My Life

Mostly I've been driving back and forth to Fayetteville, keeping medical appointments with my kid, and trying to keep up with my teaching and committee work.

The news on that front looks hopeful: the current set of tests were much better than the last.

Luckily I finished what I hope is the final draft of Fault Lines (except for copy editing) before this happened, so at least I don't have to worry about that. I need to read it through once more, to catch any glaring errors and stupid plot moves, and then get it sent off. That will happen this week.

Meanwhile, I am catching up on reading student work, and finishing a book review. Also the committee from hell, which eats my life every year this time, is eating my life again. Another few weeks and that will let up a bit though.

The Kid is loving college, by the way, as we knew they would. They were born to go to college.

I Know, I Know

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, but really, Rod Dreher is just getting more and more hopeless.

(1) Notice how he doesn't even link to the original source (published in that extremely credible venue, The Daily Signal), in which Scott Yenor, apparently a tenured professor of political science, produces such insightful comments as these:

 [Radical feminists] seek to eliminate the different ways boys and girls are socialized, so that they will come to have very similar characters and temperaments.
Second, they seek to cultivate financial and emotional independence of women and children from the family.

Oh, no! Women who are financially independent! Not that! Boys and girls being socialized in equal ways! The horror!

I can't imagine why Dreher wouldn't link to such a credible and reasonable argument.

What does Dreher link to?  Why, this extremely credible venue, The National Review, where we get to hear about Yenor's Dean, who mildly notes that while he doesn't agree with Yenor, he nevertheless supports his academic right to free speech, and these terrible kids today, who have the nerve to use their First Amendment right to talk back to a conservative professor!!

(2) And then he makes his usual point, which is that gay people, liberals, and trans people are going to destroy American, blah blah blah.

Sweet Jesus.

A picture of me at my writing group

Here's an updated pic of my AND my writing group

The occasion, besides our monthly meeting, is the sixth birthday of the gentleman sitting next to me. From the left, that is Carrie, a fiction writer/poet; her son, age six; me; Jan, who makes puppets and performs puppetry; Ardith, who directs plays; Ron, a cartoonist and a SF writer, as well as Jan's husband; Don (seated), a poet/fiction writer; Dr. Skull; and behind Dr. Skull, Adam, a poet. Not pictured, because he is taking the picture, is Bill, a fiction writer, whose wonderful house this is.

As a side note, I am learning more about autoimmune diseases than I would have thought it was possible to know. (As an academic, my response to anxiety is, of course, research.)

The Kid Does Art

Meanwhile, the Kid's art class visits the university's natural history museum and they draw skeletons

The Kid and Single-Payer Heath Care

So over on Twitter, that place, some clever fiscal conservative made a crack about single-payer health care not being a workable solution because Americans are so fat and lazy.

Meanwhile, about ten days ago, the kid got what we thought was the flu. Well, at first we thought it was a cold. When they* tweeted me asking was it normal for their fingernails to be blue and their hands to be numb, I made them go to the clinic. At this point, I was mostly worried about it being a really bad flu or even pneumonia.

There, the PA ran tests, several of which came back with disquieting results. She sent the kid for a CT. The CT came back showing a "nodule" in the lower right lobe of the kid's lung.

More CT scan, a full chest this time. More blood tests. The kid's ANA is slightly off. Her liver readings are slightly off. Does she have an autoimmune disease? Is it something worse? Who knows?**

We're seeing an autoimmune guy next week.

Meanwhile, because we don't have single payer, and because the American healthcare system is useless and horrible, not only do we get to live through days and weeks of anxiety, we also get charged thousands of dollars. (Our deductible, before the insurance kicks in, is $3000 per person. This is after we pay on the order of $7000/year for health insurance, plus a $35/co-pay every time we visit our PCP -- God forbid we need to see a specialist.)

But yeah. Americans are fat and lazy. That's the problem with our healthcare system.


*The kid is, as many of your know, genderfluid, and has asked for they/them pronouns. I know y'all will support them!

**It may well be nothing at all. This is what we are hoping for, and my friends in the healthcare profession have given me good reason to hope for this outcome. But of course we must follow up on it -- and despite what these free market conservatives would have you believe, it is not like we can fucking shop around, looking for a clinic that will charge us just a little less for a CT scan, maybe over there in Oklahoma?

The Kid Does Art

Homework for her Studio I class -- they had to do a still life of their dorm room

Charcoal and pencil on mixed-media paper

Links for You

Happy Sunday -- have some links!

The kids are alright

Aw, look here

And here (you gotta scroll down a bit)

Here is what happens when someone who can reason encounters someone who is spouting RW talking points. It's a video, but it's short, and absolutely worth listening to.

This, an article at the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is long, but also well worth reading: The First White President.  Every time I read Coates, it's like receiving a gift I didn't even know I needed.

These sorts of articles, on the other hand, are just so much infuriating bullshit. Oh, yes, thank you. That's exactly what I need to do. Quit spending money at Starbucks! Why didn't I think of that! Sweet Jesus. I should probably quit eating so much avocado toast while I'm at it.

You know what I need, in order not to be poor? To make more fucking money. And to have far less of my money going to medical bills and health insurance. That's what I need in order not to be poor. Shut the fuck up about how I'm spending too much money at Starbucks.

(Okay. Deep breath.)

This is definitely worth reading, especially for all y'all who have or know LGBT teens.


All over the internet -- and not just on the Right side of the net either -- people are clutching their pearls over a few students holding protests, passing around petitions, or otherwise being students. Meanwhile, people who have actual power, Conservative people, are doing shit like this, and oddly enough no one says a thing about it.

Meanwhile, the same people who clutch their pearls over the terrible, terrible fainting snowflakes on the left, are also clutching their pearls over the shocking behavior of this Leftist child.

Especially appropriate since I'm teaching Plato this week

Have a frog

Visiting the Kid

We went up to visit the kid yesterday, on a day trip. Since almost all the other students had gone home for the long weekend, the campus and the town were less crowded than usual.