When you say LA, do you mean Los Angeles or Louisiana?

When I was 35, a 21 year old asked me out to dinner. I said no. He asked again, I said no again. He asked again, I said oh what the hell and we had dinner. Six years later we broke up. It was fun while it lasted, and we would have broken up eventually regardless of the age difference. To me, 6 years when you are both…

My mom has been using the same nickname for me since I was about 12 years old. I will be 44 in less than a month. I HATE THE NICKNAME. I have always hated it. When she uses it with me, whether in person, via text, or in a holiday card, I experience a whole-body sphincter clench. I have never told her that I hate it,…

I live in the area and I am intimately acquainted with where they became stuck. I have driven that stretch of dirt road many times. There is much more to the story - they attempted a dirt road short cut in a remote area and got stuck in a gully, far from the paved county road they were originally on, when they…

I’m an adjunct because I love my day job and I teach as a hobby. I’ve never attempted to get a tenure-track job. I don’t choose not to be involved in daily life in my department; I can’t because I have a DAY JOB. I’m not tenured or tenure-track so I CAN’T participate in faculty meetings. I teach in the evenings so the…

Really? Reallyreallyreally? You really think hearing a professor swear is going to lead students to talk the way they do in your cute little hypothetical above? You don’t think very highly of the intelligence of students, do you? The world is fucking overflowing with examples of things that are inappropriate for…

I do. I’m an adjunct. I leave my day job, go teach night classes three nights a week, then go home. I rarely see other profs and I not only don’t attend meetings, as an adjunct, I’m not even invited to them.

I should probably just ignore your (probably deliberate) misreading of my comment and move along, but I’m a glutton for punishment, so: I didn’t say cursing was the only way to make myself accessible. I said it’s a way (I guess I should have clarified that it’s one way of many that I use, but I thought that would be…

But she’s not working as a teacher in a kindergarten. She’s teaching in a university classroom. I use curse words in the classroom, and my students consistently rate me with the highest scores on evaluations, and they tell me personally that they love the fact that I relate to them on an equal level, not as a remote,…

Augghhhh, this is one of my biggest nightmares! I teach as an adjunct so I’m not protected by tenure, and I say fuck all the time. Shit, damn, hell, and sonofabitch, too. I also joke about relationships and tell the occasional off-color joke. One time, I had one student mention on her class evaluation that she “didn’t…

20 minutes for the average woman to orgasm? Really? I can understand that if you’re doing it with a partner, but I’m surprised it takes that long when you’re doing it yourself. When I’m feeling it, I can orgasm in less than a minute; even if it takes more work it’s usually not more than 3-4 minutes. Maybe I should…

I, too, fight the good fight in the classroom teaching cultural anthropology, and I wouldn’t dream of insulting a student’s parents/economic status/religion etc. I DO teach them critical thinking skills using anthropological topics as the examples of how to use those skills; and it’s pretty amazing (and gratifying)…

Of course the black experience in the US isn’t based on a hypothetical thought experiment; but I think it’s a useful experiment nevertheless. And the question is, if Kobe Bryant had been born in the US South in 1778, would he have been a slave? The answer is yes. The question gets to the one-drop rule/law of…

In response to some of the comments on your comment, I think what you’re saying is that, IN THE US, would you have been a slave? Obviously, as others have already pointed out, the black experience in the US is not the black experience globally. Dolezal is trying to be black in the United States, not anywhere else. She…

Haha - I teach Anth 101, so I was right there with you!

Dolezal was first asked if she had ever straight-up lied to someone about her race. She replied, “No, because never have I been asked, ‘are you human or are you not human?’ Race as a construct has a fluid understanding. So I would say no.”

I was invited to a shower that is an English tea. It said nothing on the invite about having to pay your own way; but I just got the reminder email (the invites were through an online site) and it has a link to PayPal and instructions to bring $32 to the shower or use PayPal to pay in advance. WTF?? If you want people…

Yes. Some people are so severely allergic that even smelling nuts can send them into anaphylaxis.

I don’t have the answer to that question for any field other than my own, which is anthropology. At my school there were maybe five paid graduate student assistant positions to split amongst well over 40 students. And even though tuition at my public university was relatively cheap, there is also the cost of books,…

I would argue that lack of job security =/= cushy. Low wages for doing a difficult job =/= cushy. Spending years and a shit-ton of money for a PhD (many, many, many PhDs can only find work as adjuncts) and not being able to secure a tenure-track position =/= cushy. I am an adjunct but thankfully it’s not my only job.…