My potty-mouth anxieties don’t have to so much with my blog(s) as they do with my teaching.  I’m can be fairly profane in the classroom, and I often wonder in retrospect why I don’t censor myself more fully–whether it’s some feeble stab at ethos-construction, a lazy gesture toward being “subversive” in its most stupid and ineffectual sense, an attempt to get my students to loosen up, or godknowswhat.  But I have to admit that it is a tiny bit gratifying when, during the seventh or eighth week of class, students finally join the vulgarity chorus. 

(My favorite: when a student declared that Absalon in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is a douchebag–not very vulgar, but it was still pretty funny in context.  Funnier but less pedagogically enriching moment: running into an already-drunken student on the street walking toward a bar.  When I jokingly pointed out that she was not of legal drinking age, she blurted out, “Shut up, bitch!” and then immediately sobered up and said, “Oh my god, I just called my T.A. a bitch,” then apologized profusely.)

Speaking of anxiety about professional presentation: I guess I shouldn’t be admitting my pedagogical misadventures here since, despite my little sobriquet, you actually know who I am. 

But what the f—, right?

- - - -

* - “Didn’t get to” is a little misleading; I saw your original entry on the day it was published, and I had typed a comment along the lines of, “When I turn thirty-nine, there’s a good chance I’ll be living with my parents with my Ph.D. diploma hanging above my (their) twin-sized bed, and I’ll help out at their retail store and occasionally attend conferences as an independent scholar,” but it all sounded fatuous and I never submitted it.  By the time I wanted to post a more reasonable “happy birthday” message, you’d already gone through several rounds of thanking people for both timely and belated greetings, so I thought that piling just another message onto the pile would be unnecessary.