Clarissa's Blog

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone! Whether you are one or have one, it’s our day to celebrate. We are at a church banquet and then going to the mall. You just can’t get any more American.

Life is good.

I wasn’t going to go to the graduation ceremony because I’m tired. But a student who is blind asked me to help her walk across the stage, and of course I agreed. I’m very glad that I went because something really exotic happened at this graduation. I have now been to probably over 30 of these ceremonies, and I never observed anything like this.

The valedictorian was a white male student who started his speech by saying that the most important thing in his life is his Christian faith.

Yes, really. I’m completely sober and wide awake. It really did happen.

This valedictorian was such an all-American young man. A star baseball player, from a large family, deeply religious, and graduating in mechanical engineering. He said that we should not look for the meaning of life in material possessions, worldly success, or academic achievements. It is in our faith in God and in our love for our family that meaning can be found.

No, I’m not crying. You are crying.

My Ukrainian colleagues attended the woke film festival organized by my department. The very first movie they showed was a slobbering, badly made documentary about how cruel it is to report illegal immigrants. It was completely dumb and failed even to try to make a coherent case.

The Ukrainian colleague was stunned to see that the viewers were in raptures over the movie. One professor said, while almost choking on his tears, that it was one of the most powerful experiences of his life. The Ukrainian colleague was confused because she knows this professor as an intelligent man with a good taste. So the next day she approached him in his office.

“Professor, can you explain to me what you liked about the movie? Because I honestly don’t get it,” she said.

“Oh, the movie is crap,” the professor answered.

“But you spoke so positively about it at the showing. Why do that if you didn’t like it?”

“Well, this is American academia,” the professor explained. “We are supposed to agree on certain political points and say that loudly as often as we can.”

It’s a bad movie, my friends. It’s boring, the animation is primitive and ugly, everything that made Orwell’s book powerful was removed. Orwell wrote an anti-Stalinist novel but this rendering turned into a confused, weak-sauce series of vignettes with no organizing idea.

It’s Animal Farm for 3-year-olds with a dramatically dumbed down plot and not a flash of originality or anything that would make you think about anything. Slop, pure and simple. It’s all fart jokes and soppy sentimentality.

I announced to Klara that Orwell was a great writer who wrote real literature, so thank you, creators of the movie, for downgrading the concept of real literature like this.

All of a sudden, every ad I get on YouTube is for HRT. I don’t know where to go and what button to press to inform the ad agency that I am the absolute last person on the planet ever to be in the same room with HRT.

When I say this kind of thing, people immediately assume that I judge them for taking HRT. But I judge no one. People have their own situation, physical condition, moral, religious, and political beliefs. And that is completely fine by me. I find incomprehensible the idea that the female body is so immediably broken that it has to be constantly medicated out of its natural state. Other people conceptualize this differently and, once again, it’s fine. I have noticed that nothing creates so much resentment as the suspicion that you might want to separate people from their medication. I don’t want to do that. But I do find it entertaining that, once the algorithm shows you have hit a certain age, it begins to operate under the assumption that you’re a good customer for this medication.

I don’t know if people are aware, but some of these ads state very directly that without HRT you’re going to die. You’re going to have a heart attack, you’re going to go into kidney failure, your children might be adults but they still need you. Since these are social media ads, they never mention the risks or the side effects. The whole thing makes a sad impression.

Yesterday I solved two issues at work, very elegantly and fast. It’s sad to think that, once I stop being Department Chair, all of the expertise that I accumulated in the past 6 years will go nowhere. The new person will have to figure everything out from scratch. Of course, I explained the basics, but things come up every day that are new and unpredictable. You need to know whom to contact and what procedure to follow to get them solved.

There are people who are lifelong Department Chairs because “nobody else wants to do it.” I would never agree to such an arrangement, and I am happy that in six weeks I will move away from this appointment for good. There are great positives in moving on. For instance, all of the other Chairs are being forced to undergo a mental health specialist certification. It’s a terribly bad idea but people are not extremely smart, so they are agreeing to participate. I no longer need to care about their idiocy because from now on I am once again responsible only for myself. I can chart my own strategy and will not have to spend much time around people who are not students at all.

“Mommy, our teacher is very grim. She keeps telling us how white people used to hurt black people. She has many stories like that.”

“What do you do when she tells the stories?”

“We just sit there being white.”

The cat likes no human food except for parm crisps. As I found out to my detriment as I sat holding a parm crisp in my hand. She snuck up on me and extracted it in one fluid motion. I’ve tried her on all sorts of things. Pieces of meat, chicken, sour cream, potato peels.

What? Ukrainian cats are often into potato peels.

Nothing interested her, though, except for these parm crisps.

I’m not sure how to interpret this finding.

By the way, we are doing a great job slimming her down. She came to us obese but we are slowly getting her to a healthier weight. We took her in for claw trimming today, and the vet was very impressed by our progress.

No, I don’t trim claws and I resent the suggestion that I could engage in such an act. I almost caught a heart attack stuffing her into the carrier today.

Yesterday the Provost came to the Faculty Senate and, for once, she had a great suggestion. We have an online system for curriculum and program changes. It works at a glacial pace. People wait for years for their paperwork to move through the system. Finally, the university decided to ditch the clunky thing and introduce another system next Fall.

In the meantime, the Provost proposed that we form a committee that will work in the summer and move all of the proposals that are currently stuck in the system at an accelerated pace. She even proposed to pay extra money to people who would do this work. I perked up because imagine how great that would be? All the multi-year backlog cleared so that we can start over with a clean slate in the new academic year. Plus, people would get paid to do this work over the summer. What’s not to like? I have a proposal that has languished in the system since 2023. There are 13 (I kid you not) levels of review in there, and my proposal is at level 9 currently.

The Provost needs the Faculty Senate to approve the expedited procedure for this to happen. But guess what? People shouted down this idea. It’s too fast, it’s too unexpected, we need to “have conversations” about it. Most people aren’t on contract in the summer, so there won’t be any conversations. The proposals will not go through.

“I want to make this easier for you guys,” the Provost said bleakly. “I found money to pay the summer stipends. Can’t we agree to do it just this once?”

But no, we can’t.

The entire time I’ve worked here, people have been complaining about the slowpoke system that is supposed to process these proposals. Finally, we get a chance to get it all done. And … they refuse.

In January of 2021, a prospective student wrote to me to ask which of our courses she could take remotely. I gave her a list. She decided not to apply.

Today she wrote to me with the same question about online courses. I replied that there aren’t any. The prospective student is incensed.

“I don’t understand what changed,” she wrote. “Why was it possible back then but not now?”

Yes, it’s a mystery. What could have possibly changed since January of 2021?