News and Updates

1. So it looks like these quick posts are the best I’m going to do for the moment. What can I say? It’s been that kind of time.

2. I keep thinking I’ll get to another Further Notes From the Coup post but every day is another avalanche of Fascism and right now I just don’t have the time or spoons to write about it. All I’m going to say is that if you’re not incandescently angry about the ongoing and fully intentional destruction of the American republic from within you’re not paying attention.

3. Today was my annual day to try to care about horse racing. It’s not that I have anything against the sport other than the fact that the main actors involved are all people with way too much money and not nearly enough social skills, and the people I know who enjoy watching this sort of thing are perfectly fine. But horses have never done much for me and watching them run does even less. Nevertheless, every year we sit down and watch the Kentucky Derby because why not? It’s a whole day of buildup for about 2 minutes of action which is kind of like … uh … never mind … but the actual race is kind of fun to watch. This year they held it in a swamp and by the time it was over everything was so covered in mud that nobody could actually tell who won other than it wasn’t the horse I picked at random right before the race because the horses I choose generally take several days to finish. If you go to Louisville right now and see a horse rounding the third turn in the dark, that’s probably the one I was cheering for.

4. I spent much of today making stuffed shells, a process that requires me to make gravy (spaghetti sauce to the uninitiated) beforehand, and now my house smells like my childhood. I suppose there are worse things it could smell like.

5. The semester is rapidly coming to an end and pretty soon the chaos and activity of summer will descend upon me. At some point I really do need to clear out my office as it is a mass of paper and vague intentions.

6. I should also mow the lawn. Perhaps tomorrow. It is a task that offers no rewards at all, but at some point you realize that it is approaching harvest height and needs to be chopped down. But the pollinators, I cry! Yeah, right, says the City. Cut the grass.

7. We’ve been back to working in the office for almost four years now and somehow I still haven’t quite remembered how to pack a lunch. It’s always such a scramble in the morning. I don’t remember it being that much of a trial before the pandemic, but then that was another world.

8. It is a strange thing working in higher education in a country whose pig-ignorant rulers are determined to destroy every vestige of independent thought and scholarship. At this point it is entirely likely that I will not have a job in the fall and that this will be the least of my problems. If I suddenly stop posting, have someone check El Salvador for me.

9. In the last two weeks it has been anywhere from 28F (-3C) to 85F (30C) here in Our Little Town. It has rained. The sun has shone. The next town over got baseball-sized hail. So far no tornadoes, though the sirens did go off at one point. It's been a time.

10. I put up a little poll every Monday morning in the lobby area where my office is, and students and staff have gotten into the habit of coming by to cast their vote – they put their hash marks down, and sometimes add answers to the ones I listed and then those get hash marks of their own. It’s a nice little distraction and it gets people talking a bit. Last week’s poll was a question about what you would do if you discovered the True Meaning of Life but it was really embarrassing, and the responses were pretty much across the board though there was a clear winner (“Spread the word anyway”). My favorite response, though, came from the person who wrote “Bokonon” as an answer. There are still a few Vonnegut fans left after all, it seems.