In order to accomplish everything I need to get done tomorrow, I should be setting out for work now. The beginning of the semester just wouldn’t end.

If you are translating a text from English into Russian and are charging per word, does it make more sense for you financially to base the word count on the source text or on the translation? Explain your answer.

A battalion of Russian troops was captured by the Ukrainian army in Ukraine. When presented with this incontrovertible evidence of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the Russian government explained that the soldiers ended up in Ukraine by mistake. They just lost their way, the Russian military officials say.

I rarely agree with Russian officials but this statement rings very true. Russians have really lost their way.

I’m at a loss about what to do for my Housewarming Party. I will have a house full of hungry academics, and I have no idea what to serve them. We are in the midst of an overpowering, tropical, extremely humid heat wave. And I can’t think of any dishes that won’t be too heavy in this weather. I do best with frosty-weather dishes.

Does anybody have any suggestions? But please don’t say gazpacho because I hate cold soups. And I don’t want to serve anything people might splash all over my new furniture.

Crowds of self-righteous white people are piling on the black reporter John Eligon for mentioning, in a beautiful and poignant article on Michael Brown, that Michael “was no angel.” They seem to think that being non-racist involves believing that black people are obligated to be angelic if they want to stay alive.

Jonathan Mayhew wrote a brilliant post on the Steven Salaita affair that everybody should read. Here is the most salient point:

People defending him because they agree with his perspective, or attacking him because they don’t, are putting forward irrelevant information. In other words, you should put it in the form of a hypothetical: a faculty member was hired, quit his previous job, and moved, and then had the appointment canceled because of tweets about X (where X is an unknown variable.) What do you think? Your opinion should not change after you discover the content of the tweets.

This is absolutely spot-on and it’s also how I approached the situation. I only now found out what the tweets in question actually said, and I believe their content is irrelevant to the issue. It is not a university’s place to police tweets, Facebook pages, Tumblrs, and blogs. Especially while there are shameless plagiarists who are in no way persecuted for plagiarizing among the faculty members at some institutions of higher learning. In short: universities, get your noses out of Twitter and start reading books already!

I also agree with Jonathan that “Salaita is a foolish anti-semitic blowhard who should sue the pants of UIUC.” His tweets are those of a raging anti-Semite. However, I don’t see why the entire academic community everywhere should be punished for Salaita’s personal bigotry, which is exactly what will happen if it becomes normal to castigate scholars academically for what they do outside of academia. While Salaita’s unhinged outpourings offend my sensibilities as a Jew and a normal person, the precedent set by UIUC can damage me and the entire academic community in a much more tangible way. 

There must be a reason why the books I need at the library are always located on the very bottom shelf, forcing a corpulent middle-aged lady in a summer dress to lie on the floor and make a total spectacle out of herself to reach them.

On the positive side, I just discovered that an article of mine was cited in a dissertation written in Catalonia. And if I make an effort, I can actually figure out what is being said.

I’m really shocked by the students this semester. Not only are they scarily good with a very high degree if linguistic sophistication (all if my courses are taught in Spanish this semester), but they are also extremely engaged and excited by the course material. I can literally feel them hanging on my every word. This gets to the point where I fear that what I have to impart will not rise to the level of their expectations.

And I just saw a group of my students get together after class to read medieval Spanish poetry collectively.

I made a joke about students throwing parties to go over conjugations of Spanish verbs and I get a feeling these students might just do that.

The reviewers of my sabbatical application are saying that I’m making a mistake in offering very ambitious promises of what I will achieve as a result of my sabbatical. They say that it’s better to promise less as a sort of an insurance policy in case I don’t manage to finish what I planned.

My plan is to finish the second book by the end of the sabbatical. Of course, I’m not planning to write the entire book during the sabbatical. That would be really insane, even for me. The truth is that I am already writing the book. I have a new Seinfeld chain and I get up at 7 am every day to write before work. I have done massive research and have an annotated bibliography with quotes I will use culled out. This bibliography / collection of quotes is 49 pages long and growing. 

The reason why I’m making my plan to finish the first draft of the book by the end of 2015 official is that I need to have an official deadline in place to keep myself accountable and not get distracted by the endless temptations to read just one more book or article before I continue writing. I don’t really care – and never did – about the formalities of sabbaticals, tenure, merit reviews, full professorships, etc. It’s nice to have them, but that’s not what I’m about. I’m writing this book because I need it. And I don’t want to fail because it will be my personal failure, not because the university administration will be on my case if I don’t do what I promised in the sabbatical application.

Am I crazy, though? Should I listen to the wise, older colleagues and tone down my wild promises?