Opinions, art, debate
Klara’s head teacher says it’s time to give her table foods and snacks. Problem is, I don’t know what they are. Does anyone have any ideas? All I could come up with so far are little boiled potatoes and hard-boiled egg yolks.
Normally, she eats vegetable and oatmeal + fruit purees that we make for her.
Here is a little exercise on measuring one’s psychological health. Make a list of your compensatory mechanisms, or things you do that might not look like the best use of your time yet are crucial to your getting through the day. Here are some examples:
As I keep saying, these are not bad activities. They are good activities in that they literally allow you to survive. Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT try to limit these activities by applying willpower. It will only deplete your energy and make you need more of these mechanisms. Psychologically healthy individuals, a.k.a. lucky fuckers, also have their compensatory mechanisms but instead of the above, they do the following:
So once you figure out your compensatory activities from list 1, track how much time you dedicate each day to them and what triggers them. If cumulatively they take more than 10-15% of your awake time in a day, that’s a sign that your psychological health is not great. 7% to 10% is borderline. Under 7% is optimal. (List 2, of course, can and should be pursued for as much as one wants.)
The protracted use of the personal planner made it exceedingly clear to me that productivity is extremely dependent on:
The way you organize your labor is extremely important and productivity strategies are crucial. But the 3 aspects I listed above are what it all depends on.
Yes, these are completely obvious things but it’s important to see clear and tangible proof that the planner offered me.
It would be extremely cool to be a completely psychologically healthy person. If I were such person, I wouldn’t have freaked out like I did at the Philadelphia airport and spent an hour crying hysterically and saying “I just want to go home” to my reflection in the mirror at the Airport Marriott. I would have used that time instead to read and could have had a great time. But the mental resources weren’t there.
And large part of the reason that they weren’t there is that I haven’t been sleeping. And I haven’t been sleeping because I’ve been suffering from another cold. And the reason why that happened is that my psychological health is not great. It’s a vicious circle that needs to be broken.
In the next post I will publish an exercise that helps measure your psychological health at any given point in your life.
I. Submitted. The. Book.
As promised, readers of this blog are thanked in the acknowledgments.
Right now, I’m in that tiny window of time when I really like the book. Soon enough I’ll decide it’s profoundly flawed and will want to take it back.
Two of the books containing my chapters have come out this month, too. I’ve been writing non-stop for 3 years, and now I’m planning to take a two-month reading break. I’m currently making up a list of books I have urgently needed to read for years or even a decade. It’s very exciting because I have no idea which word or sentence in these books will turn out to be a thread that will lead me into the next project.
Hey, so what, the Senate actually voted to end coverage for preexisting conditions and to stop allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance till 26? Didn’t even Trump say he wanted to preserve this part of the ACA?
This is the cost of the “I’m too pure to vote” and “Both sides are the same” positions. It’s a shame that the cost isn’t paid by the purists. It’s the innocent schmucks that suffer.
I have found the most hard-working and effective person at our university. And it’s obviously not me. It’s a professor of environmental studies who is also an associate dean. Not only did he get me funding for the editing of my book, he accomplished it within minutes. And when it turned out that the costs ran higher than I initially thought because it’s a big project, he got me an increase of funding again within minutes. And immediately started the process of issuing the payment. Imagine if everybody (including me) worked this efficiently.
By the way, academics make great administrators. There are exceptions, of course, but in general, an administrator who teaches and remembers doing research is miles better than somebody brought in from the corporate world. Of course, we don’t have corporate sharks turned admin at my school because our salaries are very modest, and this is why we function so well even in the midst of the Rauner debacle.
Another reason why I’m happy the MLA resolution on boycotting Israeli academics was defeated is that I haven’t seen anything even remotely as effective as our programs where we take groups of students to Israel and let them see things for themselves. And the only way to make these exchanges happen is to get Israeli universities to participate. The state won’t pay, obviously, so we have to organize it as an exchange to keep the cost acceptable to our university. I’ve seen students after these trips, and it’s definitely a transformative experience for them. You’ve seen nothing until you’ve witnessed a student from East St Louis come back from one of such exchanges.
We have another ice storm tomorrow, and it’s the best thing ever. N is staying home from work, the university is closed, we’ll make borscht and sit in front of the fireplace eating it. If things get really hairy, I even got an oseledets squirreled away for such time when I’ll have a good enough excuse to have some.
What I found curious about the MLA is that A-list celebrities, so to speak, were not nearly as good as the B-list ones.
Homi Bhabha was a bit of a disappointment but not in an expected way. He doesn’t speak in a nearly as convoluted and incomprehensible manner as he writes. In fact, he is a good, forceful, clear speaker. I didn’t have a problem with the form of his delivery but with the content. He spoke about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book and everything he said I’d already heard before. The talk sounded like a pastiche of all of the reviews of the book, and I found no new insights in anything Bhabha said.
Rita Felski was undoubtedly the star of this MLA. She recently published a new book on theory (and I mean on, not of), and everybody else took care to bash this book in their talks. Which is already a sign of Felski’s importance because here you are, obsessing over her book while she has no idea that you exist. Felski’s own talk was good but not amazing.
The amazing talks were delivered by people who are not that famous but are on their way to making it. One session that I visited had 7 absolutely outstanding speakers. I loved all of them with a passion.
The moral of the story is that one should retire on time and open up a space for younger talent.
The only two useful things one can glean from the notorious dossier is that Russians are open to the opportunity once again to swap Putin for a milder Medvedev or somebody they will sell as less tough and that there is definitely something going on in Trump’s finances that is Russia-related. There were too many denials of this in the dossier for it not to be true.
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