Every year, my institution has a special set of meetings: the tenured faculty gather together and review our aspiring younger faculty. It’s our one evening of absolute power, in which we have three possible outcomes: 1) OK, we’ll let them linger on another year, 2) we promote them to a tenured position, so they can join us in this exercise next year, or 3) you’re fired, you’ve got one year to clear out your office. I hate it. We take it seriously, which means we have to read all these big tenure & promotion files the week before, and sometimes these meetings go on for hours. And there are two evenings of these meetings!

The first meeting is tonight, the second is tomorrow. At least it’ll be over soon…and I’m sure the faculty we’ll be reviewing will be even more relieved.

On top of that, I’m grading exams. They’re mostly done, except for the grand essay question that I told them would require a couple of pages of discussion, to be graded for grammar and quality. That I will get done today, or die.

I still teach classes and have spiders to take care of! To make it even more fun, I’m getting my COVID vaccination tomorrow. Whee.

Imagine a million dollars dropping into your lap, all yours free and clear. It’s a nice fantasy. It would soothe a lot of my anxieties for the future, although honestly I don’t see it happening very often. It’s the kind of delusion that drives lottery ticket sales, though.

Now imagine the reverse: suddenly, you’re handed a million dollar debt. That’s a real nightmare, but it’s also a much more common occurrence. One serious health scare, for instance, and your savings are wiped out and you’ve got hospitals dunning you for huge amounts of cash for the rest of your life.

Sorry for the too-real horror moment, everyone, but now imagine a different scenario: the worst people in the world get hit with massive debt — not you, you’re safe, just a few people who deserve the most awful misery. That’s different, there’s a bit of schadenfreude mixed in with a little sympathy for the rat, and a general satisfaction that justice came through for once…but also a weird feeling that they’re going to find a way to worm out of it.

Behold, Alex Jones.

Courts in Connecticut and Texas have already ruled that Jones intentionally defamed relatives of school children killed in the mass shooting, and they have ordered Jones to pay $1.5 billion in damages.

Lopez ruled that more than $1.1 billion of those verdicts, awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be wiped away in bankruptcy. But he ruled that other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys’ fees that were awarded as punitive damages in the Connecticut case, could possibly be discharged.

Negative $1.1 billion. That’s a sum that might weigh on one’s mind. Alex Jones deserves it.

Also, Kim Davis. Remember her?

A former Kentucky official facing a $100,000 judgment for refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple could have to pay an additional $260,000 to attorneys who represented the men.

Attorneys who represented a couple in successfully suing Davis for damages have requested a total of $260,084 to cover their fees and expenses.

If a judge approves the request, Davis would owe more than $360,000 as a result of the court case.

It’s only a third of a million dollars, so it’s a bit less extreme than Jones’ case, but it’s still got to burn that her sanctimony has probably erased any savings she might have.

Keep ’em coming. I like to see conspiracy theorists and judgmental Christian bigots getting their comeuppance.

Earlier this Fall, I was crippled for a while by excruciating inflammation of my ankles. I am happy to report that this has completely cleared up, and I’m pretty good below the knees. Unfortunately, I then suffered from aching elbow joints — they swelled up nastily, but that’s gone down now, and instead I’ve got skin peeling away at my elbows, now that they’ve shrunk down again. So a couple of days ago, my right knee decided to freak out on me, and walking has become painful once more. I hobble about with a stylish cane nowadays.

I can safely say that my left leg is one body part that is holding up, so far. I’ve been getting a few complaints about it having to do most of the work of shuffling me around, but I keep telling it it needs to wait its turn. It can only betray me once my right knee has recovered.

Anyway, it’s getting harder to lecture dynamically — I don’t like to hide in a corner and just tell students what to think. I’ve been trying to think of alternative jobs I could do while relatively immobile in a single room, and I think I’ve got one.

OnlyFans.

AMissouri teacher has been suspended after school administrators learned she’s an OnlyFans star.

Brianna Coppage, 28, taught English classes at St. Clair High School until she was placed on leave Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Coppage began posting on OnlyFans over the summer as a way to boost her annual income, she said.

The Post-Dispatch reported that her teaching job brought in about $42,000 last year. She told the outlet that she made up to $10,000 extra per month through OnlyFans.

Whoa. That’s $120,000/year, about 50% more than I make as a lowly college professor. I could just roll around on silken sheets, keeping the stress off my failing joints, and get a substantial raise.

I can think of no flaws in this plan.

I had bad news yesterday, with my granddaughter sick and canceling her birthday party, and my mother seriously ill in the hospital. Today, it’s a different story:

• Iliana is fine, COVID tests came back negative, the birthday party is back on!

• My mother was getting feisty, threatening to call a cab to take her home from the hospital, so obviously she’s feeling much better.

I guess Friday the 13th isn’t so awful, after all.

My students may disagree, since I’m spending the morning cheerfully polishing up an exam they’ll be working on over Fall Break.

I had grand plans for this weekend. It’s our Fall Break, so it was going to be 4 days off…and I’m pretty well caught up on everything, so I’m not going to use it for grading. It’s also going to coincide with my granddaughter Iliana’s fifth birthday, so we were going to go to a birthday party!

I wake up this morning to dismal news: Iliana has COVID. She’s doing OK, but party canceled.

Worse news: my mother is in the hospital with serious pulmonary issues, serious enough that the doctors asked the family if they should put in do-not-resuscitate orders. If you’re a woman over 65 with a history of smoking, lungs are what’s gonna get you. She’s improving right now, but I am concerned.

I’ve made new plans for the weekend. I’m going to sit around and mope and worry.

Have you been in a break-up? Miss your partner? Hate your ex-partner who has blocked you on all social media and want to rip into them? No problem, AI to the rescue!

Just feed all the texts you have stored on your phone into an app called Amori, and it will construct a simulacrum of them that you can talk at forever!

Our GPT-powered algorithm will analyze your text conversations with your lover or ex, providing you with some extra sassy relationship insights and a compatibility score to share with friends.

It’ll even simulate phone sex for you.

That’s not creepy at all.

For added verisimilitude, buy one of those inflatable sex dolls, tape a photo of your ex to its head, and run this app while you have a conversation with it.

My cell biology class is held from 1-2:05pm. Today was the monthly test of the tornado warning system, so we got sirens for the start of the hour, and then 20 minutes later everyone’s cell phones started ringing for the big national emergency alarm test. Fun. But we recovered quickly.

Except now I apparently have to worry about the long-term effects.

I thought it was just my lectures that turned students into zombies! If they start snarling and moaning about “braaaains,” I’ll let you all know.