Yes, kitchens that aren’t separated from living rooms are weird. I still can’t get used to them.

But the concept has an interesting history. Initially, such kitchen designs were considered a huge feminist advance. They allowed the person who cooked (and that was obviously almost always a woman) not to be isolated from the family while she was cooking. The sequence of “a woman goes into a kitchen => food magically emerges from said kitchen” was broken. Now everybody in the family could see how much work went into food preparation. Plus, a woman didn’t have to cook in silence (or while on the phone with another cooking woman.)

However, there was a negative side to this new design. It allowed and even promoted the brain-destroying, soul-crushing, concentration-slaughtering multi-tasking that leads so many women into anxiety and extreme exhaustion. Now that kitchen and living room were one, cooking was invariably combined with child-minding. So instead of a restorative activity based on a deep concentration, cooking became an exercise in trying to control several very different things simultaneously.

The result is that nobody wants to cook because it’s not even pleasant any more.

Another phrase that makes me feel the desire to get violent is, “they loved you the way they knew how.” Are people saying it maliciously because they know it’s going to wound, or are they that dumb?

The Russian language is very rich in offensive slang, so it’s next to impossible to recreate this in English, but there is a great expression to refer to the folks who want to stuff their positive thinking down your throat in the most inappropriate moments. We call them radiant pussy blowers.

And in a truly mind-warping development, the most progressive part of the population spent half the night pearl-clutching about how chivalry is dead and there is a husband on the planet who dared to not protect (sic!) his able-bodied, fully conscious wife from a drizzle.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

People often feel extreme anxiety when they see somebody achieving personal growth, gaining insight into their lives, and rebelling against those who beat them down and tried to destroy them.

The anxiety is fed by the realization that they have passively accepted the role of a perennial victim and are not fighting back. And hey, everybody is entitled to their own life strategy. Want to be a nice, convenient doormat because it’s easier and feels so familiar? Knock yourself out.

What bugs me is when the passively accepting begin to hound those who do try to fight and grow, drowning them in megaliters of poisonous molasses.

“Let go of your anger for your own sake!” they implore. “It’s such a hard burden to remember and to keep scores! You’ll feel at peace once you let it go!”

What they forget to mention is that the peace they extol is that of a small child who has renounced all growth to stay convenient and malleable.

God only knows how much I detest the “just forgive and forget” narrative that is used to club people over the head the second they try to lift it and get some fresh air.

This is seriously funny, folks.

So folks. Here is a really funny quiz that guesses your height and age based on the kind of guys you find attractive. It guessed my height perfectly but failed completely on the age. According to the quiz, I’m 28. I guess this is the age group that thinks Idris Elba, Gregory Peck and Robert Downey Jr are super attractive while Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney are hideous.

I already get $200 a month more on my paycheck because of the new tax bill and the consequent reduction in federal withdrawals. It’s the first “raise” I get in forever.

In the private sector, of course, it’s a lot better. N’s salary has grown by $35,000 since he started working at his company 7 years ago. (At his level, companies reward people who stick around.) I, on the other hand, got such a tiny bump with tenure that I barely noticed it.

I always wondered who the strange people are who come to Panera and order oatmeal. And just sit there, eating their oatmeal. Don’t they have oatmeal at home? Can they possibly love oatmeal so much that they prefer it to all the wonderful things one can get at Panera? The egg souffles alone make this an attractive place to go. And the Mediterranean flatbreads! The cheese pastries! The fresh baguettes!

And now I know that these sad folks are gastrointestinal (or maybe heart) sufferers who want to feel like they still can go out and enjoy a cafe just like everybody else.

Klara was playing with her Play-Doh yesterday.

“You made a sausage!” I exclaimed. “This looks like a sausage!”

“I make a snake, mommy,” she explained. “This is a snake. Sssssssss!”

Too much oatmeal makes everything look like a sausage.

I believe that worries about “assessment” in higher ed are exaggerated. I teach precisely at the kind of an underfunded regional school that the linked author mentions, and assessment is not a problem I face. I mean, my students either speak Spanish or not, so it’s not that hard to assess. We don’t let anybody graduate without writing and presenting a research essay in Spanish, and you simply can’t do that if you don’t have the language skills. We work with each student individually and very intensely, so there’s no chance they don’t present their own work.

I don’t think that everything needs to be utilitarian. Knowledge for its own sake is a great thing. But, folks, you still need to teach something. There’s got to be some understanding of who the students are and what they need.

Last semester, I’d come to one of my classes to find the board covered in the most inane and meaningless claptrap left over from the previous lecture about “intersectionally feminist and inclusive brown bodies.” Fifteen weeks of this crap, folks. Our students are not nearly rich enough to care about this ridiculousness. They laughed aloud whenever they saw the slogans on the board. I felt vicariously embarrassed for my colleague and angry on behalf of my students who are getting into debt so that an East Coast airhead can recite the mantra she learned at her expensive all-female college at them.

Students don’t know that Cuba is an island because nobody even tried to tell them. Maybe we should do that and teach them the names of continents before beginning to recite the slogans.

If people truly want to turn a college classroom into a haven of pure knowledge, they should stop talking about today’s politics in courses other than the ones titled Contemporary US Politics. It’s ridiculous that we keep harping on the importance of knowing fact from opinion yet we keep offering students our opinions by the bucketful.

When students ask me anything remotely political, I always answer that I have no professional training in any area but Hispanic Studies, so I’m unqualified to speak. I wish more people did this and kept their politics out of the classroom. There is zero excuse for talking about US gun control debates in a Calc I or Early Medieval History course.