he quoted an Irish friend of his as saying that the Irish are the black people of Europe.

OMG, eyeroll. My grandmother (rest her soul) used to go on about this all the time until I finally was like, um NO. I didn't change her mind, but she stopped talking about it at least.

broadening participation in mathematics.

I do not think this means what he thinks it means.

I'm confused... was he using the Irish as a substitute for black? Like, it was actually about there not being much math participation by blacks, but he couldn't say that for some reason?

Laga, you know how beyond happy I am for you, right? It's about time!!

Also, smonster, if I haven't already said so, I am also giddy for you.

That said, I expect that encouraging a wide variety of people (racial, gender, religious, country of origin, etc.) to participate in a given field will enrich it. Not sure if your speaker found the best way to convey that, though.

I went into this talk assuming that we were all taking that as a given, and that he'd be talking about strategies for recruiting and maintaining diverse students and faculty. He mentioned that his department has significantly increased African-American and Latino/a graduate student enrollment in the past decade, but he didn't talk at all about how they did this. Just this weird jazz thing that took up 25 minutes of his hour-long talk.

I'm confused... was he using the Irish as a substitute for black? Like, it was actually about there not being much math participation by blacks, but he couldn't say that for some reason?

I have no idea. He first mentioned the Irish thing when he was talking about when he was in elementary school in NYC in the fifties, and his Irish-American teacher told the class, "You think you have it bad in this city? The Irish had it worse." And then he came back to the Irish thing a few times, with no real purpose that I could see.

Oh, and there was also something about how white western society has become a "Cartesian" society, where we insist that people are separate from nature, but other societies maintain a connection to nature, and this is a cultural barrier to overcome, and the Cartesian societies are going to collapse because that's what always happens to people who separate themselves from nature. I'm not sure where he was trying to go with that bit.

That talk sounds mottsy and confusing.

I woke up early, fed the dog, watered the lawn, then lay down in bed to do some internetting.

I fell asleep and had a dream where I was sitting with a circle of women all talking about the ways in which we were planning to fix our men.

I woke up nauseated, saw that facebook was still open and immediately wrote on D's wall, "I will never try to fix you."

Fifteen minutes later I saw a post from D's BOSS about fixing someone and realized that that was what inspired the dream. I hope she doesn't make the connection. I r dum.

"You think you have it bad in this city? The Irish had it worse."

Yeah, the Irish were pretty shit on - they were poor, they were Catholic, the human condition always likes to dump on someone they perceive as "other" who is lower on the social totem pole than them (man, I read an awesome article about this re: American immigration trends in grad school, I can't remember where now though) - but that was a pretty temporary thing.

Ugh, I have so many things to say about this, but that's not really the point. This is something that has always upset me.

His slides also included a few pictures of him hanging out with his black friends.

I wonder if he started out with a couple of good ideas but got lost when he tried to expand them into a bigger talk.

If you left messages, I say yes.

I did. Yay, validation! I made a third call and actually accomplished something! And now I'm doing laundry because some day I will be a responsible adult who does laundry at least a day before going somewhere but apparently not today.

Yesterday D said, "Let's skip the [online gaming] tonight, snuggle up in bed, watch a movie, and eat ice cream."

Aww! So cute!