Antagonism Will Get You a Blog Post

This is one of the three most important days of the year for people in my chosen career path. The other two most important days were yesterday and the day before yesterday. Let it be known “the day before yesterday” is one word in German: vorgestern.

I would write posts about Formula One Mule Racing and Underwater Cricket in order to meet arbitrary blog goals, but the Modern Language Association convention is on. Coincidentally in San Francisco this year. I attend sessions. I avoid the passive voice.

At the convention I sit in on a wide range of topics, which I will list after this sentence, because one should not write a sentence longer than fifteen words, according to one speaker I heard, which of course is totally constraining, albeit courteous if I were reading this out loud in, say, a conference session filled with many for whom English is a foreign language (sixty-six words). Potentiality and Unfinished States. Challenges in Interdisciplinarity. Demonstration Interviews for Job Seekers. Crafting Academic Personas. The Impropriety of Goethe. René Gerard. Judith Butler. Postsecular Europe. Cash Bar.

I learned how to edit my CV for consideration at the Yemen Polytechnic Institute. There will never be a job for me in America.

Even though theoretical physicists waste nine billion Swiss francs on the Large Hadron Collider (that calls for a perverted anagram) which was promptly shutdown one week after construction and still doesn’t work; even though science funding has made computer programming so ubiquitous that those jobs no longer pay a salary; even though an MBA or a JD are the two worst possible degrees to have in this economy; even though foreign language proficiency at the government level might have prevented a lot of the problems we face today; even though grad students in foreign languages and linguistics earn less than students in any other discipline; despite all that, American universities are getting rid of their humanities programs.

I temper Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with Stifter’s The Tender Law and quietly gaze upon the answer for world peace. If only someone eventually lets me teach their kids.

Woo hoo! Pity party!