A great question but why 7.5 months? The Great Lent does feel like it’s been going on that long but it hasn’t. Is it the academic year you mean? Yes, my patience and all other Christian virtues have been sorely tried this academic year. I’m counting days until April 26 when classes end. And to Holy Week because I need to get cleansed of all the accumulated garbage. And hubris. Everybody on here will be downright shocked but I am greatly afflicted by hubris.

In the past several months I have received confirmation that whatever you give, you receive tenfold. And it’s best to give in such a way that only you know.

I was at this DEI shindig where people had to declare their “intersectional positioning.” Everybody had to come up with statements like, “I’m a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, married, white person. This gives me racial, sexual, etc etc privilege.”

When my turn came, I said the following:

I’m trained to be a foreign language teacher, literary critic, and translator. No other part of my personality is for sale. I do not choose to enter my private life, health history, sexuality or anything else into the monetary exchange that my presence here constitutes. I am here to sell my labor for money and do nothing beyond that. Work has pushed its tentacles deep into our lives, infringing on our private time. I will not cede even more of myself to it.

People loved it. Feel free to use this text if you are forced to participate in this kind of event.

When I was a Soviet child, it was explained to me that I’m lucky because with my looks I can “pass” as a non-Jew. I’m not going to try to “pass” in the US, so now I wear this:

It’s been going on for over a decade. I posted something similar back in 2014.

One large reason to vote for Biden in November was that there were no riots during his presidency. There are now riots, so that reason is gone.

He was one of the most obnoxiously BLMy people out there. And I haven’t found where he retracted or did any soul searching about his complicity now that he is being BLMed.

If I’m wrong and he has retracted, I’ll be happy to apologize.

A sign of high intelligence is having “strong opinions loosely held.”

Less cognitively agile individuals find it incomprehensible how it’s possible to believe something passionately and argue it eloquently while being completely ready to relinquish it the moment new evidence appears.

Big Data overheats a PC340 from 1996.

I honestly don’t get it. Dude has a wonderful life. I’m older so I have a family plus mostly bring lunch from home but other than that, it’s what it looks like. And I’m loving it. Are they dunking on him because he’s unmarried? But his personal situation can be absolutely anything. We can’t know that from the video. Are the clothes supposed to be not right? The food? What are people finding so unusual?

Looks like a very positive, healthy, good fellow. I watched twice trying to understand the drama but no go.

The Zeitgeist is leaving me behind.

Ah, fine people on both sides. We are going in circles, my friends.

Now let’s make Biden disavow anti-Semites as many times as Trump had to disavow white supremacists. All other problems are solved, so let’s play the disavowal game.

Nobody asked this but I still want to ponder if going conservative was worth it.

I’m still in academia, and it’s very lonely. Whenever I’m in a room with people, they are together and I’m separate. They don’t know it, for the most part, but I do. I miss talking to colleagues. I miss having friends at work. I miss going to lunch or for coffee. But I can’t because we are not equal. They can say anything they want and I can’t. We have a “bias response team” that considers my beliefs bias but the opposing ones virtue.

On the positive side, I had the best time of anybody I know during COVID. I was unafraid and free. I can explore my curiosities without having to bring them into alliance with any sort of a party line.

Most importantly, I’m not confused like everybody else I know in academia. Like the professor of mathematics who is publicly yelled at and branded as a racist because most of the students who fail Calc I are black. Like the professor of Gender Studies whose organization removed the word “woman” from every communication. Like a friend from Romania who was booed by the students in his own classroom when he started answering a question about his experiences behind the Iron Curtain. Like a gay colleague who after a few drinks at a bar said, “I’m gay, I like dick” and is now shunned as a transphobe. Like a Jewish friend whose students organized a mass walk-out during her class on the Holocaust. These people are all so left-wing, it’s almost comical. And they don’t understand what they did wrong. My exclusion is voluntary and a result of a consciously made set of decisions. I don’t feel lost and betrayed. I left the group first and wasn’t kicked out against my will. And that’s a net positive.