Someone sucks the joy from the last days of my sabbatical.

1. I receive a remarkably incoherent email from a stranger. Oh, look! He wants a letter of recommendation by tomorrow. Ha, ha, ha!

2. Sabbatical FOAD response sent automatically by procmail.

3. He resends the request.

4. Delete, delete, delete.

5. He sends the request again, adding that he is going to list me as a letter-writer despite not having my approval to do so.

6. I have to respond. "Hell no. I'm going back to the sabbatical cave now. Go away and do not bother me again." Delete, delete, delete.

7. Yet another email containing the same request worded in a different incoherent way.

8. This one was all my fault. Delete, delete, delete.

We are rodent-like animals who would be happy to live in holes in the ground.

The women's rooms in the building in which I will soon no longer be spending my sabbatical were once designed after the European toilet model: tiny cramped WCs attached to a larger salle de bain. Unfortunately all the menstrual couches have been removed. When I was an undergrad, the women's restrooms were always great places to study... but I digress.

In a recent renovation, the restrooms in Sabbatical Building were updated, and the WCs were turned into a single handicap-accessible restroom with sink and locking door attached to a larger stalls-and-sinks restroom. I have never seen anyone with a handicap use the handicap restroom, although women from all over the building, from the basement to the top floor, come to use this restroom.

That's right. It's the pooping room. The ladies who need to take a dump charge into this one bathroom (and there are women's rooms on every floor) and close and lock the door behind them. There is a certain unnatural quickness to their steps, due not to urgency but to secrecy. The problem is that everyone knows that the pooping room is for pooping, so women who go into the pooping room must therefore have to poop, and the women who use the pooping room for pooping use it because they don't want anyone to know they are pooping, and yet if they use it, then everyone will know they are pooping. The need for secrecy is so strong that if the room is occupied most women will leave and come back later rather than poop in the stalls.

There is also a hiding factor, left over from our small frightened mammal stage when the act of pooping exposed our ancestors to attack from predators. The large windows in the pooping room are completely covered with opaque contact paper, save for one small corner of approximately 4 square inches that has peeled up on one side. Understand, now, that this large window is far from the toilet, at least 3 meters, and looking through the peeled up corner gives one a view of the roof of the neighboring building. Nonetheless, I have gone into the pooping room many times in the past year to find, most times, that someone has covered up the peeled up corner with something, usually one of those boxes containing a cheap sanitary napkin that the university provides for free.

I find the pooping ritual exhausting, though I grant that the pooping room is quite nice and I do not deny any other woman the opportunity to use it. Being the daughter of small frightened mammals myself, I also feel compelled to poop while hiding. Nonetheless, I gave up on the pooping room long ago in exchange for convenience, and now I poop in the stalls with pride.

You might want to talk to your daughter.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Tetedair,

I am one of your daughter Bete's classmates. I had the pleasure of sitting next to her yesterday, election day. I should point out how delighted I was to have the opportunity to see her, as she rarely attends class.

Your daughter is an international studies major, right? You must be so proud! She is an attractive, polished young lady, and her French is quite lovely. So imagine my surprise when she expressed her boredom and frustration with the topic we were discussing, which concerned terrorism in North Africa.

During our conversation I learned that Bete has "no interest in politics at all." I found this a strange confession for an international studies major. I said, nonplussed, "But of course you're going to vote today," and she, then hostile, reported that she had no intention of doing so.

You know your daughter well, I assume, and so you have no problem with her choosing a major that usually presumes a great deal of interest in politics, both national and international, and paying her tuition and fees. However, you may not realize that our governor, fulfilling a campaign promise, has frozen her tuition and fees for the last four years, and her refusal to vote contributed to his loss in yesterday's election. This means, starting next year when the governor-elect takes over, you will get to pay a lot more for Bete to attend these classes in which she has no interest. She may be relieved to learn, however, that many of those classes will be much, much larger, because we are going to have to cut teaching positions when the governor-elect cuts our budget by 10%, fulfilling his campaign promise. It's so much easier to ditch those larger classes, you know.

I'll let you explain this to her.

Best regards,
Angry Professor

Je l'ai fait!

Oh, je suis folle, moi. Eh bien voilà, je suis encore une classe de français ce trimestre. Aujourd'hui j'ai fait mon premier discours en français! Il a duré seulement dix minutes, mais je ne l'ai pas lu et je ne l'ai pas mémorisé.

Bien sûr, j'étais horrible. J'ai fait des anglicismes, j'ai hésité, j'ai parlé comme une vache espagnole. Je m'en fous, moi. Je l'ai fait!

C'est tout. Bon week-end à tous!

Welcome Anubis.

Despite her many scars, despite her many reasons to detest all of human kind, her feather is very, very heavy.

Oh, yes.

Apparently this was unexpected.

Finalist dies at world sauna championships.

Freshman orientation?

When I stepped out of my building this afternoon I found the street cordoned off with yellow hazard tape and crowded with police cars, fire trucks and assorted other emergency vehicles, including a big red truck with the words "BOMB SQUAD" emblazoned on it.

Dozens of fire fighters were standing around the entrance to the President's office but they didn't seem very tense or anxious. I wandered absentmindedly through this scene feeling somewhat out of place but focused on the simultaneous goals of reaching my car and finishing the paper I was reading. (Yes, I read while walking. Yes, I bump into things.) Once past the building, I heard someone yelling, "Fire in the hole!" followed by a really loud bang. Apparently they blew up a mailbox, into which some joker had dumped a bag of super balls -- a "suspicious package."

There was no message on the university emergency response network telling me to stay in my office, or to leave the building by a different door, despite the fact that this little drama took several hours to unfold. The tour groups of freshman and their parents, however, were conspicuous by their absence.

It occurs to me that I get no credit for reviewing.

Dearest Colleague,

I am reviewing your latest submission. I note with great interest your claim that 2+2=5. I tracked down the paper in which you first made this claim, which was published in [Science or Nature] over a decade ago.

Leaving aside the fact that none of the humpty-jillion reviewers of your [Science or Nature] paper noticed that 2+2≠5, I wonder why you, a veritable luminary, did not notice it yourself. After all, you did not publish the fact that 2+2=5 just once, but in nearly every paper since the [Science or Nature] paper appeared.

You make me cry. I am embarrassed for you.

With utmost respect, I remain

Yours truly,
Referee Number 4

I've seen one too many.

Gentlemen, please. I know it's hot outside, and I know that you are uncomfortable. These shorts, however, do not leave much to the imagination when you do not wear underpants. I'm begging you, please, please put on your jockeys. If I see one more circumcised summer student, I swear I'm going to run over and pull these things down to his ankles. So I can make sure I'm right, you see.

Lazy, lazy, tch tch tch.

Two papers, published early in the last century, appeared in the [Cahiers des Sciences Sociales]. They formed the foundation of some very important work and are still cited in papers published today. In fact, I needed to cite them today but I didn't have copies and our library doesn't keep the [Cahiers] on the shelves.

For some reason these papers don't appear in the ISI citation indices nor in any other electronic database I usually use, so I started checking other people's references for the bibliographic information. Not a single one of the books and articles I checked had referenced these papers correctly. One "definitive" source had cut-and-pasted the latter half of the first title into the second title. I counted up to five different spelling errors in the first title alone across different sources. The year, the year, of the first paper was wrong in every single source. Some of the errors had obviously proliferated from author to author by mindlessly copying from each other's bibliographies.

I don't know why I didn't do it first, but after wasting about an hour in the paper world, I found (in about five minutes) the archives of the [Cahiers] at (go figure) www.cahiersdessciencessociales.fr. I now have my very own copies of the papers and I believe I have the only accurate citations to them in the English-speaking world.

I suspect that not a single one of the authors whose references I searched today has actually seen, much less read, these papers. I'm not going to claim the high horse and say that I have never cited an old classic that I have not read myself, a sloppy and unscholarly practice. Nonetheless, is it too much to ask that if you cite a paper you at least look at it? Or the spine of the journal volume to determine what year it appeared, fer chrissakes?

Please, not in my department.

Have you ever thought to yourself, Wow! We can't hire any new faculty, 'cause we're running out of things to teach!

No? I didn't think so.

If this were China, people would have been executed by now.

My favorite place in the world has been destroyed. I'm sickened, for the people who live and work there, for myself, and for the dolphins that used to jump in the waves. I wonder if I'll ever be able to go back.

Me voilà.

Some of you know that I have a habit of taking classes when I am not teaching, and the massive amount of work I am getting done on my sabbatical has not stopped me from doing this again. This time, this spring quarter, I girded my loins and took a French class. The instructor warned me, back in March, that this particular class was a lot of work. Il ne me trompait pas.

I did every homework assignment, every essay, and sat every exam, including the oral. I worked my ass off. At first the other students treated me as if I had a skin disease. Then, later, when they realized that I usually knew the answers, they regarded me with a little more respect. They were shameless about telling me how little they studied. I was just as shameless about telling them they were fucking up.

Et enfin, je l'ai fini et alors je me suis perdue. Qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire, quand on n'a plus de devoirs?

I love this country.

I walked across the Quad this afternoon. The preacher who shows up in the spring and fall was there, shoutin' about Jesus and how He loves all those sex maniac, abortion-getting, beer-drinking, dope-smoking heathen college students. Not 20 feet away, just across the sidewalk, was an Orthodox Jewish family playing frisbee... tzitziot flying and holding onto their kippot with one hand. The atheist student organization was passing out flyers a few feet further on.

I smiled.

I receive email.

To: Angry Professor
From: Ben Connu
Re: My project

I've been working on something very important (to me) lately. It involves a reapplication of my modeling technique to an old problem. An interesting (to me) complication has arisen and, although our work is very similar and I have held yours in barely-concealed contempt for years, and although I have refused to cite you even though you published my ideas before I even started college, I realized that the procedures you described at a recent conference might actually be useful in working around this complication. Could you send me all your code?

Ben Connu

A secret message to my fellow soccer mom.

If you are unwilling to sacrifice for your children then you should not have had three of them.

We had an awesome weekend.

Ellesiouville has amazing weekend activities for families. Yesterday, the Angry Kid and I dissected a cow's eye. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the completely disassembled eye, but I swear the damn thing came apart like a jigsaw puzzle.

Off to the right of the picture you can see a big lump of sclera with the cornea on the top. In the very front, looking sort of black and slick, is the iris, which came away from the sclera like the peel of an orange. Behind that, the dome-like thing is the lens, sitting on top of a glob of vitreous humor. In the back, in front of the scissors, is the back half of the eyeball. The dirty brown thing hanging over the sclera is the retina, and the pearly blue lining is the tapetum.

It was utterly beautiful. I want to get more of these things from the Chinese market and do it every week.

You know the truth is out there.

The weather in beautiful Ellesiouville was a bit unusual last week. Monday and Tuesday were lovely; I did not wear my usual turtleneck-sweatshirt combo. Wednesday the rain began to fall but the temperature was still comfortable. Thursday was again pleasant, but then two inches of snow fell overnight. The freezing temperatures coupled with Thursday's rain gave us about a quarter of an inch of ice under that snow. I pulled out my long undies for what I hoped was the last time and set off for work on Friday morning.

To set the background for this story, I ask you, dear readers, to think about what happens in spring when warm rain follows warm days. In particular, please think about the sidewalks.

Yes, indeed. It was an earthworm holocaust on Thursday. Earthworm death and destruction on every cold, hard surface to be found, all the way up the steps to each building. There were portions of the sidewalks so thickly covered with earthworms that it was impossible to pass without mashing one or more into the concrete. I confess that I am one of those people who rescue stranded earthworms. I witnessed so much earthworm misery on my way to the office from the parking garage that I could not bear to walk across campus for the rest of the day. I stayed in my office and starved.

On Friday, however, I could not resist the clam chowder in the faculty club. (Why is the Friday soup du jour always clam chowder?) I set off across campus, a route that took me across one of the longest sidewalks traversing the Quad.

The ice had mostly melted from this narrow passage between two immense swards. It was coated with the limp and slimy corpses of innumerable earthworms, those trampled underfoot the day before and those caught in the ice and snow overnight. I could not simply walk down the sidewalk; I was forced to perform a clumsy dance to avoid, literally, treading on corpses to get to my clam chowder.

But this is not the point of my story. The point is this: not all the worms were dead. Quite to the contrary, many of them were quite alive -- squirmy, juicy and fat alive. I ask you, dear reader, to contemplate this. I have four hypotheses, and I think we all know which one provides the best explanation for this phenomenon:

1. The live worms struggled up through the ice and snow to bask in the cold air after a freak Midwestern snowstorm.
2. The CIA and the NSA flew over campus early Friday morning to dump bushels of live earthworms over the LSU campus.
3. The previously frozen earthworms were thawing out and wriggling away.
4. ZOMBIE EARTHWORMS WERE FEEDING ON THEIR OWN DEAD.
   

Here I am.

You can stop wondering about me. I am just fine.

A few weeks ago here in beautiful metropolitan Ellesiouville it looked like this:


So we went here:


I drank things that were, I think, called "fire-breathing dragons." They were electric green in color. They had too much midori in them and not enough rum. It was only about 10 in the morning when I started drinking them, so maybe that wasn't a bad thing.

I forgot to put sunscreen on my feet:


It hurt, but I didn't care. I think that's not because of the fire-breathing dragons, but because I was finally warm after three months of chill.

I. Am. Not. In.

I am not in. A beautiful little sentence, with beautiful tiny little words. So much meaning conveyed in only eight letters! You learned how to read these words in kindergarten; why the fuck is it so hard for you to understand them now?

Beloved colleague, I am not in. I am gone, absent, missing, away. I am not there. I have left, departed, gotten out, quit the premises, removed myself to another location, withdrawn, ditched you all. No, I will not come to your meeting. I will not make arrangements. I refuse to cooperate. Do not expect me at your event. Plan to get along without me.

She's gone.

She stopped eating even hotdogs on Sunday. When a dog won't eat a hotdog, there's nothing left. We saw nothing in her future but sickness and pain.

The house is cold and empty without her.

Thanks for all your good wishes.

This is why blogging will be light.

The Angry Dog joined our family in 1997. She was a rescue dog, a woman with a past. We loved her at first sight. For almost 13 years she has slept with us, under the covers, between our legs. For almost 13 years, one of us has gotten up at 2:00 a.m. to let her out, because that's when she likes to pee.

Last week the Angry Dog was diagnosed with chronic renal failure. We knew something was wrong, mostly because the dog whose favorite food EVER was horse manure refused to eat even people food. (It was a hiking trip along the C&O canal when she found her first pile of unrefined horse poop. I can't describe a dog in ecstasy such as she was; there are no words.)

She's very early into the disease; her creatinine level isn't even abnormal yet. But she isn't herself. She won't eat, and she drinks to incontinence. She has been wetting the bed in her sleep. We started her on subcutaneous fluids last week, and today started anti-nausea and inappetance drugs.

Although she is happy, even pretty perky for an old dog, we're going to have to put her down if we can't get her to eat. She can pee in my bed all she wants, but I can't watch her starve herself to death.

Happy Candlemas!

Angry Professor's Pancakes

1 1/4 cup self-rising flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 egg, slightly beaten
1 1/4 cups milk (more or less)
1 tablespoon cooking oil

Whisk together the dry ingredients; add the wet ingredients and mix lightly. Get rid of the big lumps but don't worry about the little lumps. Set the batter aside for about 15 minutes, until it gets bubbly and thick.

Heat a well-seasoned cast iron griddle dry on medium heat. When water bounces on the surface, coat it well with oil (but not so much that oil puddles on the surface). Turn the heat down, but just a little.

Make pancakes. For Candlemas, serve with black raspberry preserves and powdered sugar.

I feel better now.

I began my day by getting a manuscript rejected. Not revise-resubmit rejected, but go-away-and-don't-come-back rejected.

While I had originally planned to go to the gym, instead I got a big box of fried chicken fingers and french fries and ate them all in front of the television.

It feels too icky.

I'm writing two pieces that are not novel contributions to any sort of literature. They are, in fact, the kind of writing for which some people (e.g., my editor) advocate plagiarism -- of one's own work, of course.

I spent this morning cutting and pasting bits of my own already-published prose into a new document. However, I don't think I can do it regardless of whose blessing I receive. I'm going to have to rewrite these damned things from scratch.

Are you wondering?

The sabbatical? It's still fucking awesome.

The interwebs? I still haven't surfed or blogged in my sabbatical office. I'm getting a shit-ton of work done. I'd probably have 5-6 more lines on my vita if I had kept to this rule since, oh, 1994.

I'm sure it's all some kind of mistake.

Last fall we took the Angry Kid to a small, local bank where she opened her first savings account. She deposited all the money she had in the world, down to the very last dime, for a beginning balance of about $50. This was a special account for minors, a "little investors" account with no fees. The teller made a huge party out of the occasion -- the Kid left the bank with balloons and candy but unfortunately no bank book, which is too "old school."

This morning we opened her quarterly statement. She is being charged a $5 per month fee because her balance is less than some minimum amount. Her balance, minus the Christmas check deposits, is down to $39.

Update: Of course, it was all a mistake. The fees have been credited back. However, I have to agree with many of my readers in the comments. I think it was a mistake made on purpose. It's too convenient that these mistakes always work in the bank's favor.

In which I make two blegs.

1. I've been trying to find French music appropriate for the Angry Kid, something in the style of They Might Be Giants. Any suggestions?^*
2. New Year's Eve, 1997, the Angry Baker and I were wandering around Paris. I can't remember quite where we were. I'm pretty sure we had just come out of Poilâne's bakery and I'm pretty sure it was the Grenelle shop in the 15th arrondissement, but it could have been the one in the 6th. (Or we might not have been in Poilâne's at all. Anyway.) We were wandering around in some strange part of Paris and stumbled upon a lovely large fishmarket in a sort of warehousey building on a side street. Do any of y'all maybe know which market this might have been? (Edited to add: AB remembers it as an open air market. His memory is probably more reliable than mine.)
   

I have one Resolution.

I resolve not to blog, read blogs, or surf the web (except when necessary for work) while in my office.

So far, so good.

Today was the first day of my sabbatical. I reviewed an NSERC proposal and debugged some code. Finishing a review kind of sucked, but I took heart in the fact that it was the last review I will do for a year. (Except for two action letters that I can't get out of.)

I have moved to another department. They have given me a small, dusty, windowless office. I thought I would hate it, but I love it. I feel like I've crawled into a cave, that I'm hiding and no one knows where I am. It's perfect.

Unfortunately, my graduate students, clever buggers, found me rather too quickly.