[Wanna win a new London Tanner paddle? One’s being raffled this month on this very blog. You enter by posting a comment to any post or page on the blog. Each comment or reply to another comment gets you another entry.]
So, it’s February 12, 2025. As someone commented recently, “The Year 2025” sounds like text from a science fiction novel, not the time we’re actually in now. No wonder things are so dystopian.
I typed “2014” the other day, mostly because I’m absent-minded, but I think also because it’s been a pretty fucking terrible decade. But so far, 2025 has been different, and by “different,” I mean, like, “I can’t tell whether something is from The Onion or not.”
No, don’t worry; this post isn’t about politics. But they factor into my situation.
Why I’m Not in Vegas at Oasis
The current politics and changing policies have impacted my life in dozens of ways since late December. There’s a reasonably good chance my department will be eliminated, and I’ll lose my job at the end of this academic year. 1This would be bad under normal circumstances, but at this moment, when ethnic studies are being made illegal in some states, there are not a lot of jobs for literature professors who research and teach ethnic studies, feminism, and gender studies. To understand what’s happening, see the recent cuts at a sister campus, Sonoma State University. I can’t go to Vegas because I’m part of the faculty senate leadership team on my campus, and we’ve been given an additional twenty-plus hour-a-week job for no extra pay to navigate this crisis.
On the upside, on the swan song front, therapy has gotten easier; our therapist says we’re both making a lot of progress individually and together. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’ve been spanked more in 2025 so far than I was in the entirety of 2024. I’ve tried to wear at least a part of my uniform every day, even when I’m teaching. I’ll have more on the whys of this as part of the #dailyuniform series I’m writing. As of today, there’s only an intro, but I’ve got sketches for five and ideas for another ten. I’m 57 and a slow blogger, so that may take care of all my posts for the next decade
Weirdness on the Blog
In the meantime, there’s something wrong with new posts not showing up for between twelve hours and three days after being posted. The direct links work, but the new post doesn’t appear on the main page for an insanely long time — think hours or even days. P thinks it’s a caching issue. Me too. The hard thing is that caching is complicated — there are many, many, many, so so many points where the problem might be. Pretty much all of them require my writing or calling ISPs or service providers and playing the “Have you tried this? I’ll wait” and “That didn’t work? How about this?” over the course of several hours while they decide this is someone else’s problem. I haven’t had the time or heart to do it so far.
Boom went my plans to post something new every day this month.
What’s New Here?
I’ve added a few stories from “back in the day,” including “A Meeting With Our Headmaster,” part of the St. Clare series. It’s a favorite of mine. It started as a straight scene report of a school role play I’d promised to the scene’s “Headmaster.” After I finished the report, though, I checked with the headmaster’s then-partner, sending her a copy of the draft before I sent it to him. They’d had a long-distance relationship for a few years with no end insight. Paul and I were still long-distance, and I knew how hard some posts about playing with others were for me.
In the email I sent her, I asked if it was okay to post it on the newsgroup, offering to fictionalize it if she’d rather or if I could not post anything about our play. She wrote back, saying it would be easier for her if I turned it into fiction and didn’t tell anyone who the story’s headmaster was modeled on. It was easily done, and I think it made it more fun. If I recall correctly, the story’s schoolgirl was braver than me.2But I also remember my actual self getting way more strokes. There’s also a real-life post from my old blog, el tercer ojo, called “What I Wished For.” Also, I put up several of Mija’s early collaborations with Pablo partly because Laura’s site was down for a bit.
Something Funny to End On
So, the other day, I outed both Paul and me by texting the link to my most recent post (the uniform one) to a longtime vanilla friend rather than to my decidedly not vanilla spouse:
That thing where I send my husband a link to my most recent blog post except actually send it to a (very close) guy friend. Vanilla guy friend.
I am dying. He’s being adorable about it, but I anticipate much teasing when next we meet.
— Mija (@mija-again.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 6:06 PM
I’m really hoping said friend isn’t reading this. It’s been preying on my mind as I’ve considered what to post. Plus, I’m going to be teased forever.
- 1This would be bad under normal circumstances, but at this moment, when ethnic studies are being made illegal in some states, there are not a lot of jobs for literature professors who research and teach ethnic studies, feminism, and gender studies.
- 2But I also remember my actual self getting way more strokes.
Hope you’re doing well, I was re-organizing my harddrive the other day and stumbled across my “stories archive” and got to wondering “where are they now”.
As with pretty much everyone else, Paul’s Good Girl and Naughty Girl have a permanent place in my brain, which is all kinds of awesome. Checked the file dates – from 1996… That’s pretty cool!
On a more sombre note, we also got a note from our Dean to expect layoffs in our department in the coming months as well. Not sure how hard we’ll get hit but would suck to lose anyone because we have an awesome faculty right now and a lot of great young teaching staff which frankly have a lot more energy than I do these days. They do more heavy lifting than me, but I was like that back when I was in their shoes, so maybe I’ve earned a bit of a break?
(entry 7)