My dissertation resolution:

Since I was already becoming nervous about finishing my dissertation, since I looked up and it was already mid-June, I decided to just make sure that I work a solid 5 hours a day (i.e. 5 hours of work not counting breaks, distractions, etc.), for 5 days a week, and however much I get done this summer, I get done.

I have another 3 years left to finish my degree, which is more than enough time; I shouldn't put pressure on myself and get stressed out by thinking about overall completion, but rather just make sure that I put a lot of time in each day to the dissertation, and the result will come eventually.

Family Lore about My Great Aunt the Nun.

Also on this visit, my mom was telling stories about 2 times my great aunt the nun (a very talented accountant) bailed out Catholic institutions that were facing huge financial difficulties:

1) When an elementary school in her order was about to close, the former head of the order got her on the phone, and she called up the priest to tell him to keep the school open for one more year, but to ask all the parents to pay the full tuition up front if they possibly could, and to let her use that extra money until the payments would typically come due to the diocese.

About 40% of the parents were able to pay early, so she took that money and invested it short-term, and with that money she made enough to keep the school open.

2) When a hospital was closing and couldn't even pay its foodbills, she personally called up the bread and milk companies and asked them to extend her order credit for just a while longer, and she would guarantee that they got paid.

Then, she looked through the books, and discovered that there was a huge backlog of Medicaid and Medicare forms.

So, she got the billing people to work 6 days a week or they'd be fired (some quit).

Then, since a ton of the $ coming in was for nuns who worked in the hospital and they'd of course taken a vow of poverty, she confiscated all of that $ as it came in, then she invested it short term, and she was able to make enough to not only pull the hospital out of bankruptcy, but to also build a new wing on it.

Years later, she told my mother she could have built her own mother a house with all of the $ flowing in all of the different directions, and "they never would have found it."

. . .

Also, my grandmother loved to party, and didn't take education very seriously, unlike her older sister, i.e. my great aunt the nun.

One time my mom asked my great aunt if she did her sister's homework to get her through high school, and my great aunt didn't deny it.

. . .

Also also, one time there was $0.05 disagreement in her books and the bank's, so they got together to find out where the mistake was.

As it turned out, the bank had made a mistake, and she asked for the $0.05.

"But it's only five cents," the bank person was like.

"If it was your nickel, you'd want it," my great aunt the nun said.

(She wouldn't back down.)

...her books were meticulous, and every tax season she'd treat herself to a 12-pack of Mountain Dew as she did the books, she said she liked the taste, I don't think she realized that she must have also liked all of the caffeine in it...

Vacation highlights...

...from a long weekend visiting my uncle and mom in the metro Detroit area:

1)  My mother sampled several IPAs and declared that they taste like "geraniums".

2)  At a buffet that my uncle demanded that we go to, he was disappointed unlike other times he'd visited and not only called it "lousy", but also said his fish was horrible and "full of fluid".

3)  When I was shitting on Michigan's GOP governor to my uncle, I jokingly asked if he had heard about his latest pro-business initiative to jumpstart the economy, allowing children to work in factories again.

"But there aren't any factories," my uncle was like.

4)  At a shitty restaurant downtown with great hotdogs, a guy sitting down the long table from me, my mom, and my godmother was a born-and-bred Baltimorean who had moved to California and now was in Detroit to help his son get moved in before starting a medical residency.

He said that after the 1960 riots, for as long as he lived in Baltimore, the anger was "palpable" with every (black) person that you met.  He was pleased to hear that wasn't my experience visiting the city, and said that the duration and severity of the recent riots were nothing compared to the ones that he had experienced living there growing up.

He also said that when the riots were happening, all the city and police officials you saw on TV condemning them as acts of criminals were (black), whereas before all the officials on TV who had been saying the same things were (white), and to him, that was a sign of progress in the city.

5)  After the author talk of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who my mom likes, she asked me what I thought, and I said that there some nice things, but I found his values "reactionary".

"That's juvenile, I can't take you anywhere," my mom was like.  "I always thought you'd grow out of that."

I then said that I appreciated his advocacy for better teaching of history, and that led into a conversation about the difference between history-as-entertainment and history-as-inquiry-and-critical-thinking.

"You could teach an entire class about [the subject of the guy's latest biography]," my mom was like.

"Well, not so much at the college level, that'd be tough," I was like.  "It's not like you slap in a TV documentary and keep the kids entertained.  Maybe you could use the biography as a jumping off point into different lines of inquiry into social history, though you'd really really have to design the course well."

When my mom asked for an example, I said that though the author had portrayed his subjects as not-that-privileged, there were some signs that they were - and then there was the whole question of (African Americans) in that area of the time, and how they fit in socially.

"You got to remember that this was the era Great Migration, when the black population went from being rural and southern to urban and northern." I was like.  "And so that whole thing about the key to success being a good mother and father and growing up in Ohio, I would love to see how much their opportunities matched what was available to all the people living in their town at the time."

"That'd be a whole separate book," my mom was like.

"No," I was like, "That'd be fuller context, a few more pages in the bio at most.  And you asked, anyway."

I then said I'd rather have students be able to think critically about interpretation of a primary source - e.g. a list of library books belonging to the biography's subjects - than memorize dates, but I don't think my mom really got that.

Rainstorm - Championship.

So, on Monday I worked a full day from home.

It was very rainy all day, and I got alerts on my phone about flash-flooding, and at one point tornado sirens went off.

That night as the rain let up, I went to the quarry park for a stroll, and many gravel paths had huge gashes running down them, since water had carried a lot of dirt down and dumped it out at the base of paths.

And, though it had stopped raining, sheets of water were running down all inclined sidewalks, as it drained off the hill.

In the pond, the fishing platform was completely submerged, the water level was so high; I tried to take a picture on my new smartphone, but the evening was too dark for any picture to come out.

As I ended my stroll, fireworks started going off, and I realized that the city must have won a sports championship.

So, I strolled down the main drag where all the bars are.

Here and there people in cars were leaning out windows or out opened sunroofs, and one car stopped at a redlight had a guy who demanded I come give him a high five, which I did.

Outside the several bars, there were groups of people, and one of them had someone with a huge flag who was standing out in the street waving it.

By one intersection, I saw 2 black SUVs parked on the side street, noses angled in towards the main drag ready to take off at any second:  cops, ready to nail drunk drivers, it seemed.

Cleaning out my closet: Stuff I threw out.

Since my move to a new apartment 2 Septembers ago, I've had like 5 boxes of stuff I've wanted to sort through to get rid of.

Finally, over Memorial Day weekend, I did it.

I ended up throwing out a backpack with a seriously broken zipper (and I had had the zipper replaced once already!), as well as cords for old broken cell phones.

I also have an external floppy disk drive that I might take to a computer store, to see if they want it.

Seriously, of all the stuff that you can't give away and so have to throw out, outdated technology is a huge part of it.

How sad and wasteful...   Just think how many natural resources went in to those cords and stuff, and are now trapped there and useless!

Distinctions among Latin Americans?.

I'm not sure if this is my limited sample size or what, but the more professional/well-educated Latin Americans I meet in the U.S., the more I respect some countries but not others:

- Chileans seem like nice normal people, very down-to-earth and relatable, and it's just not clear at all what social class they're from (and in fact I'd guess they're not very elite, from the way that they dress, since they tend to seem dumpy on the whole).

- Venezuelans seem like assholes, w/all the professionals being from reactionary elites and acting very entitled to privilege to the point where they don't even realize it (which is part of why whenever I meet someone from Venezuela, I'm automatically like, "Oh, Venezuela!, I love Chavez," and I grab their forearms and give it an admiring squeeze as I say that I love Chavez, and then I look confused and ask dumb questions when they start going off on how he ruined the country).

- Like Venezuelans - and I'm saying this based on a sample size of one - Colombians also seem very entitled, like they somehow deserve all their privilege that they have from a society w/huge wealth inequalities and a history of a handful of elites massively f*cking over everyone else.

- Mexicans seem solid, since many get advanced degrees b/c of the country's free university education (which is a whole separate phenomenon from the children-of-the-filthy rich thing, I'm also certain?)...  Interestingly, even these educated people seem resigned to the status of their country as a worsening oligarchy, though they seem to constitute an entire class of educated but not extremely privileged people.

- Brazilians are very aware of class differences, and seem embarrassed about it when you bring it up w/them, like their country could be doing better and they're ashamed of it.

With all of this, I'm just talking about the more professional/well-educated Latin Americans I meet.  I also meet a lot of Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and Salvadoreans and even occasionally some Brazilians who aren't too well-educated or in white collar professions, and I tend to uniformly like them.

With the Mexico sample, I also wonder if there's a lower travel costs thing happening b/c of our shared border, or family connections that bring many of these type of people to the country, than with people from South America.

Thoughts on the Admissions-Industrial Complex.

Is it just me, or does it seem like many of America's undergraduates are made to feel like "also rans" because they've been put through enormous pressure to apply at top-ranked schools, then end up somewhere and experience vague discontent?

The other week I met a (wealthy) undergrad from a pretty high-ranked but not extremely well-known liberal arts college, and he seemed to be embarrassed about that fact.

I don't know why, but I'm guessing his reaction is fairly typical of people from his school and many other schools.