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The University Does Not Belong to the Student

We all want to belong to something. We want to feel we are not alone. We want to believe we are part of a greater whole. However, there are some who believe the world, and its hallowed institutions, owe them more than due respect, and contrived honor — they believe they are entitled to not just set an agenda, but to rewrite the future plans of us all for their benefit alone.

Students protesting university policy is ordinary, expected, and commonplace. Students want to test boundaries, and to stretch their intellectual capacity, and to learn where the levers of power belong in an arc of a history that existed before them, and that will, and shall, extend to outlive them.

All of that is fine unless, and until, the student tries to takeover those levers of power to do specific damage to another student, faculty member, or the institution itself.

The university does not belong to the student. The university belongs to itself.

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The Sexualization of Platonic Business Relationships: How Many Families Do You Need?

I’ve always found it odd when people you work with, or collaborate with, or may work with in the future, use the phrase “getting into bed together” as a business condiment as if to somehow oddly sexualize what is, in fact and deed, a working relationship that is, if anything, asexually platonic by necessity of average function.

I wonder why there is a need to make a business contract a personal and intimate formality in such a dramatic manner.  Private relationships are bound by blood and emotion and decrees of love and passion.  No public business should operate under any of those terms.  I always wonder why that “in bed” phrase is so important for some people to utter during a negotiation or in a team spirit meeting.

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Oh, Baby, Don’t You Cry: Unless Your Mamma Makes You Mew

What would you think of a mother who purposefully set out to make her 10-month-old baby girl cry — just so she could record the breakdown and publish it on YouTube for the entire world to see?

Would you champion that mother as the prime protector of her offspring?

Or would you instead be bothered by the unnecessary spectacle of a mother exploiting the emotional well-being of her vulnerable baby for entertainment purposes?

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How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning

There’s nothing quite like waking up early on a Sunday morning to a voicemail ping that a new message is waiting to be heard.  Imagine my non-delight as, at 7:00am, I listened to some woman start a five-minute rant against and article I wrote eight years ago — and she started it all off with this sentence:

“You’re a piece of sh@t.”

I’m not spelling out the her word of the day, but you get the idea of where the rest of her message was heading.

Based on the Googly mess that is a Google Voice email transcription of that voicemail, and the manner in which it started, I deleted the voicemail after that first sentence without listening to an insane person trying to wield imaginary power against ruining my day.

I found it highly amusing that the Google Voice email transcription ended the call with the woman admonishing me to be kinder and gentler and to become a “compassionate person!”  Harr!  There’s nothing quite like the cold fish of irony slapping a hapless caller right in the face as payback for drunk dialing!

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Möbius Strip Death Notifications at Sunnyside Manor

The smell hung in the air so densely I felt like I could see it: a gray, sickly cloud that pervaded every hallway of the cheerily-named Sunnyside Manor. As I walked to the courtyard toward my Alzheimer’s-afflicted aunt, I couldn’t help the sense of dread building in my stomach. As she turned toward me, her eyes narrowed in confusion, then turned grimly polite.

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On Creating Life Filters: Ten Sentence Story #131

Betty had one wish in life:  To Filter Everything Out of Her Life That Had to Do with Kim Kardashian — including that massive butt of hers that, unfortunately for us all, turned out to be all too real.

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Botox Removes Emotion Recognition from the Injected

I am fascinated by the Botox revolution because it irrevocably removes important communication clues to the status of the emotional well being of the injected.  On January 8, 2007, I wrote — “Wearing Your Deathmask in Life” — and the poison that is Botox certainly makes the injected the owner of a corpse face:

We all wear masks. Once you’ve lived long enough, you begin to recognize and read people via the mask of their face before any words are spoken. There are few original masks in the world and once you’ve reacted and interacted with one face you quickly begin to learn all masks of that sort behave and express in the same way. What happens when the faces of the dead are resurrected into masks of the living?

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