Birthday Wishes

There aren’t many milestones in American culture once you get past the age of 21.

There’s a few, of course. You can rent a car at 25. You can also run for the House of Representatives. You have to be 30 to be a Senator, and 35 to be president, if that’s something you think is interesting. You start to qualify for senior discounts at 50, and sometime after 60 you get to retire though they keep pushing that date back and eventually it won’t happen at all so be quick about it.

But there’s a long gap after 21 and to be honest not many of those other things are all that exciting to most people. Either way there are no milestones associated with turning 22. It’s one of those years where it’s kind of more of the same only older.

Those birthdays are worth celebrating as well, though.

It is a lovely thing to have made it one more trip around the sun, a thing guaranteed to nobody so it should be celebrated when it happens after all. You learn new things, experience new things, and grow in new directions. Those trips have added up over the years, and it’s always a strange thought to realize this vibrant, interesting adult isn’t a child anymore because it all happened so quickly. From one year to the next it doesn’t seem like anything changes but then you look at the cumulative effect and suddenly things really are different and you’re not sure how .

That’s why I write things down.

We’re not going to see Lauren tonight – it’s Halloween on a big college campus and there are more than enough other things going on to keep her occupied – but we’ll get together next week to celebrate. Holidays happen when you have time, and the important thing is to celebrate them together. Eventually she will hare off into her own life far from here and these opportunities will grow few and far between so we’re going to enjoy them while we have them.

And we will celebrate, because Lauren is worth celebrating.

Happy birthday, Lauren.

I’m proud of you.

The Reviews are In!

You know what I think of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for him since he first metastasized across the American body politic in 2015. But what do the people who know him best think? The people who have worked in his administration? Who are members of his own party? Who support conservative causes in general? Perhaps even part of his family?

Let’s find out, shall we?

--

General James Mattis (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Defense

Trump's use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.

General John Kelly (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Chief of Staff

He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world, and by power I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.

He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.

General Mark Milley (US Army, ret), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Trump is a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America - and we're willing to die to protect it.

A fascist to the core.

Fiona Hill, former advisor on Europe and Russia

He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president. And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism.

Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense

I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet.

Trump is not fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor

In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security. His short attention span (except on matters of personal advantage) renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.

Mike Pence, former Vice President

I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.

It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Communications Director

He is wholly unfit to be in office.

Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of State

There were multiple occasions where, in my view, the actions the president wanted to take were not consistent with our national security objectives. ... His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.

Miles Taylor, former official in the Department of Homeland Security

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.

Dick Cheney, former vice president for George W. Bush

In our nation’s 246-year- history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power, after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.

Representative John Boehner (R-OH), former Speaker of the House

Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY)

The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), former Senate Majority Leader

Many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors. ... That’s different from what we saw. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff

I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee.

Anthony Scaramucci, former Director of Communication

Trump's going to make things rougher for people. He has already said he's going after his adversaries using the Department of Justice. When someone's telling you they're going to flex and be a dictator on day one and go after their adversaries, this is against the 200+ year experiment of America.

Open letter signed by 13 former Trump administration officials

Donald Trump's disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power. This is a man who threw his own Vice President – Mike Pence – at a violent mob in a desperate bid to hold on to power. When Donald Trump says he wants to be a "dictator" on "day one" and deploy the military against American citizens he deems “the enemy from within" - he means it.

Open letter signed by 233 mental health professionals

Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators. … To make matters worse, Trump appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up, including an MRI and neuropsychological testing. These symptoms include: a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait). We suspect the results of such an evaluation would be disqualifying.

Open letter signed by over 100 former national security officials (including ambassadors, admirals, generals, and civilian officials)

Mr. Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes. He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again. That alone proves Mr. Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

William T. Kelley, professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Donald Trump was the DUMBEST GODDAM student I EVER had.

The American Conservative Magazine

Trump has basically made himself into Putin’s prison bride.

Tara Setmayer, former Communications Director for Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)

He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.

J. Michael Luttig, conservative former US Circuit Court of Appeals judge

Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. They would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us

Mary Trump, niece and a trained mental health professional

I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.

Doing My Bit

I have done my bit for democracy.

I have cast my ballot in this most critical of elections – the most recent of them, anyway. It is easy to get jaded by all of the “most critical elections” that we’ve been having recently, but the sad fact is that whenever an outright Fascist has a chance to win it really is critical that he be destroyed at the ballot box so that we don’t need to do that in the inevitable violence that will result if he wins. Fascists do not tolerate dissent well, and they like the Big Shiny of jackbooted thugs enforcing their whims. We’ve seen this movie before. It didn’t end well. It needs to be cut off before it starts.

Do not be jaded, because it really is that important. Do not be discouraged by the prophets of doom who see no hope, because while there is life there is hope and if they want me they can goddamn well take me themselves because I’m not turning myself in. Do not be misled by the propagandists who tell you that your vote doesn’t matter, because they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from voting if that were true.

Do not go gently into the long dark night of Fascism, but rage against the dying of the light until the fading stops and the light returns.

I left work a bit early today, as it is a Friday and for long and frankly rather aggravating reasons that I will not go into here there are vanishingly few classes taught at Home Campus on Fridays and therefore equally few students who want to make appointments with their advisor on that day, and I headed over to City Hall. Here in Wisconsin we’ve been able to do early in-person voting since the beginning of the week and I have to say that this is an idea that has definitely found its audience.

I got there at 3:30 or so on a Friday afternoon, about an hour before the place closes, and there was quite a line in front of me. 

It took me over an hour to get to the voting machine.

It has to be said that the line moved pretty briskly. It wasn’t stagnant – it was just that long. If nothing else, this gives me some hope for the survival of American democracy.

They’ve redone the process since the last election where I voted early. You used to get a big paper ballot and you’d fill in the bubbles by hand with a marker and then you’d fold it three or four times to get it into the envelope and turn it back in to the clerk. Now you get a thin blank ballot – maybe 4 inches by 11 inches or so – and you take it to a touchscreen computer. You feed it into the slot, then vote on the computer and when you’re done it gives you a chance to say “Yes, that’s what I wanted to do” or “No, let me change that one” and then when you say you’re done it prints out the ballot with your choices on it. You fold that in half, stick it in the envelope, and then give it to the volunteers at the next table. You have to sign it in front of them, but then you can go.

They did give me the traditional sticker, which I appreciated.

We are facing a future where an outright Fascist, a 34-time convicted felon facing more than four dozen other criminal indictments, a self-declared sexual predator, a coddler of dictators and spiraling dementia patient whose previous term in office was marked by blistering incompetence, overt bigotry (not surprising, given the endorsements he received from every major neo-Nazi and white supremacist group in America), a response to a global pandemic so deliberately botched that peer-reviewed scientific papers attribute the unnecessary deaths of over a quarter million Americans directly to his leadership, a recession that started even before that, an unprecedented two impeachments, and a treasonous insurrection, somehow has an even money chance to be reinstalled into power.

This cannot happen if the American republic is to survive.

I have done my bit.

If you value the republic, you will do the same.

A Wedding Up North

Many years ago, somewhat on a whim, I signed up to be an ordained minister in the Church of the Latter Day Dude. It’s based on the old movie The Big Lebowski and its basic theology is “don’t be a jerk.” I can go with that. I think more people should subscribe to it, actually. It would make the world a better place.

Not long after that a friend found out about this when she was planning her wedding and asked me if I would officiate, so I double checked with the local County Clerk about that and we determined that since the LDD Church was not a registered 501c3 nonprofit it didn’t qualify under Wisconsin law but that I could just as easily sign up for the Universal Life Church – whose basic theology is much the same and which is a 501c3 – and do it that way, so I did. I officiated her wedding and another a few years later.

This past weekend I got to do my third.

I’ve known Sherry since we were both shelving books at the library here in Our Little Town way back at the turn of the millennium and we’ve been friends ever since. When she brought Evelyn over for dinner a couple of summers ago we could tell there was something special there and it is nice to be right about the good things.

The wedding was up in northern Wisconsin, so on Friday Kim and I drove up to our friend Joe’s house, not that far away. It is good to see friends when you can, especially if they’re more or less on the way and are happy to let us stay with them and fill us up with good food. We had a lovely time hanging out with Joe and Lisa and the various dogs, and Kim got a chance to wander around in the woods which doesn’t happen very often here in Our Little Town, particularly with me around, so it worked out very well.

Saturday afternoon we continued our way north to Hayward, where the wedding would be – an outdoor sculpture garden next to the local library. Most of the guests were either librarians or people associated with librarians so it all fit together nicely. It was brisk and a bit rainy for the rehearsal but we managed to get all of the blocking down – who enters when from where, what do they do when they get there, what music plays when, that sort of thing. Sometimes it helps having spent three or four decades backstage. Kim and I checked into our AirB&B afterward and then went back into town for the after-rehearsal party at a nice little winery there.

We had the early part of Sunday to ourselves and spent a fair bit of it talking with our AirB&B hosts, who seemed like nice people. We found a wooded trail to walk for a while, had lunch at a local diner, and then wandered around downtown Hayward taking in the place a bit. It’s an entertaining place to visit.

And then the time for the wedding was at hand.

I like weddings. They’re generally happy affairs, and it’s a lovely thing to see two people who love each other enough to want to spend the rest of their lives together. Sherry, Evelyn and I had worked out the basic structure of the service beforehand and I spent much of the last couple of weeks working on the details.

It went very well.

It was a bright and sunny day, rather warm for northern Wisconsin in late October but pretty much exactly the sort of day you’d design for an outdoor wedding if you had the chance. All of the various parties made it up to their positions without mishap. I got through my homily (“Abide with each other”) and did not lose the rings. They wrote their own vows and did them well. They kissed. And then there they were – legally wedded, ready for a life together. There is good in this world, and when you get a chance to be a part of it you should take it.

Kim and I couldn’t really stay afterward – it’s a long ride from Hayward back to Our Little Town and Monday was a workday – but it was worth the drive.

Congratulations to Sherry and Evelyn! I wish you a lifetime of love and happiness.

News and Updates

1. Another year of Why Can’t Us? being answered by “because you lost to the other team,” in this case the NY Mets, a team that never has to win another game again as far as I am concerned. Alas, my poor Phillies – a fantastic season cut too short, and now we are left with the dire prospect of either the Mets, the Yankees, the Dodgers or the Cleveland Team becoming World Series Champions. It is a good thing I don’t follow baseball anywhere near much as I once did or this would be depressing.

2. I just want to point out the fact that for about a quarter of an hour during the season opener last week the Philadelphia Flyers power play – a facet of their game that ranked dead last in the NHL last season and likely cost them the playoff spot that they were shockingly in a position to achieve with fewer than ten games left in the season – was scoring at a 100% rate. This is a mathematical fact and I am going to treasure it even as things regress to the mean once again because why not.

3. Also, the Premier League is back in full swing and has been for a while and my Wolves are looking like prime relegation fodder this year, which is sad because I have no idea if I will be able to watch them once that happens. Everything is so balkanized now – even the NHL is spread across multiple networks, each of which requires its own subscription, so half the time I couldn’t watch the Flyers even if I wanted to and thus I feel less guilty about not doing so. I forget which comedian said it, but someday soon they will start to bundle all the subscriptions into One Big Subscription and then sell it to you as “cable television.”

4. I have mowed the lawn one last time and put the mower away for the season. It’s not supposed to get over 82F (28C) again this year, though it would not surprise me at all if it did. Folks, the climate isn’t changing – the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out where it’s going next, is all. If you don’t believe me, consider that Asheville NC, a city in the mountains of western North Carolina 300 miles from salt water – was just wiped out by a hurricane. On balance, mowing the lawn is not that much of an issue, really.

5. Ancestry says I’m back up to 76% Italian in my heritage, which is fascinating since my dad’s side of the family was Very Much Not Italian so I’m not entirely sure where the other 26% comes from. In the decade or so since my mother convinced me to do this my heritage has never been calculated at less than 55-60% Italian and I have to wonder just how strong those genes really are.

6. We have reached the part of the school year where my office is jam-packed with students and every single one of them is bringing a new and exciting disease with them like an offering. Some of them are pretty exotic – did you know people still get whooping cough? this is what happens when antivaxxers are allowed to walk the streets unsupervised – and others are just the standard run of the mill colds, flus, and general cruds. Pretty soon I will have collected the whole set and can trade them in for valuable prizes to be named later.

7. I have two long term projects that are coming to an end soon and I’m not sure how that will feel. I suppose I will find out.

8. It is a sad thing when beloved authors reach a point where they no longer feel the need to listen to editors. I’m just about finished a 900pp book that really could have been a 300pp book without losing anything of any real significance and it’s just a good thing that this particular author is a talented enough writer that you don’t feel too bad about the extra pages, though a competent editor would have taken a hacksaw to that manuscript and made it a much better story.

9. One of the local service organizations had its annual Giant Used Book Sale this weekend and we went because we like to do that sort of thing and it’s a good organization to support. We even found a few books to take home with us, thus beginning the replenishment project after the recent deaccessioning. Wheels in wheels.

10. We have hit our first frost here in Baja Canada, a month after we should have. We were pulling jalepeños out of the garden as recently as this weekend. Strange times indeed.

A Few Thoughts on the State of the Election Campaign

1. We’re coming to the end of the election season and the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains a viable candidate is a damning indictment of American patriotism, morality, and intelligence. He’s not even bothering to hide the fact that he has gone Full On Fascist these days. Not that he could stop himself if he tried – the man is a walking 25th Amendment dementia case who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2018 and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House even as a tourist. But Fascists gonna Fascist, I guess, and he does seem to be drawing such volk to him like flies on dogshit. If you vote for this guy, guess what that makes you? Go on, guess! You are the company you choose. You can’t claim ignorance this time. You know what he’s planning. You know what he will do. He’s told you, loudly, at every available opportunity. Even through the haze of his senility the crystal-clear lodestar of his ideology remains. Either you stand with those who fought WWII to destroy this sort of thing or you stand with the people they fought. And yes, I mean that in every historical sense. If Trump and his supporters don’t want me to call them Fascists they should stop doing what the Fascists did.

2. I don’t know if you caught the recent statement by General Mark Milley (US Army, Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – i.e. the highest ranking military officer this country has – but as you would expect from a soldier he minces no words in describing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” And yet Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s cult following is stronger than ever, which tells you all you need to know about who they are.

3. On that note, just this past weekend Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump called for using the military to round up his political opponents and anyone he decides is “radical,” which effectively means anyone who dares to disagree with Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump by contradicting his policies, being the wrong sexual orientation, having non-white skin, belonging to a union, or exercising the rights of American citizens in any way that doesn’t contribute to the fawning adoration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and if you want to know how dictatorships start this is a good place to start looking.

4. You could also look at his repeated descriptions of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation or his descriptions of his political enemies as “vermin” who need to be eradicated, both of which are direct quotes from Adolf Hitler and thus we come full circle to point number 1 above.

5. FEMA announced this week that thanks to the batshit insane conspiracy theories thrown around by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his loyal minions they have had to suspend hurricane aid efforts in western North Carolina because aid workers are being threatened with violence. Sometimes you feel tempted to step back and admire the aggressively stupid asshattery of the American right as a platonic ideal of evil that really shouldn’t have been achievable in this fallen material world, and then reality sets in and you say to yourself “What the FUCK is WRONG with these people?” instead. There is either no possible answer to that question or there is an answer that will take the rest of your life to list in all of its details and either way we are so, so screwed as a country.

6. Watch what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign is doing, here in the closing stages of the election. They’re only very occasionally sending him to swing states where the vote will be close. He’s too much of a coward and a dementia patient to accept a second debate with Kamala Harris, even on Fox where she has offered to meet him. He’s not doing interviews. Honestly his campaign is not really sending him anywhere much at all – a few highly scripted rallies to rile up his cult members here and there, but his disappearance from the campaign trail at this late hour is unprecedented for a modern election. He’s not trying to win votes. He and his campaign know very well that he cannot win any sort of free and fair election. The Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1989 – a record of futility unmatched in American history by any major party – and this year will be no different. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes just as he has done twice before – it’s been eight years, nobody’s changed their mind about this neo-Fascist toddler. Instead what you’re seeing is a concentrated effort by his minions to suppress votes and sow chaos and disorder so he can claim the election isn’t valid and seize power some other way – either through GOP control of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court or through a repeat of the Trump Insurrection of 2021. We stand on a precipice, folks. It’s a long way down.

7. If you’re planning to vote for a third-party candidate this year because your precious “principles” won’t allow you to take the better of the two candidates on offer, just know that you are part of the problem and you will not be forgiven for your smug refusal to notice the world beyond your own fingertips. Moral purity is a luxury enjoyed by people with no responsibilities and no concern for the consequences of their actions. Politics isn’t about purity. It’s not about finding a perfect unicorn candidate. It’s about finding the candidate who will get you further along the path you want to go than the other candidate will. There is only one candidate in this election who is normal – who has pluses and minuses and will leave this nation intact when she is done with it, and there is another who represents everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for the second one, and you either know that or you don’t.

8. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has successfully pushed most of his many indictments and prosecutions beyond the election and hasn’t already been jailed for his crimes (some of which the United States has, in the past, executed people for) is a travesty of justice that will haunt the United States for however long it has left.

9. If you’re not making backup plans for when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seizes power, you’re kidding yourself. There will be blood. He’s promised that. His cult is eager for it. Fascists do not take kindly to dissent or opposition and those of us who have been banging this gong since 2015 are probably on a list somewhere already. Make your plans now.

10. By my count I have received 17 glossy campaign flyers in the mail frantically attempting to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from Project 2025, the blueprint for Fascism that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s supporters and former administration staff put together for the initial blitzkrieg against the United States should he be installed into power next year. You can understand why they are trying to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from a document that mentions him by name over 300 times and which contains policy measures he repeats at nearly every public appearance, I suppose, since Project 2025 is the pure distilled essence of authoritarian dictatorship and is desperately unpopular even among self-declared conservatives. It calls for destroying the merit-based civil service that has defined the federal government since the 19th century and replacing it with a force of toadies, lickspittles, fanatics, and slaves loyal only to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. It calls for expanding the power of the presidency until it is unchecked and uncontrollable. It calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, NOAA (the agency that provides weather forecasting) and FEMA. It calls for a concentrated surge of bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t straight, white, or male. It calls for a national ban on abortion, contraception, and anything that might give women the idea that they and not some old white men in a far-off capital actually control their bodies. It will end Social Security, overtime pay, and the Affordable Care Act which tens of millions of Americans rely on for their care. It will get rid of the FDIC and remove regulations on banks so that they can go bankrupt with ease just as they did in the 1920s and take your money with them. It effectively makes the United States the personal property of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his servants, and if that doesn’t kindle you to incandescent rage you really need to re-examine your life choices.

Testing

I had to get my sleep tested this week because apparently I’ve been doing it incorrectly.

You would think that after nearly six decades of practicing I would have it pretty much down by now but you would be wrong.

If you’ve never done this, it’s one of those minor yet uncomfortable things that happen as you age your way through the process of medical care and it requires you to navigate the Byzantine complexity of the American healthcare system which is designed to protect the wealth of its corporate shareholders rather than anyone’s actual health. Getting useful medical results out of it is an unintended though occasionally helpful byproduct of its profiteering, but FREEDUM and this is why we can’t have nice things in the US.

Sometime over the summer I went in to see my regular doctor, which is a statement that puts me in a distinct minority in this country (see above, re: FREEDUM) so I’m grateful that I at least have this privilege. It has come in handy at times.

This is the third regular doctor I have had in the last few years as the ones I pick have a distinct tendency to retire no matter how old they are. I don’t think this is because of me since I don’t see them that often, but I cannot rule it out. The hospital where they work then asks me to pick a new one and I have no idea on what basis I would make that choice so I just take whoever has the next available appointment and since this usually gives me six to eight months to get used to the idea of seeing someone else it has worked pretty well so far. This particular new guy seems like he knows what he’s doing even if he’s not the most sociable person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him twice now – once for the “Hi, I’m your new patient, please renew all my prescriptions” meeting that you have to have every time you switch doctors and once for this – and we have yet to have a conversation that isn’t directly connected to medicine or contains a sentence longer than seven words. But so far, so good.

He gave me the required referral for the doctor who would actually do anything connected to sleeping, and that sat on my desk for a couple of months while Life Happened. Eventually I made an appointment with the Sleep Doctor – either they’re not terribly busy or I got very lucky because that only required a wait measured in weeks rather than months – and I went to meet her and fill out more paperwork repeating all of the things that are already on file (medications, allergies, history) and then discuss the new things.

After the examination she said (in a much more professional and polite way, but this is effectively the gist of it) that I am old and fat and yeah these things will happen under those conditions so we’ll do the sleep test to get it confirmed in a way the insurance company that actually determines your medical care will accept and then figure out what to do from there.

This required me to respond to multiple texts from an equipment company confirming that I did actually want them to send me equipment. Of course I don’t read (let alone respond to) texts from numbers I don’t recognize so this took several tries before it worked out, but last week an envelope with equipment in it appeared on my front doorstep along with dire warnings that this test had to be started THAT NIGHT and the equipment returned within 48 hours or there would be CONSEQUENCES.

It would probably go on my Permanent Record.

None of that happened as far as I know. I don’t have access to my Permanent Record so that’s still an open question. But the rest of it? Not so much.

I put the equipment aside on the first day because I had a lot of grading to do and the math just didn’t work out – you have to commit to a certain amount of sleep time for this and that just wasn’t going to happen. But the next night seemed more doable.

For equipment that came in an envelope there certainly was a lot of it.

The main bit was an electronic recording unit about three inches square and maybe half an inch thick. It came with a two-inch wide elastic band that I was supposed to strap around my chest and then snap the recorder to it so that it sat right on my breastbone. It had a full complement of BlinkenLights and made me feel like Ultraman.

There was a cable that screwed into it that went to a sensor that clamped onto one of my fingers like it was trying to feed off of it and a tube that screwed into the unit somewhere else that I was supposed to loop over my ears and then shove up my nose except that my ears really don’t accommodate such things well so I had to just tighten it around my head and hope for the best.

It didn’t work the first night – the BlinkenLights swirled red at me the next morning – so I had to do it again the next night and that seemed to take.

I have no idea what it was actually measuring as I got basically no sleep either of those nights. I find anything on my face to be deeply uncomfortable and every time I tried to move all the various cables and cords would tangle together into a knot. So as far as I know this test will result in my immediate hospitalization and they will put me on a diet consisting of nothing but Ambien and vodka just to keep me unconscious for a while.

It's been 22 years since the last time I graduated from an educational institution. I thought I was done failing tests.

That Point in the Semester

We’ve reached that point of the semester where all you can do is try to keep up.

The first two or three weeks of the semester are hellaciously busy for advisors. Students are coming in to get their classes straightened out – adding things, dropping things, trying to decide whether to do either of those things. They need to make sure their financial aid is straightened out, which has been a nightmare the last couple of years with all the changes made to the FAFSA and the deliberate underfunding of grant aid by state governments. They need to make sure their bill is paid. They need to know how to pay these bills, a Byzantine process with more options than are probably healthy. They need to get the hang of being in college in general, which is not as straightforward as people think. College is an artificial environment and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been through it. There are a lot of unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and part of being an advisor is helping students navigate through that. It hits hard in the first couple of weeks.

Things calm down for advisors a bit after that, but for faculty that’s when it all starts to ramp up. You’re through the introductory material by then and heading into the heart of the syllabus where things get more complicated and more challenging for both students and professors. Assignments are coming in that need to be graded and if you are basing your assignments on when they naturally fall in the sequence of the material covered (as opposed to, say, trying to spread them out across the calendar to ease your workload) you may find yourself giving exams in every single class you teach in the same week. That’s just how it works out. Have fun grading it all at once. Meanwhile the administration is peppering you with requests for progress reports, alerts, and other such bureaucracy designed to increase student retention so the advisors can reach out to the students who need help and you know that this is important but it is another task on an already large and growing pile.

Then advising gets busy again. Students have a few grades back to them and they’re panicking about some of their classes – sometimes justifiably so – and you have to figure out whether to encourage them to persevere (“This is salvageable if you can do X, Y, and Z”) or cut their losses (“We have a form for just this situation”). You also have to reassure them that this is normal, that setbacks happen, that they can certainly move forward from here, and if they do find themselves in a worst-case scenario where everything collapses around them anyway that college is not a one-and-done experience and they can always come back. There’s a reason we have forms for those situations, after all. There’s also a reason that GPAs tend to rise over time – not because anyone gets smarter, but because students figure out how the place works.

It's a back and forth pendulum of frantic activity.

And if your job entails both advising and faculty duties, well, the busy never ends. It just switches from one to the other depending on what you want to focus on today.

The students are in the same boat, by the way, which is why in my First Year Seminar classes I always schedule the mental health and wellness unit for mid-October. This is about the point in the semester when we start losing people.

Somewhere in there one must eat, sleep, and occasionally do something that isn’t related to any of this because if you don’t take breaks now and then you will eventually stop functioning at all. Fitting these things in can be a puzzle.

We press on.