We were the members of Tau Iota Tau, one of Dartmouth's least-official groups. Rather startlingly for a bunch of basically good girls raised in the cities and suburbs of 1960s and 1970s America, we made up a sorority in 1975 before any "real" sororities  hit the campus -- and we called it called Tau Iota Tau.

TIT.

Our motto was "They May Be Small, but There Are Those Who Love Them." You can imagine all the other jokes springing from this one-beat routine. We were uplifting. Etc....

But the official Tau Iota Tau photograph is more compelling than I remembered it. One of my friends is wearing the varsity sweater she earned on the track team, but her waist-length dark and wavy hair betrays a less-than-Olympic attitude; one is wearing a feather boa, rhinestone earrings, and a gaudy t-shirt; another is holding a stuffed bison (that she claimed had been given to her in 1976, on the...

I am deliriously exhausted because I stayed up until four o’clock last night to finish a book.

And not a book I’m writing, either, but a book I’m reading.

Not a book I’m preparing to teach, not a book I’m working up to review, not one I’ll need to introduce or preface, not a book recommended by my contemporary-book-reading friends. Nope, I stayed up WAY past my bedtime, wrapped in a comforter with the cats wrapped around me like feather boas, because I could not rest until I found out  what happened in Desperation, a novel by Stephen King.

Desperation, in a big clothbound edition, had been sitting on the bookshelf for a year or so, bought in a feeding frenzy at a store where King (even in hardback) was practically given away as a treat if you purchased other books. “Someday,” I thought, “I’ll give myself a break, sit down with big cup of coffee, and take a look.”

King is not new to me....

Midnight:
The two hardest things in life: falling asleep and waking up. Wedge of Brie cheese in one hand, glass of fake champagne (sparking wine, they call it, but we know what it is: cheap, fizzy, but at least dry)—in the other. Phone at my ear, listening to girlfriend talk about her kid’s prom preparation earlier in the day. Can’t decide whether I am envious or not--wouldn’t it have been great to have raised a beautiful daughter right from the start, given how much I loved even the bit-player part I had in my two step-sons’ lives?--but decide, once again, that I wouldn’t have done the sort of terrific job she’s done. I remember when she was toilet training her kids; it amazed me that we, as adults, are not all walking around in Pampers. That our parents, our mothers, took the time just to teach us continence is astonishing. They should get paid just for THAT. “Successful toilet training”...

Here are more suggestions -- although, unlike the previous list, these are drawn from outside the office -- concerning what folks would like to see invented during the next 50 years:

One of my former students suggested that he would like to be able to play new-release movies on the inside of his contact lenses. This way he would appear to be paying close attention to whatever he was meant to be doing while watching, for example, The Hangover.

A newly single friend wants a version of a meter reader that would allow her to tell whether a man is genuinely interested in having a relationship, just interested in being friends, interested in a one-night stand, or a 10-minute stand.

A neighbor wants photographs that would self-destruct once you realize just how terrible you actually look, or when the relationship ends, whichever comes first. This will happen even if the photograph is...

Don't be nasty, now.

Admitting when you're frightened and ignorant can be the first step in overcoming fear and ignorance.

Or not.

It can also be the start of the process whereby the white flag of defeat is raised by those who cannot, simply cannot, face the next onslaught with the requisite courage. 

Look, I'm saying that I don't know what I'm doing because I'm just being honest with my readers, even the ones who will kvell because of the headline.

Right now, even in the writing of this tiny bloggette, I am relying on Young People Who Know More Than I Do to assist me in the learning of this new program for blogging at the CHE. Nice folks are offering advice and URLs; they offer emotional and technical support from afar.

So far today I have had three cups of coffee, three Diet Cokes, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a big bowl of chocolate chip ice-cream, all just to get me to the ...

At first I thought it was a piece from The Onion—you know, one of those eyebrow-raising bits of satire along the lines of “Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman” and “Jilted Hasbro CEO Laughs Coldly As Scrabble Destroys Another Relationship.”

I figured that a headline reading “Henry Louis Gates Jr. Is Arrested at His Own Home by Police Investigating a Break-In” must be a joke.

I thought it was in poor taste and not that funny, true; frankly, I thought it was a little, well, stale.

Turns out that Prof. Gates, of Harvard, was arrested for entering his own home.

Here is the link, and this will lead you to other articles from The Boston Globe, The Associated Press, and elsewhere:

Amazing, right?

It’s frustrating when the world is so dumb, so nuts, and so absurd that you can’t tell the difference between a headline and a racist joke.

What invention would you like to see change your life in the next 50 years?

Can you imagine living without your computer, without your cellphone, without air conditioning?

I’m 52, so when I was growing up, I had none of these things. Yet now — and spoiled as it sounds — I would be hard-pressed to be without them.

Even 20 years ago, when I first started working at UConn, the building where I worked had no air conditioning. It was a flat-roofed four-story concrete and brick structure, lots of glass, and when it was sunny, hot, and humid, my office became a terrarium. Posters would peel off the wall. Flip-flops would make sucky-noises on the linoleum.

When they moved me to the basement of another building, I was actually grateful because at least the new place was air-conditioned. So what if I had to look up to see people’s feet?

I wanted my cooler air. You get used to stuff...

The placard says $2 I give $1.

I'm special, I get a discount, I get it wholesale.

I want the salvation Off the back of the truck.

I'm after the imitation Coach bag of redemption.

Faking it is as close as I’ll get to the real stuff.

But I want the good fake, not the bad fake; And I swear to God I would never pass it off As real to somebody else.

The closest I get to forgiving those who suckered me Is cheating; a con artist, spiritual shoplifter, Blinking, smiling, Sparking this light, Unobservant, unobserved.

Humor by women breaches the “wall of utterance, the wall of origin, the wall of ownership” Barthes claimed as the problem of modern writing — insofar as conventional modern writing takes issue with the notion of discourse against a “classical” language.

If women appear unlaughing at conventional, masculinist humor (“whatsa matter honey, can’t ya take a joke?”) it might in part be because the directive to find something amusing is as inappropriate, even impossible, as the inverted directive not to find something funny. Charges of unlaughing and laughing inappropriately have been leveled at women, as we have seen, since women began to participate in the creation of literary works. These charges have also been brought against the female audience, of course expected to laugh at humor often based on the degradation and debasement of their sex. “The admonition to be happy,” writes...

Judy Tenuta

“Judy, you don’t know nothin’ about the South. You don’t even know the difference between the North and the South.”

I said, “Oh yes I do. In the North, there’s a cut-off age for sleeping with your parents.”

Mary Russo

Making a spectacle out of oneself seemed a specifically feminine danger. The danger was of exposure. Men, I learned somewhat later in life, “exposed themselves,” but that operation was quite deliberate and circumscribed. For a woman, making a spectacle out of herself had more to do with inadvertency and loss of boundaries: the possessors of large, aging, and dimpled thighs displayed at the public beach, of overly rouged cheeks, of a voice shrill with laughter, or out of sliding bra strap — a loose, dingy bra strap especially — were at once caught out by fate and blameworthy … anyone, any woman, could make a spectacle out of herself if she was not ...