Amazon gave me $250 in “Apple ebooks anti-trust settlement.” What’s up with that, does anyone know? I don’t mind an extra $250 in books, of course. It will be almost like having book money from my university – something I never had and clearly never will at this school.

The most recent nanny asked if I could pay her once a week instead of once every two weeks. This is a question of somebody who actually needs a job. This is the first time I feel a connection to one of the applicants because I know very well what it is like when it matters a lot to get paid more often because you are constantly putting out small financial fires caused by the absence of even the smallest money cushion. And two weeks is an endless stretch of time to wait to be paid.

What we kept hearing throughout the campaign is that Clinton supporters reject Bernie’s suggestions because they are hard to implement and too lofty in their purpose for our pedestrian and incrementalist minds. The truth, however, is that Bernie’s college plan is very easy to implement. The process of destroyong academic self-governance and expanding the number of administrators who are invested with an ever-growing capacity to control professors and make our lives difficult has been under way for years. There is nothing audacious or ground-breaking in speeding this process up some more. 

This is why when I hear the word “incrementalism”, I know I’m talking to somebody who is not smart and gets all his information from stupid places like Twitter and Mahablog. But hey, what a great attempt at branding: attach the word “incrementalism” to the opposing side and you never even have to read yoru own damn proposals. The Other is the evildoer, so you must be in the right.

And now even I am getting upset with Bernie. The following statement makes me cringe with vicarious shame:

Secretary Clinton has come up, as usual, with a very complicated and convoluted approach on higher education. You got to spend half your life filling out forms and checking your income every day.

Hillary’s college plan is intelligent and thought out. And Bernie’s plan is simply bad. It’s bad not because it’s hard to put into practice. It’s actually very easy to implement. But because it is not thought out and full of unconnected, unintelligent gimmicks that look nice to people who have zero understanding of higher ed. In reality, though, they are a disaster.

Bernie lost the nomination not because anybody conspired against him and evil superdelegates something something. But because he didn’t do the work. He’s into grand visions but the grunt work of preparing an intelligent, meaningful reform plan bores him and, apparently, everybody in his campaign as well. Hillary’s college plan looks complicated to him because it’s nuanced. It’s sad that nobody in his inner circle has managed to tell him the truth about how bad his own plan is.

Sarkozy is such a piece of useless garbage. At the Russian economic forum in St Petersburg, he’s been pathetically eager to flatter Putin and condemn the sanctions. Only the most ridiculous fools have gone to that forum where Putin pretends Russia has something other than the same exhausted state-planned economy of forever ago.

What I find really interesting about the OJ documentary is how easy it is to manufacture racial solidarity and how impossible it is to make people at least consider gender or class solidarity. Just look at the current election for an example.

Maybe racial solidarities are so strong because no other kind of solidarity is accessible.

Academaze was written under the pseudonym Sydney Phlox by the blogger Xykademiqz who often contributes valuable observations here at Clarissa’s Blog.

There’s been a steady stream of publications that describe academia as a horror show of massive proportions. My non-academic friends and relatives often bring me these whiny and moany treatises as a gift (or send links to them) and joyfully exclaim, “Here! This is a book / article / blog post about academia!” I am, however, one of those academics who’d rather read the phone book than a book about academia because I can’t take any more diatribes about everything being absolutely horrible and hopeless to the point where we all need to don a shroud and crawl straight to the cemetery.

Academaze is a welcome exception to this annoying trend. The author is a successful tenured STEM academic who discusses the good and the bad of academia with insight and humor. The ideas behind some of the sub-chapters are accompanied by really cool cartoons that even I – a passionate hater of the cartoon genre – enjoyed. This book can be an invaluable resource not only to young STEM scholars who are contemplating a career in academia but, with some modifications, to beginner scholars in all fields. The author clearly loves her work, loves her life, and writes in a way that will make a budding academic less – instead of even more – nervous about her career choice.

Among the defects of the book, I can name the excessive use of the word “Gaussian” (it is used once in the book, which I, as a professor of literature, find hugely excessive), the dearth of cartoons (they are so good that I would love to see more), and a slight disconnect between the introductory chapter and the rest of the book. From the intro, one can arrive at the conclusion that the book is aimed at the general public and hopes to convince readers that academic schedules don’t mean that academics do nothing all day and especially all summer long. However, the rest of the book makes it clear that it will be most useful to academics and probably their family members who need to understand that saying things like, “Why can’t you come over / talk / pick up the dry cleaning / join the yoga class with me, etc. if it’s summer and you don’t have to work?” is obnoxious and unfair.

The book is fun, there are tons of RL stories that illustrate each point – I highly recommend it. Especially if you are a woman in a STEM field who lacks a female mentor, this book can answer your most pressing questions while you chart your course in your field.

I don’t think that thevRussian secret service organized the attacks by Russian football fans in Europe, like the Guardian suggests. Pigs will be pigs without any governmental involvement. But the gleeful reaction of both the Russian authorities and the general public in Russia is disgusting.

The Russian authorities may not have organized the attacks but they have been fostering an environment of hatred towards Europeans for years, and now we are seeing a result. Football fans are always rowdy and obnoxious, yes, but when they put a person in a coma and a society erupts in cheering, there’s something wrong with that picture.

I understand that there are people who were born and lived their whole lives in different circumstances than the ones available to me. I don’t begrudge them the existence where they have no idea what it means to worry about making a living, to be terrified by mounting credit card debt, to know that a third of all hours in every day belongs not to you but to your employer, to structure your life around the knowledge that between such and such hours you have to be at work no matter what else – illness, bereavement, exhaustion, the concert of your favorite band – is happening in your life.

I understand such people exist and I have even grown to accept that there is no way to live my life without coming into contact with them. 

What drives me nuts is that such people don’t even try to understand the reality of those of us who know the words “I have to.”

Example. I tell yet another prospective nanny that I teach for a living. I have to be in the classroom every Monday and Wednesday at 11 am no matter what.

“Oh yes,” she says, “I understand.”

Three minutes later, she reveals to me that she is pregnant and due in October. 

“Jessica,” I say hopelessly. “As I said, from August until early December I HAVE TO be in the classroom every Monday and Wednesday at 11 am no matter what.”

“I know,” she responds. “I get it.”

“And when you are giving birth and then recovering, you wouldn’t be able to help me, would you?”

“Oh, that’s OK,” she says happily. “I will come back to work a few weeks after giving birth.”

By this point, the desperation I feel gives way to rage that locks up my throat and makes my blood pressure almost take off the top of my skull.

“But I have to be in the classroom every Monday and Wednesday,” I repeat robotically.

Jessica stares at me with an incomprehension that could not be deeper if I had suddenly addressed her in Ukrainian. She sincerely fails to udnerstand what the problem is.

I have now had this conversation hald a dozen of times. It’s not always pregnancy. In one case it was a beauty pageant. In another, a visit to Las Vegas. It’s great that people are giving birth, participating in pageants, and going to Vegas. What would make me really happy, though, is to see one of them lose the blank stare for a moment and say, “Oh, wait, if you need me to be here every week from August to December, then I can’t help you.”

That would be such a beautiful instance of mutual comprehension.

So three nannies said that they prefer to work 3-5 hours a week and not 20, one said that she is actually looking to work for the government (and had to come out all the way to my house to figure out I’m not the government, I guess), one didn’t show up for the interview at all with no warning. And these are all women in their fifties and sixties. Younger candidates show such incredible entitlement and such incapacity to stay in a dialogue instead of slipping into a monologue that it never even gets to the point of scheduling an interview.

In our town, one can get world-class service in what concerns skilled work. My dentist is sensational, my massage therapist and hair stylist could easily be working in any world capital, the realtor and the banker are super professional, restorateurs are out-of-this-world good. But as for low-skill work, it’s impossible to get anybody to do it with any degree of reliability or work ethic. 

Just one example but I have more. During the first pregnancy, I wanted somebody to come over and clean the house. The local agency said they only send out teams of three cleaners and you have to pay for all three. When they arrived, it turned out that one of the cleaners was a child of maybe 11 or 12. The child clearly didn’t do any work and ended up breaking one of the glass flowers I had in a vase and trying to conceal the damage. But I had to pay for the child to be there, breaking things, because that’s the only way to get cleaners. The whole experience cost a lot (A LOT) of money and the results were entirely inbisible. Of course, I didn’t repeat the experiment.

Casual work around the house, lawn-mowing – it’s a struggle to get any of that done in this town and it’s always unreliable and aggravating. And everybody else I know around here has the same (or sometimes even worse experience).

I always loudly and angrily disagreed with people who argued that mass immigration into developed countries was caused by local people refusing to do low-skilled* work like gardening, cleaning, cooking, child and elderly care, etc. The very idea seemed ridiculous to me. And now I’m discovering that I was wrong this whole time. I hate to be proven so entirely wrong but I can’t deny the mounting evidence any longer. So reader valter07 and others who made this argument: you were right this entire time and I was wrong.

We currently don’t have any immigrants other than college professors in this town. But capitalism operates on the demand/supply principle. There is demand for this sort of work, and it is inevitable that it will eventually be met. 

And then the locals will become very angered that immigrants “steal” their jobs and will vote for the future equivalent of Trump.

* Low-skilled is not necessarily low-paid. What I’m trying to offer prospective nannies (including very good benefits, by the way) and what cleaners, handymen, mowers, etc. charge is anything but low-paid.