Sometime in 2011 or 2012, I bought a Jo Malone perfume. This is a brand that specializes in interesting, unusual scent combinations. I really loved my scent but then, for a variety of reasons, I moved on and didn’t buy from this brand again.

Then last November I passed by a Jo Malone stand in Montreal and saw that they had new, attractive fragrances. I went over many of them and chose one that I really liked. N gave it to me for Christmas.

Today I was looking for something and found the old bottle from my 2011 Jo Malone perfume. It was the exact same scent I selected 12 years later.

There were all those options but, without wanting to, I went with the same old one. I’m telling you, people, I have a rigid, rigid brain that needs to get exercised to avoid getting completely ossified.

Pardon the long quote but every word of this screed is priceless:

15 yo daughter returned to school this semester to grab some credits that are trickier to get with homeschooling

Some regular school stuff, from her perspective really does seem absurd:
– have to ask for permission to read, pee or close eyes?
– have to show steps in math, but it’s their steps?
– cannot drink water in specific areas of the school hallways?
– can’t leave the school at lunch for a walk outside?
– teacher can yell at kids?
– staying seated for 7 hours?
– everyone sad and gloomy?

And a whole lot more. Needless to say she’s already got a reprimand for refusing to present ID to a teacher who scolded her in the hallways for drinking from her bottle

https://twitter.com/MamanLunettes/status/1745520308428124304?t=ULwVoFmOvvROQc3bTazhAQ&s=19

Oh what a joy this VSC (Very Special Cookie) will be in the workplace. And in society at large.

I see VSCs all the time. Parents never took the trouble of socializing them because that’s onerous and unpleasant. Socialization means teaching a child to self-contain and accept the multitude of social limitations and demands as not only normal but good. And if you are aiming for psychological health, pleasant. We self-contain physically, as in learning not to pee if circumstances are not propitious. (I don’t interrupt my activity to pee when I teach or give a talk). We also self-contain emotionally and learn the difference between “everybody is gloomy” and “everything seems gloomy to me because I’m unequipped to deal with the situation.”

Socialization is the unpleasant part of parenting. The child doesn’t like it but you know you have to do it. Or you pretend you don’t, like the quoted mom.

The number of students I’m seeing who are incapable of following simple directions is enormous. They will take so much longer to be successful in the workplace because this skill, which had to be taught in childhood, remains undeveloped. The girl in the linked tweet is posing, of course, in order to please mom. But her capacity to self-edit to be part of a working group is already atrophied. Forget the capacity to feel joy when encountering a new environment. That never even made an appearance.

The one that really got to me is “have to show steps in math but it’s their steps.” I mean, oooh, you don’t say, Very Special Cookie. This is only the definition of working life. That’s what people get paid money for. No matter how many degrees they have or what great talents they possess, people do what they are told. And it’s OK.

Gosh, forget the working life. Imagine a person like this trying to form a family. With a baby, you really don’t pee until the baby is ready for you to pee. You eliminate the spice from your cooking because the husband has a sensitive stomach. You play Magic Mixies for two hours straight even though you are decades past the age where you could appreciate the pastime.

In short, this is not about schools. It’s about parents who want to avoid unpleasantness and end up raising children who are unable to control their raging Special Cookieness. When kids come to the house, I immediately see who’s getting socialized and who isn’t. They all go to the same school, so it’s always the reflection of the parents’ approach. For instance, some kids ask for a snack in polite, complete sentences. Others open the refrigerator and start rummaging there without saying a word. Some look around to see where we leave shoes and put theirs in that place. Others just fling their boots around wherever it pleases them. And it’s the same basic lesson that the 15-year-old in the linked story hasn’t been taught: when you come to a new environment, observe, learn, adapt, and be sincerely cheerful about it.

Percentage of US births to unwed mothers:

Blacks, 77%
Hispanics, 57%
Hispanic immigrants, 49%
Black immigrants, 34%
Whites, 30%
Asians, 27%
White immigrants, 13%
Asian immigrants, 11%

“Have you been learning about Martin Luther King Jr at school?” I ask Klara.

“Yes, but only about the big one.”

“What do you mean?”

“We learned about the big one, mommy. Not the little one.”

“So what did you learn about ‘the big one’?”

“He criticized the church’s beliefs about purgatory, mommy. Didn’t you know about this?”

A real-world riddle.

A woman married to another woman is raising a child she had with “a gender-fluid donor.”

What’s her job? Meaning, what field of human endeavor does she work in?

Nah, you normie. Wrong guess.

She’s a rabbi.

“Who sold the first American weapons to Ukraine? President Trump – Javelins,” [Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Minister] Kuleba said. “Who started the program of free transfer of the first naval vessels, Island and Mark-6 type boats to Ukraine? Trump. Who fought Nord Stream 2 and sanctioned the famous but now forgotten Russia’s Fortuna vessel that laid this pipeline? It was Trump.”

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-praised-first-us-weapons-sale-ukraine-1857509

All true. This is almost enough to get me to forgive the immigration fail, the Fauci debacle and the BLM enabling. Almost.

Trump was always good to Ukraine but a lot less good to Americans. I can’t completely disregard that.

My students invariably assume that in every conflict the US was on the side of evil. Fifteen years ago, it was the exact opposite but it’s been steadily going in the direction of always reflexively condemning the US.

It’s gotten to the point where in the most recent winter semester 2 students informed me that in WWII the United States fought on Hitler’s side. When I asked “so whom did the Nazi Germany and the US fight against?”, they were completely stumped. This is a generation that has the vaguest possible knowledge about the USSR and is invariably shocked to discover it participated in WWII.

But forget students. How many adults in the US automatically support whatever side of a conflict detests their country the most? The entirety of many people’s opinion about the world can be summarized as “US bad; its enemies good.”

This is an expression I simply hate. It always conceals an intention to increase immigration. What I want is a complete ban on processing immigration claims of people who are in the US illegally. This is a simple, cheap and fast method to stop torturing both the US and Central America.

Any politician who uses this expression should be boycotted.

DeSantis should drop out. This is painful to observe. He’s a great governor. He shouldn’t be soiling his record with this exercise in ineptitude.

Here’s another interesting question from the anonymous app:

Thing is, I’m not seeing that. My most curious, sensitive and deep-thinking students tend to double-major in Spanish and computer-sci, Spanish and Chemistry, Spanish and pre-med. The students (always male) who’ll show up at my office to talk about poetry, history, and society are pretty much all future programmers. A new computer-sci major came today, and by the look of it, I’ll see him in my office now constantly. They are all very interesting guys with a wide range of interests.

Curiously, the discipline that absolutely despises foreign languages is English lit. English majors never take our courses beyond the required Beginner level. A double major in English and Spanish is more rare than a giraffe in the Arctic.

And this is completely off-topic but it’s very sad that female students never go to professors’ offices just to chat. I go down the hallway and see a male student chatting with a prof in every other office. Female students will only come with some nitpicky question about a grade but it’s the beginning of the semester, so grade worries haven’t begun.

I literally remember the last time I had a female student show up to express her thoughts about philosophical issues. It was 2011, she was older than me, and had a schizoaffective disorder.

Getting back to the subject, my husband is a quant. The friend I’m the closest to here is a Computational Chemistry professor. And the colleague who drives the whole campus crazy with philosophical musings is a physicist. Maybe I’m very lucky but I’m not seeing one-dimensional, boring science people.

We also have some great science types participating on the blog, by the way.