Everything is horrible!

Everything is wonderful!

Horrible!

Y’all, it is not a good time for higher education, perhaps especially so in the Deep South. I was already feeling existential angst due to legislation changes, changes in accreditation requirements, and vendors shoving AI into any and all library resources (to the extent that they are now “helping” students by summarizing abstracts, which are, of course, already summaries). It’s bleak. I won’t go into details here but last week it got worse. I’m fine-ish, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty, but it hurts to come face to face with how little the powers that be value what my colleagues and I do. I’m coming up on 19 years here, the entirety of my professional career. I’ve made sacrifices to be here and I have done good work. I’ve been proud of a lot of my work. It’s not a good feeling to be told in no uncertain terms that it’s not important.

All I can say is we’ll see how this FAFO strategy turns out for them…

Wonderful!

Despite that significant downer, a lot of life is really great right now. Some highlights:

• Pippin celebrated his 5th Gotcha Day last Monday. We got him a custom cake from Dog Days Barkery and a special Gotcha Day bandana. I have requested that we stay at this milestone because time is flying by too fast and he’s the perfect dog now. No need to mess with perfection, we’ll just stop his aging here.

• Last week, I had a PR on the bench press! 80 pounds! When I first started lifting weights roughly a year ago, the 35 pound bar was a struggle so this was a big milestone and I can’t wait to lift even heavier.

• I recently encountered Molly Knight’s wonderful baseball Substack, The Long Game, and the chats have been a delightful addition to my week. Baseball is the main topic, but other sports are discussed and lately there’s been a bit of a rabbit hole related to The Odyssey, both text and movie. Thanks to Long Gamer Kevin Keenan for sending me this BlueSky thread from THE Emily Wilson. Truly a delight to see that this morning.

• Don’t look now, but the Red Sox are FUN! Also fun, aside from that final game yesterday which was just so dull: The World Cup! Bring on the women!

• Books, man! I love them. I’ve read a few things lately that were, relatively speaking, duds, but also some great stuff. I really adored Daniel Mason’s new book, Country People, which (unlike a lot of litfic) was fully joyful without being treacle. Mark Haber’s newest book, Ada, isn’t his best IMHO but I just love the rhythms and repetitions of his work, and the man can write a sentence. (My favorite of his is Lesser Ruins). John of John was stunning, and my read coincided with the Scottish invasion of my beloved Boston, which added a bit of fun. I already written about the classics that I’ve encountered recently.

• I am doing two summer reading challenges this year, from the National Book Foundation and the New York Times, and I’m almost through with both. If you do all of the NBF prompts, you can enter to win the grand prize, which is a trip to the National Book Awards. You should not bother to do that, though, because I am ✨manifesting✨ a win.

• We got a blackout curtain for the bedroom and my sleep has been ON POINT even with the ginormous workplace stress. I have a harder time sleeping in the summer because of the light and the heat and this works better than I imagined possible. Sleep is important for everyone but due to certain health conditions¹ it is critical for me so this is truly wonderful.

It’s good to remember that sometimes, when everything is horrible, everything can be wonderful at the same time. This isn’t an accident - I have worked really hard to balance work and my real life, and to cultivate a meaningful real life, which for me is partially comprised of good people, great pets, the magnificent highs and lows of baseball, and (if I may be pretentious) a life of the mind.

A bonus funny thing!

Fresh off the success of my reread of The Odyssey, I am attempting an immersive read of a fairly new translation of The Aeneid. Instead of taking a useful language that would have allowed me to follow the World Cup on Telemundo instead of Fox, I studied Latin (five years) and French (four years) in high school², which allows me to now say one of the most pretentious things I’ve ever said, which is that I’ve only read The Aeneid in the original Latin. I remember the story only vaguely and my extremely literal translation was not elegant. I’m only one book in but it is fun to see the places where I can remember the Latin phrase.

But the funny thing: the audiobook narrator for this is the same narrator who did Murder in the Dollhouse, a rather dishy true crime book that was my car book a little while ago. It is taking my brain to adjust a bit.

1. My asshole brain

2. I immediately negated the French by taking German for two semesters in college. I am, unfortunately, an ugly American who can communicate orally only in English.