger Brother by eagerly embracing the mandate to treat each other as consumption goods. Bauman believed that being stuck between Big Brothers #1 and #2 cannot be the only possible way for humans to coexist. This book was a call to start looking for a new way of relating to each other. 

I just got an offer for a Mastercard with a $995 annual fee that’s “bathed in 24K gold to reflect your status.”

Did I fall asleep and wake up in fucking Russia?

In this country, welfare often takes the form of preserving middle classes by creating imaginary middle-class jobs and paying for them with government funds to avoid calling them welfare. That word would destroy the dignity of middle-class folks and lead them to lumpenize, so the strategy is not incomprehensible.

Whether the recipients of this form of welfare work at diversity and inclusion offices, ethics offices, offices of institutional compliance with block grant requirements or at a defense facility seems like a very minor point. 

Today I took Klara to her first invited birthday party. It was held in the Children’s Museum, which is a fantastic place for kids. The party was great but I was very confused by the abundance of color green. Everybody was dressed in green, kids, adults, museum workers. The decorations were green, too. I still see green even after getting home. 

I can be excused for not clocking on to it because the party was for my Venezuelan colleague’s daughter, and I was not in an Irish frame of mind. Most people around here are historically German, not Irish. The only Irish pub we had went bust and gave place to a restaurant that serves pea soup made from canned peas. 

P.S. Hey, I completely forgot that I’m now a redhead and can finally wear green. And that’s after fleeing it like the plague my whole life.

This is crazy! I just saw over a dozen American sources in my newsfeed share the story that Trump refused to shake Merkel’s hand. At that exact same time, my Spanish sources are publishing stories titled “Trump and Merkel Shake Hands” and accompany them with this photo. Spanish sources also insist that the meeting was very cordial while American sources are unanimous that it was extremely tense. 

Somebody’s gone nutso. 

Or take “the right to choose.” I hate the term. I much prefer “reproductive rights” or the honest “abortion rights.” Hey, why are we do afraid of saying the word abortion? Do we think there’s anything wrong with it? 

“The right to choose” is dumb because I don’t see anything particularly good or important in choices. Dumb choices are made all the time. People chose to vote for Trump, didn’t they?

The rhetoric of choice obscures the fact that choices are not made in a vacuum. If a woman doesn’t really want to abort but still seeks an abortion because she’s poor and desperate / doesn’t have access to healthcare / is afraid of losing her job or her living arrangement / knows she won’t have childcare, etc, what kind of a “choice” is it? We hide from our collective responsibility for her hopelessness behind the neoliberal rhetoric of choice. 

I want to live in a society where everybody has healthcare and nobody suffers from poverty that forces them into unwanted choices of this nature. I want prenatal and neonatal care for everybody. I’m very eager to pay higher taxes to achieve this goal. Let’s make this happen and then talk about choices. But until then, let’s leave the rhetoric of choice aside. 

In Humanities, academics in their mid-fifties approach the moment of the highest productivity, their great flourishing when all of the knowledge they have accumulated will produce their greatest achievements. 

Those of them who have fashioned a productive research life up to this point detest anybody who wastes their time and move with great effectiveness and speed through the obligations that distract them from scholarship. It’s an enormous pleasure to work with them.

Those who haven’t managed to create a productive life of research take vengeance on everybody by wasting everybody else’s time like it’s their sacred duty. 

I was just in a meeting where two such academics drove everyone nuts, interrupting the speaker, giggling, throwing bits of paper at each other (sic!) and laughing, snapping and exchanging selfies, and making such a nuisance of themselves that I’m literally livid. This was a really good speaker and I wanted to hear what he had to say. But these two colleagues drowned out a good quarter of the talk. 

It was not the kind of meeting that anybody is obligated to attend, by the way. If you don’t want to be there, don’t go. But to steal people’s time like this, on a Friday afternoon, is shameless.