Dreams, Again
I've had a series of vivid dreams recently. Now to explain the context of this dream, I've sometimes had to deal with frivolous complaints lodged by co-workers over the years. (I recently mentioned a personal horror story of a former female colleague who filed a complaint after I tried to invite her to lunch at a building cafeteria. I also had to deal with a mentally ill fellow contractor while I worked on a Booz Allen internal data warehousing project; his code wasn't working, and he managed to convince himself that I had stripped his Oracle user account of necessary privileges, totally insane. The funny thing is the client knew he had emotional problems; they had sent him home for the day just a couple of weeks earlier.) So in this dream scenario, I had a foreign-born older colleague. A female co-worker had been talking to him and they were discussing his surname. I think we were looking at a life sciences company, and oddly enough his surname started with "bio" so I said the obvious ironic comparison to "biology". The next thing I know, he's filed a complaint against me, arguing that I was mocking his name. Dude, seriously?The man in the dream looked familiar, and I finally realized who it was: Géza Freud, a visiting Hungarian-born professor from Ohio State at the University of Texas; I was a first-semester teaching assistant in his introductory calculus course. I've written about him in one or 2 past posts. The university should never have assigned him to teach calculus. The students were up in arms; there were multiple complaints, too many to list. His accented English was almost impossible to decipher (nature-al numbers, recipe-rocals), he had unusual exams (1 right, a C, 2, a B, 3, an A), but to qualify for an A you had to pass a personal oral exam--and I remember he denied a student, saying he had to give him too much help). I was a teaching assistant--meaning I conducted optional calculus word problem study sessions a couple of hours a week. The students had an unrealistic expectation my colleague Jeff and I were supposed to prepare them for the exams (but Freud never involved us, maybe worried we might leak details: who knows?) Probably the defining moment for me was when the best student in the class, a coed, literally threw her exam in my face one day; the last thing I heard, she was scoring straight 100's under a different professor in the follow-up course.
But the "jump the shark" moment for me in the course was when he started filling the first of six blackboards with equations; the students were just mechanically jotting them down in their notebooks. I myself had no idea what was motivating this stream of work--when in the middle of filling the sixth blackboard, he suddenly has a brain fart and stops writing. He was lost, couldn't remember what he was trying to do and what comes next. He looks at me through his thick eyeglasses and sheepishly asks me for help. I myself didn't know what motivated his stream of consciousness.
I've mentioned Jeff's setup of me in a past post. Jeff had come to me and convinced me that we had to have a "come to Jesus" moment with Freud; his students were in a mutinous state, too. So we go to see Freud, and Jeff motions me to start. (Now I'm not crazy about this in the first place, because I don't know how he's going to take it; I need my stipend to attend school.) So I start detailing student complaints; Freud is in a state of utter shock. After I finally finish, Freud desperately turns to Jeff and asks, "Jeff, is this true?" I was totally unprepared for what came next: "Well, sure, a couple of students have complained. But you have some of these in every class. Nothing more than the usual." Son of a bitch! He had set me up for God knows what reason.
Now Freud is pissed--at ME! What was motivating my disloyalty to him? He starts stalking me--literally. He follows me into my graduate real analysis class and starts badmouthing me in front of my professor. I get an unexpected summons to the department chair's office, who is literally seething at this trouble-making nobody in the scheme of things, who didn't know his place. I was told there would be repercussions if I didn't see the error of my ways. And (there's other nonsense in the interim) when stipend renewals came out in the spring, I didn't make the cut, but Jeff did. That effectively killed my dream of seeking a doctorate. My MA was sort of a consolation prize, and I had to plead with my reluctant grandfather the next year for a $500 loan so I could have my thesis professionally typed, printed, and bound. I did at least land a grader position in a number sense course to help with the bills.
There are other quirks I remember about Freud. If you Google him, you'll see he's well known for his work with orthogonal polynomials. So I remember earlier, when he wasn't pissed at me, he had offered to lend me one of his monographs over the weekend, like it was a Stephen King novel. I also remember us visiting his spartan furnished apartment off campus near the end of the semester where he had stuck a clipped (like wallet school picture) photo of his wife on a lampshade.
Remember in those days there was still a cold war with the USSR; I don't know the circumstances of his leaving Hungary. but one day he caught me walking on campus and I was carrying my paperback edition of the Gulag Archipelago. He was definitely intrigued by the book, but I got the definite impression that he was paranoid, like maybe the KGB might see him with the book.
One sometimes wonder about the road not taken. I really wasn't obsessed over going to a name college for my undergraduate school and really, despite my outstanding high school academic record, I didn't get a lot of attention from colleges. My folks weren't in a financial position to help (my Dad was career enlisted and responsible for a family of 9). OLL is a quality small college which was a long bus ride away from my folks' south Texas home. One of the limitations of a small college, which I realized when I reset my sights on a career as a professor versus a math/science high school teacher, is you are constrained by a limited number of upper-division courses. This meant in practical terms I was taking each of the 2 or so advanced math or philosophy courses being offered (thank goodness the courses rotated. Plus I had taken one or more independent study courses. If I had pursued a degree, say, at the University of Texas, I would have had more course offerings, faculty, etc.
Ironically one of the sisters in the math program had worked hard to recruit me to the math doctoral program at (what is known today as) the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I basically had a verbal offer of a fellowship or some sort of stipend. I have to admit I was strongly tempted; I think, in fact, they thought I had accepted. That's in the middle of Cajun country; who knows? Mom may have been thrilled to have a Franco-American daughter-in-law. (I think she would settle today for a breathing daughter-in-law.) I think I may have been concerned with my career options after the PhD. In fact, once I got to UT, they made it tougher to qualify to ABD status, concerning about a developing glut of math PhDs on the market; their new PhDs were finding it hard to get a faculty appointment.
So I knew I was done at UT after the Freud encounter my first semester. It was unfair, but life isn't fair. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I should have gone to Louisiana. Similar situation years later when I chose UWM over Bowling Green State (which I preferred), mostly because UWM gave me a chance to teach graduate courses. And then I got on the bad side of a senior faculty member, again, my first semester, for privately criticizing his student's garbage dissertation proposal. I've mentioned before while I was watching my cherished academic career flush down the drain, the guy who eventually got my BGSU offer won early tenure.
Amash is Leaving Congress
I've blogged and tweeted numerous times about Amash over the years. I've republished some of his content, and in fact I have a related blog tag. He had gained the unusual reputation of explaining his Congressional votes in detail on Facebook. I had by that time coalesced my emerging libertarian (minarchist) perspective.
Trump was increasingly irritated at the more libertarian contingent in Congress, not rolling over to rubberstamp his spending and other votes, and has targeted them: Sanford, Amash and Massie, to name notorious target. Massie, for example, refused to roll over for Trump's COVID-19 boondoggle bill. (The Massie opponent's campaign imploded.) Amash had become the first and only Republican to announce his support for impeachment before formally leaving the party a year ago. Amash's principled conservative positions made him unelectable to the Dems in his purplish district, and Amash's principled stand against Trump's incompetent, unprincipled Presidency irritated his overwhelmingly pro-Trump GOP base. DeVos, the Education Department secretary, is married to a former Amway CEO and is from the Grand Rapids area that Amash represents.
I'm actually somewhat familiar with Grand Rapids. I did a campus visit (academic job interview) to nearby Grand Valley State University, which for whatever reason declined to make me an offer, which I would have likely accepted. Grand Rapids is particularly known as a hub for Steelcase and Amway. It also is home to the Acton Institute, one of my daily blog sources.
So Amash likely had problems with DeVos' opposition to his reelection, although he put his best face forward, insisting he had outraised funding among his competitors. But quite frankly, a third-party challenge in Michigan is tough logistically. And at least one poll showed him losing the nomination to a Republican before he left. In a campaign with a high profile, both parties have would have thrown resources into the race to his disadvantage. So I think when Amash silently put his reelection campaign on hold in February, he probably conceded (internal polling?) that it wasn't winnable. That happens to be the reason he gave for bowing out of the race for the LP nomination.
So is Amash's political career over? I don't think so. This is all speculation, of course. I think he has an eye on the governor's mansion. In part, that's based on some of his comments on state vs local face mask policies. I myself listed his lack of public executive experience in seeking the Presidency. (Of course, neither does Jo Jorgensen, who I'm currently supporting.) And I may be out in left field here, but if Trump were to lose this fall, which seems highly likely as I write, the GOP will have to regroup/rebuild for a post-Trump era, and that might provide an opening for Amash's return.
It Looks Like Twitter is Shadow Banning Me Again
Yeah, I know to others that might sound like crackpot conspiracy theory, but the recent Twitter hack revealed an administrative dashboard that does just what Twitter has for years denied doing--no, not to my own account.To be honest, the new account was off to a blistering start. I had something like 56K impressions in my first 2 weeks, including a record number of "viral" (1K+ impression) tweets, nearly a dozen. And then stats crashed to less than a handful of impressions over hours, the same type tweets that would have earlier earned hundreds of views. Now really I don't do the tweets for stats, and maybe there's a system problem effecting others than me; I don't think so, though. I'm seeing people with tweets that show, e.g., 186 likes. I have only 3 new followers so far. It's possible only my followers can see newer tweets. No notices from Twitter. I've been very careful of language, etc., in renewed tweeting, so whatever is going on has to do with people not liking what I tweet, not because of incidental reasons like linguistic preferences. Not sure what's going on, but it's been happening for a few days now.
