In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon. . .

"In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, was old-fashioned--then the summer was eccentric. It snowed twice in July, and once the dawn never came, so the night lasted for forty-eight hours. And so on, day after day. Nothing happened. Just like in earlier years, when the summers were more respectable. Our tiny whims exist just to camouflage our desperate emptiness. I thought: when the time comes, I will have nothing to write about, and my next book, like the preceding ones, will be brimming with loneliness, boredom, and nullity. Now, it is possible that wasn't thinking about that; I was gathering material for future works of fiction: an abundance of nausea, loads of fears, huge bins overflowing with feelings of failure and numbness--all the tedious material of modern storytelling. But I wrote nothing down. God is my witness. Suddenly, an interesting reason to write popped up. My friend, N.V., made sure of that. He committed suicide. A classic: a hundred barbiturates and sliced veins. But that's still no kind of story line. What's strange about that, that one of my friends kills themselves? A year does not pass without two or three of them committing suicide."

~~ from The Mongolian Travel Guide by Svetislav Basara

and in other news in the blue grass state

The Kentucky Wildcats, an 8th seed in their region, roared into the NCAA championship game last night on a three-pointer in the final seconds against Wisconsin. If they win the final game, then the small state of Kentucky will hold the men's basketball championship for the third consecutive year (UK won two years ago and Louisville last year).

But in another part of the college scene, where adjuncts struggle to survive while teaching many of our most economically vulnerable students, the story is not so rosy. In a blog, Christian L. Pyle reports on "Life in Adjunct America" for instructors at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. His writing includes these sobering notes:

In my previous article  on this subject, I revealed that I was suffering from depression and that I could date the beginning of the disease to my “adjunct awakening.”  I’m not alone.  In the comments on my article, Tim Arnold posted

"A colleague of mine at then-Lexington Community College, worked for years as an adjunct. Finally, they had no classes for him. I last saw him standing alone playing trombone at the amphitheater behind Memorial Chapel. His depression bloomed into a full flowered psychosis.  A coordinator of the Business Writing ‘department’ at UK died alone in his apartment under suspicious circumstances as his meager adjunct position began slipping away."

I did also see that Tennessee is strongly considering advancing two free years of community college to all of its high-school graduates, so there are also these glimmers of hope, that change can be effected, that learning, lives, and livelihoods can be improved.