No Rest for the Weary

In which your humble narrator realizes that he has spoken too soon.

Apparently one of our former Republican legislators who found himself out of job when the Pawlenty administration closed up shop managed to have himself appointed a Regent of the University in addition to his part-time gig in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.*

From Tim Post's piece at MPR:

"At today’s board meeting Sviggum apologized to his new colleagues for putting them in an awkward position.  But he told them he didn’t think his work as an instructor and a regent would conflict."

Oh, gosh no. Just take his word for it.

I'm begging you University, please stop. I'd like to go back to writing about my kids' insanity, snot and verbal abilities some time soon.

*Where he pulls in 80k per year. Part time. 

More Woes at The U

In which your humble narrator wonders what embarrassment to expect next.

It continues to be a lousy week at the University of Minnesota. I mean on top of previous issues.

Big budget cuts are coming, preceded by the corporatist weasel words we've all come to expect.

We're number four! We're number four! We're the fourth most corrupt athletic program in the country!

Oh, and a math professor from a lesser local University punched Goldy in the head.

At least next week is spring break. So we've probably got a week's reprieve from embarrassing scandal. I'm going to spend my time grading some papers in a modest, professional manner without embezzling, assaulting or humiliating anyone. You're welcome, University.

Hold your applause please

In which your humble narrator burns with righteous indignity.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you my University.

Sheesh. I'm starting to feel about my academic home the same way as one of my undergraduate Religious Studies professors described his relationship to the Roman Catholic church: "Well, she may be an old whore, but she's still my Mom and I love her."

It's a New Year in Hate

In which your humble narrator brings the mad dizdain* to five offending abominations.

1. My house, she is the structural equivalent of  the type of crack-addled, welfare queen that only exists in Republicans' imaginations. She always needs something. A roof, a furnace, a new water heater, new toilets, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.
2. The intimation from students that I'm supposed to respond to emails sent after 9:00 p.m. within an hour or two. Here's the deal students, my kids go to bed at 7:00. Then it's Me time which involves equal quantities of beer and Netflix streaming. Then I go to bed. 
3. Using** the word "utilize" instead of the word "use." Seriously, why?
4. George Stephanopolous. This one isn't entirely rational. He just bugs me.
5. The recent decision on the part of Child #2 to stop saying "no" and "yes" but rather to say "nope" and "yep" which are, in case you didn't infer it on your own, completely impossible to distinguish between when she's got a damn pacifier in her mouth.

*This is an intentional misspelling for comic effect. I can spell. This is a quality blog. Tell your friends.
** See? If I had said "utilizing the word 'utilize'" I would be a heinous douche.

Why would you replace one perfectly good preposition with two?

In which your humble narrator decries creeping colloquialism.

One of the odder, at least to my ear, verbal tics endemic to the laconic, Scandinavian or German inhabitants of this God-forsaken windswept tundra is the change of the idiomatic construction "based on" to the bastardized alternate, "based off of". This variation doesn't seem as jarring when spoken as it does when written, but it still frosts my grammarian posterior.

In assignments for my class, students are constantly declaiming that an idea or practice is "based off of" some pertinent theory. This makes no sense from a metaphorical perspective. A house can successfully be "based on" a foundation, but it cannot be "based off of" the foundation and retain its function.

In conclusion, get it right, people, or pay the price.

First Day of Term

In which your humble narrator recalls the implementation of a key policy.

It's the first day of term, which fills me with dread. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a better class this semester.

When I was a pale, callow youth I went away to college in a magical land called St. Paul which was conveniently located far away from my crazy family and also in a large(ish) metropolitan area where one rarely saw gun racks and 'chaw' tins all over the damn ground. Though people were surprisingly nonchalant about carrying hockey sticks in grocery stores and churches.

In my first course, my professor (a sardonic transplant from Lubbock) announced at the beginning of class that "In accordance with College policy, I'd like to say from the outset that I care deeply about each and every one of you."

Job Prospects

In which your humble narrator, after a grueling semester of teaching slack-jawed, glassy eyed undergraduates, reevaluates his career prospects.

There's nothing like a lousy class to aggravate one's barely suppressed misanthropy. In my introductory Educational Psychology lecture section I tell hilarious stories, sprinkle popular cultural references and basically jump up and down in order to keep the ungrateful suburban spawn (who happen to be our nation's future educators... Hooray!) awake for a measly hour and fifteen minutes. This particular semester is seeing attendance rates at about 60% of enrollment, a lot of vacant looks and some truly depressing test scores. Adding to this festival of crap, one student, whom I'll call "Hippie Q. Flakington," actually asked my opinion of alien abduction in class.

At any rate, perhaps it's time to reassess my career options. Here are the current contenders:

• Official artificial spine implant technician for the Democratic National Committee. My job duties would involve inserting steel rods into the rear ends of the invertebrate members of the Democratic caucuses in both chambers of Congress and the White House. I will clearly need hazard pay for having to look at David Axelrod's butt.
• Lifestyle Suppression Artisan. My job duty will be to brutally suppress anyone who attempts to use mass media to disseminate their "lifestyle choices." The entire Huffington Post "Living"* section will be replaced with a single HTML page reading: Shut up.
• Language Cleaner. My job duty will be to outlaw stupid, corporate jingo and ridiculous sports metaphors that have entered common parlance. I plan to synergistically bring my A-game to this effort. Also there will possibly be a "webinar."

*Do not click this link. You will be transformed into a vegan, eco-conscious Tibetan doula that constanly emits personal finance expertise for transgendered albinos. 

Tick, tick, tick...

In which your humble narrator perpends upon the coming autumn with fear and trembling.

Summer seems to abruptly deserted those of us nestled into the curves of the upper Mississippi. Unfortunately a richly deserved, bright and sunny autumn seems to be nowhere in sight. After the constant rains of the early season I feel more than a bit annoyed by the constant cloud cover of this September.

In remembrance of my ability to manufacture vitamin D only a few short weeks ago, here are some photos of my offspring from an early August outing.

Child #1 runs down a hill at Gold Medal Park in Minneapolis.

Note the clearly more predatory approach of Child #2. If she ever gets Zombified* we're in trouble.

Dissertations for Wife-a-roo and myself are both in progress. She's ahead of your humble narrator, but she started two years earlier and is only going to finish a couple of months before me. I intend to point this fact out to her on, pretty much, a daily basis for the rest of our lives.

In other news: Twitter is still stupid.

*This is apparently the correct spelling of the past tense of the verb "to Zombify." Don't doubt me. This is a quality blog; I looked it up.

First day of the rest of the term

In which your humble narrator knows he should not be surprised and yet still...

Today is the first day of summer term. A whole semester's worth of educational psychological goodness crammed into five, fun-filled weeks. I (of course) received an email from a student who did not show up to the first day of class because she had the first day "written in her planner as Tuesday, June 15." I can only suspect that the wrong date was inadvertently written while she fiddled with her slide-rule and Trapper-Keeper.

Why must you turn my inbox into a house of lies?

Reflections on an undocumented week

In which your humble narrator writes a list rather than composing a substantive essay about something of interest.

• Lists are easier to write than regular posts.
• This is the earliest spring I've ever seen in 12 years in Minnesota.
• Undergraduates have a hard time focusing when the temperature is above 60 degrees.
• A friend applying to the bar (you know, like, lawyering) asked me to write a a character reference for her application (being her friend with the best ratio of "length of time known" to "ability to write sentences"). I emailed the first line of my draft letter to her: 

"Dear State Board of Lawyerliness: J.R.T. is one of the finest, most ethical hoboes that it has ever been my privilege to drink with under a bridge. She only stole my bottle of gin once and that was my fault since I pushed her shopping cart into the river."

• Child #2 has taken to signaling that she has finished her meal by hurling the remainder of her food to the floor, or grasping it and rubbing it vigorously into her scalp.
• Potty training Child #1 is a total drag.
• Apparently, I like talking about the Large Hadron Collider way more than most people. Particle acceleration is cool and "Large Hadron Collider" is fun to say. 
• On a related note: I am made inordinately happy when man-made calamities do not end life as we know it. First they fired up the Large Hadron Collider and we didn't get blinkered out of existence in an "oopsie-doodle" accidental black hole. Second, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann appeared together on stage in Minneapolis and the resulting explosion of jingoistic malarkey proved to be entirely metaphorical, leaving my beloved adopted homeland relatively unscathed.
• Manchego is a tasty cheese.

It's Tuesday, so I hate stuff

In which your humble narrator lists five things that get his Capra aegagrus hircus.

1. The five ancient Buick drivers in front of me in line at the car wash WHO ALL HAVE CLEAN CARS.
2. Encountering unexpectedly damp objects. (Child #2, I am looking in your direction.)
3. Diaper rash.
4. Students that email you the night before an assignment is due and then expect you to answer their questions within an hour or so. Sorry, kids, I don't actually spend the 24 hours before your deadline hunched over the Gmail waiting to answer questions you could have asked last week.
5. NBC Winter Olympics Commentators. Let's put them all on a bobsled, set it on fire, and push it off a mountain.

Faith-based Refrigeration

In which a dark shade from your humble narrator's past emerges on Facebook and causes reflection.

When I was a callow and sallow youth I attended a preparatory high school in southwest Ohio run by the Jesuits. Like about a quarter of my fellow students, I was not a Catholic. There were a fair number of Protestants, and a goodly smattering of Jews, Buddhists and Hindus at this school. We still had to attend the long, lugubrious all-school Masses, but there wasn't any formal Inquisition-like establishment aimed at converting us. Did I mention that this was a boys' school yet? It was. I received a decent education and despite having no nostalgia for my alma mater whatsoever, I don't harbor any particular hard feelings... well, except for the broken nose thing, and the two concussions.

We only had one nun at this school. She was a native Kentuckian of thick, German stock, a member of an order I have never heard of aside from her membership, and a habitual teller of tall tales. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the current students of my high school have a Facebook page devoted to quotations from my former  history teacher, the most erratic, Germanic instructor I have ever had, bar-nun.* Let's call Her "Sister Helga." While I was in school we often referred to her as "Attila."

What was surprising to me was the consistency of her craziness, even after 14 years. One of the quotes was, "Indians have to pay $7 a gallon for gas, just because they're Indians." This teacher was way into the Indians. We spent the first quarter of junior year American History talking about the Indians, wherein we learned that the "Iroquois" were composed of five tribes, hence the name, since "quois" means "five" in French.** When we were in school she used the same line, but she's obviously been adjusting for inflationary injustice since it was only $3 per gallon back then.

Sister Helga told us she was 80 years old.*** She told us that she was one of fourteen children.**** She told us that she went to Pine Ridge in South Dakota every summer to visit her sister (also a nun) and minister to the Indians.*****

There was one particularly memorable story about a time when she was teaching Bible School to the little Indian children on the Pine Ridge reservation. According to Sister Helga, one day, while telling the children about Jesus, a Schwan's Freezer truck pulled up outside the church. The Schwan's man told her that his refrigerator unit had broken down and could the children please eat some ice cream before it melted? According to the story it was 130 degrees in the shade that day, and there was only one air conditioner in the entire state of South Dakota and that was at the Governor's mansion and they never let the Indians near it. So Sister Helga and the children gorged themselves on ice cream. One little girl asked Sister Helga to drive her home after Bible School so that she could take an ice cream bar to her aged grandmother. "But little Indian girl," said Sister Helga, "you live 2 hours away and it's 130 degrees and I don't have air conditioning in my pickup truck."

"Please, Sister Helga! I know it will be fine!" said the little girl, and Sister's heart melted and she and the little girl got in the truck and drove for two hours on a dirt road in the 130 degree heat with the ice cream bar sitting on the dashboard of the truck. When they reached Granny's house the little girl kissed Sister Helga on the cheek, grabbed the ice cream bar and ran into the house.

The next day, Sister Helga asked the little girl about her Grandmother and the (presumptively) melted ice cream. The little girl told Sister Helga that her Grandmother (who hadn't had any ice cream since 1931) loved it. "But wasn't it melted?" asked Sister Helga. "No it was still frozen," replied the little girl.

Sister Helga realized that the little girl's faith had kept it cold.

And that's how refrigerators work, boys and girls.


*Oooh! A delicious pun!
**No it doesn't.
***Nope.
****Who knows? Who cares?
*****Hadn't they suffered enough?

Take that, hoop.

In which your humble narrator passes his preliminary exam and becomes a doctoral candidate.

After much fretting I sat for my oral preliminary examination this morning. Much to my delight, the questions were less "What business do you think you have here, miscreant, (probably retarded) urchin boy?" and more "So what do you think about this thing that you actually know about?"

Now on to other things. No, not a dissertation, gentle reader, the procurement of Kentucky Bourbon.

Wearisome Week

In which your humble narrator stares down the gaping maw of a test with no parameters and the beginning of another lousy semester.

Today is the first day of a new term, bringing with it new classes to teach, fresh undergraduate faces, an impending preliminary exam for my doctoral degree and a big old-fashioned bucket of glum. The enterprise of completing a Ph.D. seems less and less appealing since it seems apparent that it will result, not in a wood-paneled faculty office complete with tweed jacket and pipe, but rather a somewhat less glamorous job in the food service industry. "Would you like a thesis on the application of psycholinguistic research to reading comprehension tests with your burger and fries, sir? No?"

At least I'll be Dr. Impoverished Unemployed Person, Ph.D.

Friday brings with it my preliminary oral examination in which I will go into a room with my committee, give a 20 minute presentation and then hope and pray that I have actually learned something in my (too long) graduate career. I scheduled in for 9:30 in the morning, thinking that at least there won't be much of the day preceding the exam to spend agonizing over my impending doom. The lack of any set expectations for this exam is what sends my anxiety into full-on catastrophic mode: "What's that, simple boy? You're not ready for the physical challenge in which you wrestle with Jean Piaget's reanimated corpse?"

This may be the last post until after Friday as I plan to spend the next 60+ hours pulling the hair from my head strand by strand.

Trudge, trudge, limp, collapse

In which your humble narrator claws his way across the finish line of the semester, only sacrificing a little sanity along the way.

The children are still sick. Child #1 is finally getting to the end of his cold, which makes him much more likable now that his upper lip isn't shellacked with a shiny covering of snot all the time. Wife-a-roo is sick too, as of the end of last week. I was going to drive to Costco yesterday morning since we were damn near out of toilet paper, paper towels, baby formula and imported, Italian cheese.

9:45 a.m.
Me: (to Child #1) Wanna go to Costco?
Child #1: No.

10:17 a.m.
Me: (to Child #1) Wanna go to Costco?
Child #1: No. Don't wanna go to Costco.

11:05 a.m.
Me: (to Child #1) Wanna go to Costco?
Child #1: No. I don't want to go to Costco (starts crying).
Me: Okay, Okay. No Costco. Don't wig out, little dude.

3:30 p.m.
Wife-a-roo: (via cell phone message left while I am at Costco during Child #1's nap) Umm. It turns out that your son did want to go to Costco. If you're still in the neighborhood could you come back and pick him up? (Much screaming is audible in the background from Child #1)

He was temporarily restored by getting to drag the giant packages of toilet paper and paper towels around the house when I returned. I then spent most of the rest of the day grading papers in an attempt to finish everything so I can return stuff at the final exam tomorrow. Also, I think I discovered a leak in our new, $8000 roof.

This morning I was all set to leave the house without children in tow to meet with a faculty member regarding a research project that I've neglected for far too long. Then I was going to have lunch with a friend (We'll call him "Bobo" because it's way funnier than "Chris."). So I was getting my crap ready to go this morning as Sister-of-Me had consented to mind the offspring and Wife was home anyway with her illness.

Then Child #2 broke out in hives.

Welcome to Can't Catch a Break, Minnesota. Population: Me.

Hoop jumping

In which your humble narrator describes slogging through the writing of an academic paper with no parameters.

In my continuing quest to complete my Ph.D. in Educational Psychology so that I can become unemployed, I am currently involved in the revision of my oral preliminary exam paper. My department gives both written and oral preliminary exams  for doctoral students. I passed the written preliminary test when child #1 was 6 months old on the Saturday before we moved to our new house. It was a giant waste of time.

For the oral prelim, I have to write a 20-50 page review paper of some literature without providing any plan for my dissertation (that's part of the next hoop, dummy). It's ostensibly supposed to show my "evaluative skills" and prove to my committee that I can write a literature review, though I think it's actually just to provide some framework for what they might want to ask me about during this upcoming 2-hour fun-fest.

My adviser's instructions for writing this paper (as the department provides virtually no direction other than what I mentioned above) were to (wait for it) "write about something I know a lot about."

I wrote most of the paper this summer while I was teaching and was allowed to leave the house more than once a week. Now I'm reduced to working on it during the 24 minutes between when the children are finally settled in their beds and when my brain turns off and NASCAR starts seeming interesting. 

Perhaps it would have been better to finish this degree before transmitting my genetic material to another generation of crabby, demanding little persons.

A Head-on Collision on Memory Lane

 In which your humble narrator recounts one of the horrors of high school gym class.

Last night, I went over to a friend's house to deliver some cookies of thanks and some cookies of remorse. This particular friend, (Let's call him Chris, because that's his name) fixed my sister's computer many months ago in return for some cookies. Then she didn't make good on her cookie promise for a long time, so yesterday she came over and entertained the children while I made some snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies to repay her confectionery debt (after levying a heavy baker's tax on the finished products).Sister labeled them "cookies of thanks" for the original computer fix and "cookies of remorse" for taking seven months to get them to Chris.

So after delivering the cookies and seeing Chris' (and the affianced bride of Chris') new home we ended up talking about traumatic brain injuries which, of course, led to a discussion of high school gym class. At the Jesuitical boys' high school that I attended we had two required semesters of pain and humiliation gym. In my first year I got a concussion when someone stepped on my head while playing flag football. In my second year I had my nose broken by a volleyball. I should stress that the offending volleyball was not the one from the game in which I was playing. It was some other game's volleyball. I was engaging in my usual, half-assed participatory way in the game. I wasn't awful at volleyball like I was awful at running for a long time or swimming. But there's this sudden whoop from the other side of the gym and I stupidly looked toward the noise only to have a wildly served volleyball slam right into my nose. Here is a helpful graphic representation:

So I went to the nurse and she said of my blood streaked face and shirt, "Wow, that's gross," and gave me an ice pack. What was it with school nurses and ice packs? They're not actually a panacea for every illness and injury known to human kind. I skipped eighth period and laid around the nurse's office until it was time to go home. So I rode home all bloody on the bus and walked from my stop to my house and went in to clean up. This was the first time I'd seen myself in the mirror. And, boy, that was not right. El Schnoz now had a sort of twisty, ski-jump to the right thing going on. This was going to need to be set straight since I could see where the cartilage and bone were misaligned at the bridge.  No one was going to be home for several hours. Since these were the days before cell phones, calling the parents was a giant pain in the butt.

So I grabbed the tip of my nose and stared at my watery eyes in the mirror and pulled down... hard. The feeling of jagged cartilage sliding back into place over bone is something I cannot adequately describe. I don't think I've ever screamed aside from that afternoon.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't look like Owen Wilson.

Socialism in our Schools

In which your humble narrator ponders the red menace.

So the president is giving a speech to the nation's school children next week. It's being broadcast on C-Span and the White House website. Silly old me, I presumed it was going to be a pretty typical "politico speaks to the youths" type address: "study hard, you're our future, lead the way, don't smoke doobies," kind of speech.

MPR's Tom Weber reported today that the Fergus Falls school district was taking a cautious approach:

"Some districts, like Fergus Falls, are not showing the speech live - but will instead tape it and have administrators review it to see if it's appropriate to show later."

And I thought: "Really? To make sure he doesn't tell any off-color jokes?"