When I speak of the civil society coming into existence in Ukraine, this is what I mean:

Gosh, I grew up around these village bus stops, and they were always the saddest, most depressing places that made you feel like you were surrounded by people who hated being alive. They stank of piss and excrement, the walls were covered with peeling paint that looked like it had been applied back in the 1950s.

But more and more often, the village bus stops are beginning to look like this:

And it isn’t just bus stops. I’ve seen photos of those ugly Soviet residential areas buildings that stood ugly and drab for decades until last year people decided to paint beautiful, colorful images on them. And now the entrances look like sunflower fields or cherry orchards* instead of concrete gray blocks.

* Chekhov was from Ukraine, of course, and his famous cherry orchard was based on traditional Ukrainian imagery.

“I’m a tenured professor at our School of Education,” a colleague announced at a meeting. “As I’m sure you all know, the field of education is known for its outstanding. . . erm. . . lack of rigor and  . . . erm . . . exceptional intellectual shallowness.”

I laughed so loudly that the windows rattled. Everybody else looked embarrassed at stared at the table in front of them.

So? What’s up with the elections in Israel? Who won?

Zygmunt Bauman was one of the first philosophers who started talking about the erosion of the nation-state and the growing fluidity of existence back in 1999. The following quote from his foundational volume Liquid Modernity explains things such as the mattress-carrying battle against terrifying articles at Northwestern U that I blogged about earlier today:

The body has become the last shelter and sanctuary of continuity and duration. . . It is becoming safety’s last line of trenches which are exposed to constant enemy bombardment, or the last oasis among wind-swept moving sands. Hence the rabid, obsessive, feverish and overwrought concern with the defense of the body.

The higher education is being eroded. Nobody knows how to hang on to everything that made higher education worthwhile or even verbalize what is happening. The anxiety produced by these feelings of helplessness intensifies the need to protect what is perceived as the only territory that one still kind of controls, namely, the body.

The boundary between the body and the world outside is among the most vigilantly policed of contemporary frontiers.

No other boundary is safe from erosion, which is why the need to protect this very last frontier from fading becomes so urgent and fraught.

I keep hearing that things are bad for women in tech, but how can they improve if this kind of idiocy keeps happening (emphasis is mine):

The Ipsos Girls’ Lounge is . . . creating a safe haven for women at tech, media and advertising conferences, including SXSW. The group believes it can foster networking and deals between women and help empower them through pro-female programming facilitated by manicures, makeup and a bit of bubbly. . .

“Guys do deals,” Ipsos Girls’ Lounge CEO Shelley Zalis said. “Girls create relationships. I think there’s confidence in the pack. We’re creating an environment where women feel comfortable, where real conversations happen and you have time to spend together.”

Every single word of this is offensive in the extreme. I would not be caught dead at any event where it is acceptable to insult me with the condescending “girls create relationships” and “let me empower you with a manicure.” It’s 2015, how is this shit still possible?

Are you noticing anything unusual in the list of my blog visitors?

Yes. I finally have visitors from Russia and Ukraine thanks to my recent bout of Twitter activity.

I banned over 100 Putinbots on Twitter yesterday. It was fun and also very educational because it’s obvious how many of them are simply trolling for a modest salary.

When a drama-queenish, melodramatic professor encounters a group of drama-queenish, melodramatic students, the result is very embarrassing.

A short resume for those who have missed the whole sorry thing. A professor at Northwestern complained in an online article that many of her students are overwrought and behave like “trauma cases waiting to happen.”

The students proved her right by freaking out about the article in really bizarre ways and claiming they were “terrified” of the article.

The professor proved that this was not a generational issue when she responded with outlandish stories of professors being terrified of the terrified students. In professor’s words:

Someone on my campus—tenured—wrote me about literally lying awake at night worrying about causing trauma to a student, becoming a national story, losing her job, and not being able to support her kid. It seemed completely probable to her that a triggered student could take down a tenured professor with a snowball of social media.

The most surprising thing is that none of the participants in this bit of arrant idiocy are noticing how stupid they are making themselves look.

Today there was a massive rally in the Crimea, celebrating the annexation of the peninsula by Russia a year ago:

Yes, it was as massive as Putin is tall but there is no more money in Russia to pay people to pretend they are celebrating. Putin pays a little under $5 to each person who comes out on his marches and rallies but it’s getting too costly for Russia to do that.

. . . it’s summer. A hot summer with an angry, unforgiving sun. Our summers last from March to November. And that’s after only 3 instances of snowfall in all of this so-called winter.

But I shouldn’t complain. California only has enough water left for a year, so we should consider ourselves super lucky in contrast.

In other bad news, Putin has resurfaced. He looks unhealthy but these over-Botoxed creatures do looked permanently puffed up and freaky. People are saying that his disappearance was a ploy to distract everybody from the recent murder of the dissident Boris Nemtsov and from the growing concentration of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border. 

In good news, there are just 7 weeks to go until the end of the semester and then I can concentrate full-time on my research for the next 8 months. Over the spring break, I did no grading and no class prep and had a blast. When one is immersed in writing a scholarly book, everything that distracts one from it is annoying.

So 7 more teaching days, and I’m free to write.

One expects philologists to be careful with words, yet sometimes when a fellow philologist says, “Do come by our panel on online learning for a few minutes, maybe answer a question or two”, what she actually means is, “Deliver a talk at our conference. And, by the way, you are scheduled to speak this Friday.”

I don’t mind much because I have a mile-long bibliography on the evils of online learning, so I can talk away but it’s still funny how this all came about.