It was supposed to be a joke.

Of COURSE I don't have swine flu. I don't think it was even a head cold. I think it was a snootful of some pollen or another.

But LSU has just confirmed the first case of swine flu in a student.

Achoo!

I'm sick. I'm certain it's swine flu.

Update: Sudafed, apparently, is the cure for swine flu.

Kiss my ass, Sweetheart.

To: Angry Professor
From: Lukin Ferna Scape
Re: First midterm

Dear Dr. Professor,

I didn't say a word about this to you before now, but I have surgery scheduled Monday morning when we are having the midterm. I will get documentation for this, but I need to know when my makeup exam will be. Also, will the makeup be harder than the midterm? If it is, I can maybe reschedule my surgery.

Please let me know as soon as possible.

Lukin

A secret message to my colleagues.

Dear Colleagues,

I know this is a middling-important issue. However, when I ask y'all whether or not we should have a faculty meeting to discuss it, those of you who are out of the country until the Fall quarter are not permitted to demand such a meeting. Fair enough?

Love and kisses,
Your Chair

I haven't been blogging because there's too much to blog about and yet I don't want to be indiscreet.

I took the Angry Kid to the dentist yesterday. We were a little early, so we got to sit in the waiting room for a while. We were joined by a stereotypical Red State kid, a sturdy boy of about 11 years wearing camo and a John Deere cap, and his younger sister.

One wall of the waiting room is painted with blackboard paint and much chalk is provided. Imagine my surprise and delight when Red-State boy wrote out the first 25 digits of pi and then started to teach his little sister the Pythagorean theorem. (My students don't know the first significant digit of pi and couldn't recite the Pythagorean theorem if their lives depended on it.)

Give me some reasons to keep going.

I'm struggling my way through Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts: Return Engagement. It's an alternative history, in which the Confederacy won the Civil War. This is not my usual genre, but it was one of Amazon's free downloads for the Kindle.

Unfortunately, Turtledove writes too much like a college sophomore in a creative writing class. I've tried to ignore the turgid prose. I'm trying to ignore the formulaic introduction of characters one at a time in unconnected vignettes. (With more than a dozen characters in two chapters, I lost track long ago.)

Then I get to the paragraph where the President of the Confederate States is fondling his newly-published book (a Southern racist's Mein Kampf):

Maybe this was what women felt when they had a baby. He didn't know about that; he'd never been a woman. But this was pretty fine in its own way.

Up to this point, Turtledove's prose has been utterly humorless, so I can't believe he's trying to be funny. (Or perhaps I've failed to appreciate his subtle and sophisticated wit.)

I hate not finishing a book once I've started, but I can't stand it any more. Unless one of you can convince me otherwise, I'm deleting this trash. Danielle Steel would be more pleasant.

Some of my students are completely invisible.

There's a student in one of my classes this quarter who has studied with me before. He's a smart, serious kid and I enjoy having him in my classes. However, he is a habitual nose-picker. He has his finger up there for most of the duration of my lecture, and when it isn't up there, it's rolling something around. This is disconcerting, but I try not to let it disturb me too much. I'm fairly certain he doesn't realize he's doing it.

There's another smart and serious student in the class (who is also in one of my other classes) who sits in a different location in the lecture hall. Today, as I droned on about something, I lectured first to the nose-picker (busily at work), and then by chance my lecture focus shifted to this guy. He was obviously very engaged in the lecture, looking at me and the overheads quite seriously, with a pencil rammed up and hanging out of his nose.

I have a problem.

I'm afraid of flying. As my daughter gets older the fear gets worse. While I can usually get past the fear to get on shorter domestic flights, I can't face the long overseas hauls. (Over water. Good god, no.) Last year I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference in Berlin - all expenses paid. I said no, thanks, because I couldn't possibly get on an overseas flight.

I have a conference in Europe this summer. The Angry Baker and I used to go to Europe every summer before the Angry Kid was born. He really, really wants to go, and he really, really wants to take the Angry Kid. I really, really don't want to go and I really, really don't want them to go either. I have only a few days left to register for the conference and reserve my hotel room.

Don't tell me about the odds of a fatal airplane crash. Or my distorted perceptions of risk. Or that driving is more dangerous than flying, or that the short domestic flights are more risky than the overseas ones. I teach this shit; I know all about it. It's an irrational fear. An irrational fear that is now impacting my career.

But has anyone else noticed that there seem to be a lot of planes dropping out of the sky lately for no reason and incinerating all souls on board?