And I’m home. Yay!

The hospital personnel allows people to keep their phones until the very moment they are carted off to the surgery room. I guess they understand they’ll need to call a psych team if they separate people from their devices long before they are knocked out by general anaesthesia.

Also, one would hope that a Humanities scholar, of all things, would be more aware of how neoliberal mentality manufactures human alienation and promotes the belief that everybody is your enemy, everybody is out to hurt you, nobody can be trusted, we are all isolated individuals who have to look out for themselves because community is dead. Maybe a good way to resist this mentality is not to assume that the colleagues who are interested in your career path are racist dipshits and to be a little more open to the possibility that they are simply being curious.

Yet the reality is that it’s precisely the Humanities folks who are eager to push the narrative that everybody is an evildoer on the lookout to sabotage you.

And of course, we experiencethe usual indignities of being a person of color: explaining for the umpteenth time why we are not teaching Chinese/Japanese/Korean or answering the variously inflected “How did you get into Italian?”

I get this question absolutely every single time I mention to absolutely anybody whatsoever that I teach Spanish. And I’m obviously not a person of color.

It is, indeed, quite unusual for a Ukrainian to teach Spanish or for an Asian person like the linked author to teach Italian. It is very boring to answer the same question thousands of times but I fail to see an evil intention behind it. Moreover, I’d also assume there is an interesting story behind, say, a Honduran or a Nigerian scholar teaching Ukrainian and I would be interested in hearing it.

What’s especially ironic is that I was signed up for a productivity bootcamp that was to start precisely at the time I have to leave for the surgery.

It’s as if fate were saying, “No productivity for you, lady!”

I took an Oxy and now have a hard time figuring out what is real. For instance, I just got an email from Uber with the subject line “Drag Shows on Demand Return.” I love drag shows with an uncommon passion but I can’t figure out what Uber has to do with them. Do they deliver performers in their cars, and if so, where do I sign up?

God, I miss drag shows. For some reason, I only ever watch them in Toronto.

Yes, I’m loopy. My surgery had to be rescheduled to tomorrow because I was in great pain, so I bought a thousand-page true crime novel to entertain me in recovery.

Deneen says in his book that the greatest threat to the environment is that liberalism* transformed the meaning of freedom. From the original meaning of “cultivating oneself with the goal of not being enslaved by one’s appetites” freedom acquired the opposite meaning of “recognizing no constraints on the satisfaction of one’s boundless appetites.”

As students learn on the first day of class in Economics 101, human needs are endless and can never be satisfied. Humans will not stop wanting to consume more until they eat up the whole planet. Deneen says that the only thing that will help the environment is for people to accept that the greatest freedom is not to desire endlessly but to be free from the tyranny of unbounded desires.

* Obviously, he doesn’t mean liberalism in the narrow US sense of “whoever opposes the US Republicans” but in the wider sense of the great emancipatory project that began in the 18th century and that aimed to liberate humans from political tyranny (think modern democracy), tyranny of nature (think antibiotics, heating, the AC), tyranny of their their bodies (think birth control, modern dentistry, reproductive assistance), etc.

Mr. Trump is now threatening to tax nearly the total value of goods — more than $505 billion — that China sent to the U.S. last year. His stance has drawn a rebuke from retailers, tech companies and manufacturers.

Environmentalists should be peeing themselves with delight. This is the biggest thing that happened to advance their cause in forever. Consumer goods prices go up, people are forced to buy less, and reduce the speed at which they are devouring the planet.

Obviously, this would be an unintended effect, but who cares? The important thing is that nobody has come up with anything else that stands the slightest chance of curbing consumption.

Please share.

I’m having an outstanding year so far with my reading choices. There has been a couple of losers but overall I’ve discovered some amazing books this year.

I ask Klara, “Do you get time-outs at school?”

“No, mommy!” she says indignantly. “I’m not a boy. I’m a girl. Time-outs are for boys.”

I hope everybody realizes that I didn’t teach her this particular gender difference. This is a product of her observations.

This is the promised post on different stages of academic life.

Graduate student. The main big thing that differentiates a graduate student from an undergrad is that nobody babies and praises you all the time any more. As a talented undergrad, it’s easy to stand out but in grad school you need to rely on internal motivation a lot more. And it’s hard to relinquish the addiction to praise and to being celebrated like an uncommonly amazing creature. Plus, the time is a lot less structured and it’s a lot lonelier. So you have to become inward-oriented, and if what’s inside isn’t capable of giving much joy, misery begins. That’s why many grad students are depressed. They’ve been left alone with what’s inside, and it’s not that amazing.

Tenure-track. The difficult thing about tenure-track is the sudden autonomy. Now if you didn’t bother to study the operational papers before your third year on the TT, it’s your problem. If you banked on a book and forgot to publish articles, ditto. When I first created my own syllabi as a professor, I brought them to the chair so that she could tell me if they were ok. She refused to look at them and said, “If I hired you, it means I trust you to do your own teaching as you see fit.” That was a great professional lesson for me.

Tenured. I discovered that the way to be happy as a tenured professor is to stop seeing everything as being about you. During the tenure-track, you had to prove yourself, demonstrate that you are a worthy colleague, a great teacher, a productive scholar, etc. After tenure, it’s time to get more outward-oriented again but in an adult way. You have to start mentoring, running scholarly organizations or projects, looking at what’s good for the field or the profession, helping others, etc. It’s time to become a figure of authority and not just somebody who is still trying to prove themselves like a confused, underappreciated kid.

Every stage brings a different degree and kind of autonomy, and that can be a great thing if you are ready for it.