It’s a strange thing, surviving an enemy. An old man accused me of hitting a japanese maple with my car (parked near it once) and said that it damaged the tree and made it grow green after. He was a dumb asshole because all japanese maples are grafts. The original larger green tree just wanted to grow and he didn’t trim it. He blamed and accused me of it for years while threatening to take me to court when I had to park even close to it. He died of course, a heart attack. I don’t feel less angry about the whole thing but now there is no one to be angry at. I have to remind myself it doesn’t matter anymore and enjoy the shade.

This is the type of joke I make in my classes, and it’s beautiful to see how many Gen z students don’t realize it’s a joke. To them, I’ve murdered several people, had a very messy breakup with Taylor Swift, and probably repeated high school. Also belonged to several bands with obscure names.

It’s not my fault, I grew up on Conan O’Brien and Craig Ferguson. Those implied one-offs are a tick I can’t control, lol

My worst review said that my paper was technically sound but my entire specialty was a “cottage industry” generating computational models with no real-world relevance and therefore the paper should be rejected. The editor offered the opportunity to rebut but what could I say to something like that?

(The reviewer still lives, as far as I know.)

On the plus side, this meant that I was rejected by PNAS but then published in BJ.

I’ve been open on the fediverse about my background.

The problem with being a major depressive for the first 36 years of your life is, you meet a lot of friends in treatment, and statistically, many of them don’t make it.

I recently surprised myself by telling the boyfriend two stories back-to-back and hearing myself say, “they died in (x) year.” Some of us outlive others. Some of us outlive a lot of others. That just makes those of is who make it all the more precious, and makes the example we lead that much more critical.

(Yes. 36 years of depression. And yes. It was actually worth it to live through it and get to the other side.)

To be very German, here is my favourite Max Planck quote: Scientific Progress marches on one funeral at a time.

Perhaps it was meant like that. And the old guard that disliked his papers is now dead and progress has been made.

If he thinks something doesn’t matter just because the people involved are dead, maybe history is not the right academic field for him.

Had a former soviet physicist back in cc. Similar idea. He made fun of students for pronouncing Greek letters wrong. Talked about detecting submarines using capacitance. Great instructor, intense, but great.

Then there’s the high school history teacher who was a Vietnam vet. Slapped a kid for joking about his story calling in artillery/strikes on bs positions(he was tired of seeing mass murders of civilians). Never got in trouble for it. Kid spent a week in detention. Also a great teacher!

I’m going to use that next time I need to bail out of a story I shouldn’t have started telling

As we all know, german humor is no laughing matter, so this very well may be true.

A professor I was taking a management class with gave me a fun burn on my thesis. I asked for his input on a specific point and he called it “intellectual masterbation” and proceeded to talk for 15 min or so about ideas he thought i should have studied instead (I was already preparing for my thesis defense so couldn’t change topics). Never got an answer on the actual question I’d raised.

I feel profoundly incomplete, and always will, until I’ve put my life’s work and entire reputation on the line over an obscure academic point, on which I have violently disagreed with others in the field. Step one, find something I care about that much.

Oh… God damn it, my entire worldview of who sucks and who is cool has big red arrows pointing at where I ended up.