I’m planning to go to a conference in Houston, Texas, and given that I just finished writing a book, I could, of course, cull a presentation out of it and spare myself the trouble. Many people would do exactly that (and then wonder why their jobs bore them and their careers are going nowhere).

I don’t do this kind of thing, though, because there is no intellectual or professional growth in it. I’ll be working with a novel that is completely new to me for this conference.

The number one secret of scholarly productivity is that the brain should constantly process new information and work on solving new problems. The reason why academics write less than they’d like is not that they have no time. It’s that they don’t know what to write about. And the only way never to run out of ideas is to read, think and analyze constantly.

I was woken up by the baby and can’t manage to fall back asleep. So I started browsing (what on earth did people do before there was this option?) and found a delightful true story about a young man who says that his mental and emotional health were damaged by a picture of a gun with roses coming our of its barrel. It’s fortunate that he is too young to have lived in the heyday of the band called Guns N’ Roses, or the poor creature would have a mental breakdown whenever he heard the band’s name.

I’m all for alternative masculinities but this is taking the image of a sensitive male a bit too far from my liking. At the same time, if you read until the end of the linked piece, you’ll see how easily this sensitive male managed to get a woman to service him emotionally and cluck around him like a stupid hen. There is no masculinity alternative enough to let go of the need to be serviced and pandered to by women.

Even the commercial for online K-12 programs looks sad. A lonely kid spends all day alone, staring at a screen and talking to some weird fellow over the phone.

Learning is sitting in a room alone and stating at a screen. Fun is sitting in a room alone and stating at a screen. Everything is sitting in a room alone and stating at a screen. How can anybody possibly think this is normal or desirable?

I finally colored my hair, and now Klara stares at me like, “So there are two of you? Or are more planning to show up?”

I think she likes the new version, though, because she smiles at it more. Overall, she is not a smiley baby. She is very serious and pensive and only smiles in the mornings.

A subtitle of an article in the NYTIMES reads,

An immigrant waits on the Supreme Court and hopes.

To me, “waits on the Supreme Court” means that she is either a waitress who serves the justices their meals or that she is a member of the Court and she’s waiting for something while she’s there. Given that the sentence starts with “an immigrant”, it’s probably the former.

Now, here is my question: if it would be so easy to avoid this confusion by using the perfectly appropriate “waits for”, why stick the with the ambiguous “waits on”? To make the immigrant in question sound low-class through the use of this mushrooming “think on, hate on, wait on, etc” obsession?

On Thursday, both the Tennessee House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill to cut the entire $436,000 state appropriation for an office at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that promotes diversity at the state’s flagship university.

I’m envious! I wish somebody did at for our university because the unctuous fools who are distributing pamphlets telling us to look for visual clues to job candidates’ race are annoying me mightily. I wish all these diversity officers, multiculturalism centers, and ethics boards would just go away and we’d use the funds to give grants to our struggling students.

I have to say that I find it deeply offensive that the whole country is talking obsessively about toilets, presidential candidates find it necessary to state their position on toilets, boycotts are declared over toilets, yet nobody has much to say about the fact that the state of Illinois is still living without a budget and the education grants of the poorest students are still being withheld.

One would think that the very real suffering of the young people whose college is about to be shut down or the indigent retirees thrown out of their retirement homes would merit a boycott, but no, only the ridiculous toilet drama does. There is no evidence that anybody in this country has been prevented from peeing, of course. Yet the toilet drama is still proving a lot more important to the believers in social justice than the collapse of the government in Illinois.

And then we wonder why so many people in this country are angry and are voting their rage. Just compare the extent of coverage in the media of the Illinois budget fight or a similar situation in Pennsylvania with the attention the toilet scandal gets and you’ll have the answer.

Turns out there are people who are actually upset about Harriet Tubman being placed on the $10 bill. They talk about it in such tragic tones that one begins to wonder if they sit there, staring at the backs of banknotes for hours on end.

I’m at a salon having a martini and my hair done. And although true, this statement illustrates one of the verbal monstrosities that populate student essays.