Living in exile

Today's entry is about small, embarrassing mistakes we make. Some consequences can be dire, but some can extremely be funny (without even trying).

Yesterday, I almost fell into a manhole. After getting home, I found out during the same day from a shared WeChat moment that there was a virtual conference of a regional study group I have attended when I was a PhD student. I had the pleasure of participating in two poster sessions (learned TikZ which is quite useful) and gave a plenary talk (the last time I attended). I registered to attend and was able to get in. But internet connections was getting quite poor by the end so I had to leave. So, where is the booboo? It turns out my PhD supervisor was there and he sent me a private message asking about how I have been. I responded to EVERYONE. Of course, I said I was ok for the most part. This was already embarrassing enough but I am really glad I did not say, “Well I almost fell into a pit.” I am sure that conference will be unforgettable.

Another booboo I wanted to talk about was a booboo that had dire consequences. A University of Miami lecturer, teaching business analytics, resigned after a student released a Tiktok video pointing out that one of his bookmarks contained the words “Busty college girl fu...” In all likelihood, we all know what letters will follow. But there is a small probability that it could have been “Busty college girl funded after an arduous application process”. Or “Busty college girl furtively went to all girl's frat house.” But out suspicious minds automatically filled in the letters because that is the auto-fill/auto-correct function deep inside out hearts.

I shared the link to this news in WeChat and a couple of friends had quite a discussion. For me, it was an issue about boundaries for everyone concerned. The lecturer should have known better and most of us would have made an uninteresting bookmark folder, say, “Higher-order Theil-Nagar asymptotic expansions and weak IV” and dumped all of the private stuff there. The lecturer violated a boundary that exists in the classroom. The student should have not released the video. The student probably had the freedom to take the video, but there are consequences for violating someone's privacy. In effect, the student violated the lecturer's expectation of privacy.

One friend of mine commented on the lack of fairness to the lecturer and that training is necessary to avoid these things from happening. Yes, I agree. We all have secrets and there are consequences to revealing secrets. A part of me wondered what would have happened if the guy was not a lecturer but a lecturer with grant money. Another friend commented on the fact that “college girl” showed up which created a level of impropriety and a lack of ethics. I also wondered about this: would it be ok if it were MILFs instead? Some students would really feel uncomfortable if they really knew what kind of porn (or something simpler like kinks) their professors have. These students do have the right to be uncomfortable or express their discomfort. How do you come to a resolution of this? In the “new normal”, there is a lot more urgency in mot doing business as usual.

More than a decade ago, I was in a German language class with a friend of mine and we were just fucking bored of making sentences that I constructed a sentence that had the word pornstar in it (you know, just to have some fun) but nothing explicit at all (as I know that there are boundaries). In the German context, sexuality is something that is healthy and that one should be candid about, so I felt my joke was appropriate. But, one of my female classmates glared and gasped because she felt I was inappropriate. After class, I apologized for my utterance. She acknowledged it but I don't think she forgave me. We rarely spoke together in class after this.

These dire examples really tell you that boundaries are tricky and that inevitably you will offend or hurt someone. But I believe we have to try hard to negotiate and be explicit about these boundaries (like what that female classmate signaled). As always, do not double down on the mistake or boundary violation. I think tomorrow I will talk about the act of double-down, which I observe a lot in the university context.