As it turned out,(almost) no one abandoned me because of my loss of faith in graduate study. Instead, my relational terror was replaced by an existential terror as I realized that all of those specialized topics we study so deeply for so long in graduate school are — for the most part — of zero interest to anyone else.

Maybe because you aren’t any good at it.

I’m so tired of all this hand-wringing about how nobody cares about our research or reads what we publish. It’s not in the least true. When I was writing my first book, I was taking a lot of Greyhound buses. And on a 38-hour trip you end up striking tons of conversations whether you want it or not. People always asked me what I did, and we had great conversations about it.

All that you need to get your research out to people is to stop thinking that you are such a special cookie whose profound ideas are inaccessible to the hoi polloi. Maybe the problem lies with the delivery and not with the audience.

Quitting graduate school is an entirely valid and wonderful life choice. Just like not quitting graduate school. And most people I know who made it know how to do it without shitting all over alternative choices. And hey, this isn’t even the worst quote I’ve chosen. It gets a lot worse later on in the essay.

I hate it when academics gleefully dedicate themselves to the cause of creating an ideological apparatus to support fluidity. I hate it that there is such an unthinking endorsement of fluidity. I hate it that the anti-capitalist bluster they so love is just a front for doing the work that advances the interests of capital.

As I shared before, the association for the scholars of female Hispanic literature has been renamed into Association for the Study of Genders and Sexualities. The only idea that has come out of the study of genders and sexualities is that both are fluid. So we are ditching the national literatures because there is a clear limit to fluidity there, and are moving into an area that does nothing but boringly repeat how great fluidity is.

Obviously, none of us know anything whatsoever about human sexuality beyond what a regular person does. We are not even remotely qualified to produce scholarship on the subject. All we can do is repeat how much we love the idea that it’s all fluid. But that’s the whole point. The task here is to normalize the idea that everything is fluid to the point that not even the physical reality of human biology can stand up to it. And if you can’t embrace that, then you are hopelessly behind the times.

People tell me I worry over nothing because it’s just a name. But I say, imagine people you are living with call you “Brilliant and Beautiful” for the next year. And now imagine they call you “Dumb Loser” for a year. Can anybody honestly say it would have no impact on them? (And those who would are immature poseurs who bore me.)

Klara’s pediatrician said, “I can see you put down here that she can climb the stairs up and down on her own. But you should still try to be with her when she does that because she’s still too little to do it without any supervision.”

And I’m like, lady, look in the chart. I gave birth to her when I was 39. It will be a good thing if I let her climb the stairs on her own when she’s sixteen.

Every tinpot dictator these days feels the need to play at democracy. Putin is so desperate to lure at least enough people to the polls to make the election look not totally pathetic. So he’s putting up announcements that promise basic good staples to be sold next to the voting booths at “social prices” (meaning very cheaply.)

Obviously, it’s the very poor that he wants to attract because they are in thrall to his anti-West bluster.

As the local rag said today, Putin truly turned Russia from a backwards nation into a world superpower.

Our university is interviewing a person for the position of the Labor Relations Director. The message she delivered to us is that “some of her best friends” are union people but it’s important to “treat workers well so they don’t need to unionize.” Given that we are all now unionized, the whole thing was quite bizarre.

The local paper published an article on Putin and how much he improved life in Russia. Because, apparently, the murder capital of the US doesn’t have anything more important to discuss than Putin’s idiotic propaganda.

Our sister university wants to merge School of Art and Design, School of Architecture, the School of Music, Department of Cinema and Photography, Department of Communication Studies, the School of Journalism, Department of Theatre and the Department of Radio, Television, and Digital Media into one school and call it “the School of Creativity.”

My sister and her daughter are visiting us for the spring break. We’ve been to a bunch of restaurants: Indian, generic Asian, Mexican, Panera, Applebee’s, and Japanese. Klara’s absolute favorite so far is the Japanese. I thought I’d do great at the Japanese, but I never noticed that all the sushi have avocado, which I’m not allowed to eat any more.

Somebody posted it on Twitter:

If universities were radical left-wing institutions there wouldn’t be wide-scale normalized exploitation of an entire class of precarious workers who are often produced by the university specifically to be exploited in this way. https://t.co/ELHshN8jj6

I’m putting this here because I keep ragging on Facebook but there is a medium that is even dumber and here it is. The format encourages smug, unthinking stupidity.

A brilliant, brilliant article on the nature of the Humanities in the Chronicle. Thank you, Fie, for the great link.

There is now a push to dispel the myth that everybody needs to go into STEM and that nobody wants to hire people who graduate with BAs in the Humanities. I’m getting interviewed for a podcast about this important new movement tomorrow.