Having to tell my kids this morning that Kamala Harris lost, that we once again elected a racist, sexist, criminal con man who has ran a campaign on hatred of people I love, to the presidency of the United States, is obviously not the worst of the bad things that will be coming, and certainly it is not very significant. But it was the first bad thing, and my only accomplishment of the morning is that I got them to school before I started sobbing.

I just had a reddit post go viral, and the person I wrote it about saw it and confronted me about it. I didn't think that happened in real life. What universe am I living in here

Over lunch today I was grousing to a colleague about the class I'm teaching this afternoon, about how no one says anything no matter how hard I try, and I'm ready to just give up on the class. And then I checked my email when I got back and found an email from one of those students, saying they wouldn't be in class today and they were sorry, they were having mental health issues and it was making class challenging, but they really appreciated my enthusiasm and excitement about the subject because it made them glad to be in college again. So now I'm sitting in my office trying not to cry. I really, really needed that today. Not giving up on this class after all.

I have spent nearly every moment of the last six months thinking a combination of "surely it's going to get better, this can't last forever" and "you're not actually dying, you're just so tired it feels like you're dying," and I'm starting to worry that this is permanent, actually

Look, if you want to have a child-free wedding, you can do that, but what you CANNOT do is decide to have a child-free wedding and then get mad at your friends with children when they can't be there

I don't know if anyone actually is waiting for more Jiang Cheng time loop AU, but my kids (too young to have been vaccinated) have COVID and we live in a society that makes zero accommodations for that whatsoever, so for the last several weeks I have been basically at the verge of total physical collapse at all times. Writing will continue once I have brain cells to spare again.

Got another negative department review today, and it's clear that I just, fundamentally, Do Not Understand what they want from me. My teaching evals are excellent. I'm publishing in top journals. But apparently my syllabi are "not methodologically rigorous" and my book project is "lacking a coherent theoretical apparatus." And I have looked! At my colleagues' syllabi and books! And I cannot! See! What is so different about mine! And my kids' school is closing due to COVID cases rising AGAIN, I have had full childcare less than a quarter of this semester, and I don't know how much longer I can do this, and I can't afford NOT to do it