Yes, this will be about Joyce Maynard. I’m going to make a point at the end of this, though, so stay with me.

Maynard was born to be a mother. She thrived on motherhood. Most importantly, she knew this about herself since her teenage years and tried to engineer her life in a way that would let her have many children. I’m even more into mom stuff but I only discovered this at age 40, so that was that for me.

In any case, Maynard managed to wrangle the permission to have three children out of her husband Steve. It took an extraordinary amount of begging, crawling on her knees, all sorts of horrid stuff. After three kids, he adamantly refused to have more.

But then.

Steve waited until his wife got menopausal, found a younger, fresher woman, dumped Maynard (yes, in that order), and…

… yes, he proceeded to have more children with the new wife.

All this drove Maynard to near insanity, and all the crackpot things she did next stemmed from that.

In any case, here’s the point I want to make.

Maynard made a living in the 1980s by being what today we know as a Mommy blogger. There was no Internet, the field wasn’t oversaturated, and you could make a decent wage without doing fake poseurish stuff to exploit your own children by making them into little social media props. Maynard would spend her week with her kids, then write a weekly column about it, and make enough not to live in luxury but to live normally. The point of her columns wasn’t to pretend that she was some paragon of fake motherly perfection but, to the contrary, to talk about the normal, frequent, and inevitable frustrations of being a mother. Her Mommy blogging was not aspirational and competitive but relatable and kind.

This is an area of life where technology didn’t do us any favors. Mommy blogging is oversaturated, and authors have to get increasingly fake and outrageous in their artificial perfection to attract attention. Maynard’s Mommy blogging was sincere, humble and well-written. In the absence of photos, she created imagery with words. Technology is fantastic in many ways but in this one, it impoverished our reality.

Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Phil Jones describes the transformation of the concept of work in neoliberal times. Microwork, gig work, Uber, Fiver, remote work, offshoring, and outsourcing are robbing many of us of stable careers and plunging us into badly paid, uncertain, unreliable gigs.

This is a very important subject, and Jones describes the phenomenon well. There are even a couple of interesting turns of phrase that he comes up with. He says, for instance, that microwork is increasingly gamified, and as a result, in order to get paid for the work he already performed, a worker has to gain bonus points and reach competency levels. As a result, Jones says, what used to be a wage becomes a wager. That is well-said and very true.

Still, the book is mostly a wasted opportunity. Jones describes the situation carefully and the description is good and useful. But every time he tries to analyze what he observed, he runs into a huge obstacle. Jones is very left-wing. He can’t allow himself to see how his own ideology is at the root of the destruction of work, security, safety, and welfare. Whenever time comes to draw conclusions on the basis of the information he gathered, Jones veers off into empty sloganeering. This is a short book, yet he somehow manages to recite every lefty slogan in existence. Climate change, BLM, defund the police, poor persecuted Palestinians, white ethnonationalists, defund ICE, fascist Trump, evil white men, poor persecuted gang members, racism, sexism, something-phobia.

In the absence of ideas of his own, Jones attacks Yarvin and Land. It’s become the favorite pastime of the intellectually impoverished left to express contempt for Yarvin whom they never even attempted to read. The problem is, Jones is a prisoner of such a rigid ideology that he can’t come up with any counterargument. All he does is the standard leftist practice of name-calling. Proto-fascist! Ethno-Nazi! But we’ve heard all this so often that it lost all power to make an impression. The only unexpected thing here was that Jones placed Narendra Modi on the list of proto-fascists. Why Modi had to be rubbished when really evil politicians weren’t even mentioned is a mystery.

Jones’s solution to the problem of job scarcity? Brace yourselves because this one is a doozy.

“A world where a hundred sexes bloom.”  Because right now we are experiencing “gender scarcity.” Meaning, there are not enough genders.

By all means, let’s criticize Yarvin’s thought but it’s best to leave people who believe there are too few genders out of a task so arduous for their overstrained brains.

The rest of Jones’s prescriptions include embracing some form of communism, making sure men do dishes as often as women, and assigning jobs collectively.

Leftism, ladies and gentlemen. A place where any semblance of thought goes to die a sad and gruesome death.

Americans are very endearing people. I’m preparing for a surgery tomorrow (prayers appreciated), and the pre-op instructions say, “using a washcloth, wash yourself from the neck down with antibacterial soap. Do not use your favorite washcloth because the solution can leave brown stains.”

The idea that a person might have a favorite washcloth gave me a huge cuteness attack.

The absolute degradation of the famous Russian ballet is shocking. Two ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theater perform the same dance. One is from back in the Soviet times, dancing beautifully at the age of 43. The second is 27 and is dancing today. She’s clearly a pathetic hack. How did she end up as the Bolshoi prima, then?

It’s simple. Her father is one of Putin’s cronies.

You don’t have to be a ballet connoisseur (I’m not) to see the difference:

Слева – знаменитая "Тарантелла" в исполнении великой советской балерины Екатерины Максимовой.
Справа – ровно тот же самый танец, который теперь на сцене Большого исполняет балерина Мария Шувалова.

Просто сравните.
Это небо и земля.
К тому же, Максимовой на кадрах 43, а… pic.twitter.com/aL1GhJWVsV

— Проф. Преображенский (@prof_preobr) April 2, 2025

Yes, the geriatric looking one is actually 15 years younger.

When I was in elementary school, my mom started going blind. Retinitis pigmentosa. No family history. No treatments. No cure.

I got lucky. She didn’t. It led me to build @OrchidInc so my baby —and everyone else's—gets to win the genetic lottery—avoid blindness— and hundreds of… pic.twitter.com/QPYC2FxmS7

— Noor Siddiqui (@noor_siddiqui_) April 1, 2025

This is a horrible idea that needs to be outlawed. Strangely, the opponents of eugenics are cheering on this abomination.

Once this practice becomes widespread, it will be easy to deny healthcare to people born normally  on the basis that it’s their parents’ fault for not engineering away any possible illness pre-birth.

That people even consider such a possibility shows how badly their brains have been eaten by hubris and consumerism. Banning every mishap and unpleasantness from life is impossible. Attempts to do so, to reverse the very nature of human experience will have terrible consequence.

How come she’s adult enough to have a husband but not adult enough to see something so obvious?

Speaking of understanding social cues, what does it mean when a man and a woman have an intensely and weirdly emotional reaction to each other? Call Sherlock, there’s a mystery afoot.

No, not really, because it always means the same thing.

Our regulations specify that faculty members should be given time to express their opinions about budget cuts and layoffs. Administration always comes up with tricks to eat into that time so that it’s wasted and people don’t get to speak. The funny thing about this primitive strategy is that it keeps working.

Yesterday, for example, we had 45 minutes allocated to people representing three programs that are being eliminated. Fifteen minutes each. The Dean started the meeting saying that he wanted to make just one little comment about the terrible suffering of trans people at the hands of the Trump administration.

And guess what?

Everybody bought into it. Everybody. For the next 30 minutes, people ranted and raved about federal politics.

In the last 15 minutes, I made my statement, asked my questions, and received useful information. The other two programs didn’t get to speak about their issues at all. They had swallowed the bait and used their precious time to rant about illegal migrants in Guantanamo.

You can’t help trans people or Guantanamo convicts by prattling about them at a work meeting. But you can help your colleagues and your program. Or you can be tricked into gushing out your energy and sacrificing your time.

While everybody yelled excitedly about Trump’s policies, I wrote down a plan for the next segment of the chapter I’m working on. As a result, my 45 minutes were extremely productive. I got to work on my research project and wheedled out of the Dean some useful points to give to my union rep who is helping me write a response to the administration.

This is what I keep saying about being emotionally undisciplined. Our administrators go to business workshops where they learn to use these tricks. These mechanisms are created to work on gushy, twitchy victims who have no idea how easy they make it to exploit them.

And it’s not only at work. This happens everywhere. People jump up at down on cue, giving in to every attempt to milk them for emotion.

I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the only two departments scheduled for elimination are chaired by the only two people who, constantly and consistently, oppose DEI measures.

Also, not a department but a program in Music is being eliminated. It must be an equal coincidence that it is directed by the strongest defender of labor rights on campus.

The three of us are the loudest opponents of the administration at the university. It’s impossible to persecute us individually because one is an immigrant, another a Muslim, and the third a lesbian. So our positions are made redundant.

Again, a total coincidence.

In the meantime, Colorado is trying to push through the following bill:

Section 2 provides that, when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.

Sections 8 and 9 define deadnaming and misgendering as discriminatory acts in the “Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act”, and prohibit these discriminatory acts in places of public accommodation.

Please think back about everything I said regarding the “second constitution” created by the Civil Rights legislation and how it erases the protections offered by the actual constitution. According to this new legislation, citizens will be stripped of their freedom of speech protections. Calling Julie “Julie” and referring to her as “she” will become a Civil Rights violation. This opens absolutely anybody to being persecuted on Civil Rights violations.

There is absolutely no way to avoid these situations cropping up and mushrooming unless the second constitution is abolished. We have no constitutional rights at all if something as simple as saying “he” can make us legally liable.

I still have one year left as department Chair but I’m being deposed and the department is being merged with English. I’m supposed to fight to save the department, and I am but the anticipatory joy of no longer being Chair after June 30 is intoxicating. Not having to care about anybody else’s enrollments except for my own would be wonderful. Or anybody else’s problems of any kind.

I’m trying to make myself so odious to the administration that they will welcome me stepping down as Chair prematurely even if the department is preserved. As everybody here on the blog understands, antagonizing the administration is one of my biggest skills in life.