On Protocol

If during graduate school you lost a TAship at your institution; if you have now tried everyone’s patience here; if you are now being allowed to take certain classes so you can earn a professional qualification in another field; please do not address the professor who is kindly but painedly showing you how to register [...]

Preparing for Third Year Review

That Blackguard has asked me what will happen at third year review. He was not interested in my answer, however, because he believes the public university which awarded him his degree is several tiers better than the one that awarded me mine (the University of California at Berkeley).  In addition, I work at this university, [...]

Le Travail

I now do nothing but work, and I still need to step it up further. I understand at last those people who say they do not care where they live or how they dress because all they do is work. I am not convinced the lack of recreation will be good for work on a [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: The Glass Menagerie

I am reading The Glass Menagerie and it is heart rending. I am also reading excellent poems and seeing excellent videos for class, but I Tweeted some of them to my IRL Twitter account, and put others on class websites.
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I removed Reeducation, whose idea was that one should not control one’s life. Now I am [...]

Mais, pourquoi?

If you are foreign and it is the birthday of your father, who lives several time zones away, you may ceremoniously excuse yourself from a meeting early to call him. Then everyone knows that you are a virtuous son and a person with important calls to make.
If you are native or perhaps a foreigner from [...]

On Getting By

With some effort — not inordinate effort, mind you, but some — I have put together a two year long speaker series for my other department. That is eight outside speakers a year, four per semester, for two years, for a program that has no budget of its own.
I have done this for the sake [...]

Oxalá

Whiteman (lecturing severely): At third year review, you will not just be reviewing me — I will be reviewing you. By that time I expect you to overhaul the undergraduate curriculum to my taste, add a new graduate program and have housed in the department an additional journal. If you have not provided these things [...]

In Which I Request Your Opinions

I am the only person typing at the outdoor tables on the Glorieta de Bilbao in Madrid. My hair is brown and my shirt is pale green. Walk up and say hello if you are here, because I have been outed.
Should I mark this blog as private? Or what? If I did not check my [...]

Lime

If I put lime on anything I am instantly transported to Latin America, where Reeducation does not reach me. I think I shall put lime on everything, every day, in addition to expanding myself through yoga.
I have said it before but it is ever clearer to me how Reeducation insisted on the establishment of a [...]

On Recrimination

It was also the recrimination, which I had resisted so far but which Reeducation finally drummed into my pores, that made it so hard to work. A year or two later a friend mentioned that he was trying to stop “yelling at himself” and I realized it was what Reeducation had taught me to do. [...]