Have you ever met people with “disaster mentality”? The ones who see every contretemps as the end of the world, always assume the worst, and have trouble seeing their way past their problems?

More often than not, these are people whose parents adopted the pernicious maxim that they should always present a common front in any problems with the child and never take the child’s side against each other. Such a child grows up thinking, “If Mommy is hurting me, I can’t even tell Daddy, he won’t listen”, or vice versa. Later in life, their first reaction to any problem is despondency and the desire to give up without even trying. In their world, there is no alternative to a bad scenario. Everything and everybody in the universe is allied against them. 

Parents who adopt this parenting strategy do so in order to prevent the child from manipulating them by setting one of them against the other. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it is all about protecting the parents from the child and setting the child up as their enemy. The child grows up with the belief that s/he is all alone in a battle against a hostile world and carries this attitude through his or her entire life.

I’m on bed rest and reading a novel by one Joel Decker purely for entertainment. The book does contain interesting insights, though. See this one:

We live in a society of defeated office workers, and to get ourselves out of this fix, we must fight – against ourselves and against the whole world. Freedom is a constant battle of which we are barely even aware.

This character is speaking about being a writer but isn’t this the greatest allure of academia, as well?

For the first time ever, I actually had to cancel classes because of being sick. I always come to work in any stage of illness because teaching actually helps me get better. But today I have no voice plus I know that the real reason why I’m sick is that I’m completely exhausted. If I push myself through 3 lectures today, I will make myself incapacitated for a much longer period of time.  Plus I’m coughing and sneezing, and students might catch whatever I’m having. It seems more practical and better for everybody for me to stay in bed for two days.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m racked with guilt over cancelling classes. I don’t know why I feel so horrible about it. I was going to cancel 3 days of classes to go to that conference in Montreal that fell through, and I never felt any guilt over it. This is very weird.

Also, I came out onto the porch and saw my handyman busily working on my house. I’m sick and I’m running a fever but I’m not sick enough to have forgotten asking him to come over and do any work. The handyman explained that he saw some things in need of improving and decided to take initiative. But if I didn’t want to pay for the work because I hadn’t asked him to do it, that would be totally fine.

Since then, he has knocked on the door twice to apologize some more. I guess he has feelings of guilt, too. Of course, I’m going to pay him, especially since we were going to ask him to do this work anyway, but I could do without people’s company today.

This is the absolute limit. Feministing published an article calling the woman who fed her daughter drugs to spare herself an inconvenience “somebody who should get every Mom of the Year Award ever.” I’m speechless. I mean, I lost my voice so I’d be speechless anyway but this is very shocking.

Parents who invade their children’s bodies, private space, life, everything are a dime a dozen. But since the word “abortion” appeared somewhere in the story, Feministing will count it as a huge victory for feminism.

If you haven’t been reading this blog for a long time, I want to reiterate that I fully support a woman’s right to control what happens inside her body at any point in time and in any circumstances. But only her own body, not her daughter’s, and definitely not to please some useless ne’er-do-well fella. Read the story in full to see what I mean.

I just discovered that one of this blog’s readers (and a very popular blogger) is a professor at one of the schools I interviewed with at the 2007 MLA.

This was an absolutely grueling interview. I had applied for pretty much all the jobs in existence (including a Yeshiva school in New York) just for the hell of it.

There was, however, a single state where I didn’t apply because I don’t want to live there for any amount of money. Of course, this just had to be a state that was offering dozens of jobs in my area that year. I wondered if I was making a mistake by ignoring this state so doggedly, thought and thought about it, and finally decided to apply to a single college in this state just to clear my conscience.

The interview was the longest of all MLA interviews I had during my two years at the job market. (Altogether I believe I had 17.) Everybody on the search committee was very obviously into me (as a candidate, I mean) except for this one Argentinean lady. Usually, Argentinean women love me. I have the same accent, the same rough and bossy style of communication as they do. But this woman detested me from the start. She probably had a candidate of her own she wanted to push through. And when an Argentinean woman sets her mind on something, she becomes a short-range missile.

For 2 hours I sat on the edge of a hotel-room bed, trying to keep my back straight and grabbing pathetically onto the sheafs of papers that I had brought to the meeting and that kept sliding off the bed. The entire time the Argentinean lady sneered, huffed and showed her extreme annoyance while her colleagues asked me every question imaginable to convince her I was a good candidate. This wasn’t even a job I wanted, so the aggravation wasn’t worth it. Obviously, I didn’t get a callback.

I have no idea why I decided to dredge this ancient memory from the dark recesses of my mind. I’m sick and running a fever, so I’m not in complete control of my faculties.

But wait, I know what the point I’m trying to make here is. Now that I discovered that one of this blog’s readers is a faculty member at that school, I will be able to see its name without a shudder. So yay for blogging!

I suffer so much because of the heat that when it gets colder I can’t make myself close the windows or dress in warmer clothes. So, of course, now I’m getting sick and losing my voice. Which will make the 3 lectures I have to give tomorrow very unpleasant for everybody involved.

Shit.

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