And you say that Russian people are bad at business. Here is one who even manage to peddle her hugely expensive Tarot readings on what is supposed to be a feminist website. The readings are done through email which reminded me of the following Russian joke:

“Thank you for recommending me this great massage therapist! In exchange, I can recommend my priest. He is so fantastic! He takes confession by fax.”

Of course, here in North America, you can get a personal Tarot reading for $20 (I have a friend who is a huge fan, so I’m very aware of the prices), which is much cheaper than the online Russian reading. But the American Tarot specialists are not smart enough to dupe silly American pseudo-feminists into letting them peddle their services on their feminist websites.

Remember, folks, if you are planning to have any business dealings with Russian-speakers, you need to know that you will not win. My people are way too tough for you. They are too tough for me, too, which is why I emigrated in the first place.

Seriously, people, what’s with this trend towards drowning everything in triviality? The Montreal protests dissolve in a clownish display of stupidity, feminists advertise card tricks, and my students believe that slavery is bad because it caused the slaves to have low self-esteem. Does anybody take anything seriously any more?

So do you remember how I was searching for self-soothing mechanisms? I now found one that really works*: translating fiction. I have been given a novel to translate from Russian, and it has been the most relaxing endeavor ever. The novel is a very pulpy thriller where FBI agents chase after zombies sent by a religious sect. I wouldn’t read something like this but translating it is fun. I open the novel, turn on Law & Order as background noise, and work on the translation. A couple of hours later, I feel as refreshed and rested as ever.

The problem is that this novel will end soon. And what will I do then? There aren’t that many texts that need to be translated between Russian and English. And I can’t just choose a text and translate it without an actual client who needs the translation because I will be tortured by guilt if I spend so much time doing something like this for fun and not for remuneration.

* In addition to the great suggestion to paint my nails for which I will be eternally grateful.

I wanted to comment on the following story because every piece I have read on it, in my opinion, really misses the point:

 This story about an elderly widow who was hit with a major tax burden because she was married to a woman and not a man is a sad read. The women were together for decades and made a series of great real estate buys, amassing quite a bit of wealth. Ms. Windsor (the surviving wife) cared for her partner for years through an illness, to which her wife eventually succumbed. Then, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, she was forced to pay enormous sums on her wife’s share of their assets — sums she would not have had to pay if she had been married to a man.

Let me begin by saying that I consider DOMA to be a disgrace and a vile piece of barbarity. I believe that equal rights need to be granted to gay people and that discriminating against anybody based on their sexual orientation is horrible and shameful.

However, I think that there is something else going on in this story that needs to be acknowledged. How come a couple who lives together in a loving, profound relationship and who didn’t go to the courthouse to put a signature on a piece of paper enjoys less rights than a couple who did? Why are there rights that are granted by putting signatures to a piece of paper rather than by entering into a certain kind of relationship?

There are countries that have chosen to acknowledge all couples equally. My sister and her partner live in Quebec. They have been together for over ten years and are raising a daughter. They haven’t had time to organize a wedding ceremony or even walk over to the courthouse just yet. But they have every single right enjoyed by the couples who did. They will organize a marriage ceremony when they feel like it. Or not. This will be a choice not based on any paperwork-related convenience but exclusively on when they choose to have a celebration.

I think it would be great if we all started moving towards this model. All couples within it would enjoy equal rights. Marriage, in the meanwhile, would have absolutely no legal or formalistic meaning. It will be nothing but a ceremony that some couples would choose to undergo because it entertains them. Of course, people in really shitty relationships who need to exclude large groups of people from having access to the same rights in order to feel like their bad marriages mean anything at all will be against this.

A very personal post from a member of the Sandwich Generation.

“The doctor concluded that I am one of those rare cases where a person’s blood pressure rises for no apparent reason. I don’t totally buy that—there is no effect without a cause—but we have ruled out every potential cause known to the medical community at this particular moment.” As I said before, unless you address the real cause of high blood pressure, which is repressed aggression, everything else you do to bring it down will just be cosmetic. Thank God, the very first doctor I consulted on my high BP was not a quack. He immediately suggested I start blogging to release some of my pent-up anger.

“And I personally don’t find Obama’s domestic policies very enlightened, even if he could get more of them implemented. For example, why doesn’t he champion public education? Could it be because he never went to public school?  I think it matters that he was educated to be a member of the elite. He shares the views of people who attended private schools and the Ivy League universities.” I agree with this blogger’s opinion on Obama but I want to point out that I also went to and Ivy and then taught at another Ivy. These experiences made me realize that public education is a lot more important than I could have ever imagined. We all choose what we do with our experiences, so I’m not ready to let Obama slide on this one just because “he was educated to be a member of the elite.” It was his decision what to do with his education.

Children should not be used as billboards for political ideas.

“What I was taught growing up in the anti-abortion movement, that every woman instantly bonds with her fetus as a mother to a child, is incorrect. The idea that every woman can’t help but mourn a lost child after an abortion or a miscarriage is simply wrong. Some may, but not all do. For some women, in contrast, the fetus remains a potential child all the way up until birth. Indeed, even now, as I approach that point, I still see my fetus that way.”

An interesting insight into the Canadian healthcare system.

If you are a fan of Paul Fussell, read this. I remember how eye-opening his work was to me many years ago. What a great scholar!

Canada, sometimes you suck something fierce: “Lyndon Dorval, a high school physics teacher in Edmonton who has been suspended for giving students zeroes on missed assignments/tests. (He actually does give them a chance to make up the work, but he enters a grade of zero until the assignment or test is completed.) This contravenes his school’s “no zero” policy, where teachers are expected to give students interim grades based on averages of any work students have turned in (i.e., not include any assignments the students have failed to do), and then pursue the students to turn in incomplete work by the end of the semester OR “find alternate ways…to show they know the material.” I don’t know what I would do to anybody who’d suggest I can’t give zeros for assignments that were never even handed in. Idiots.

When college graduates have to move back in with their parents, it’s not a cute new phenomenon. It’s a tragedy, you stupid jerkwad from the Washington Post. Believe somebody who comes from a culture where parents and adult children lived together as a norm.

This is the only kind of ice-cream that I like. Can anybody explain to me why I can’t find it anywhere in the US? I found something like it but it came in a big tub. It’s not the real thing, though, until it looks just like on the picture I linked to.

“There are certain issues where there is no middle ground: either the Biblical version of God exists or He doesn’t; either abortion is murder, or it’s not: either I am a person deserving the full range of Human Rights or I am not. You can whine all you like about my “black and white mentality,” but you know what? At least I’m not seeing the world in a single uniform, mushy shade of grey.” EXACTLY! I’ve been accused of “black and white mentality” too many times by people who are simply too stupid or to chicken to voice any opinion at all.

If you are past 40, play this fascinating game. I promise I’ll do it in 4 years.

“If psychiatrists’ inability to agree among themselves on a diagnosis threatened to make them a laughing stock in the 1970s, the relabelling of a host of ordinary life events as psychiatric pathology now seems to promise more of the same. Social anxiety disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, school phobia, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders are apparently now to be joined by such things as pathological gambling, binge eating disorder, hypersexuality disorder, temper dysregulation disorder, mixed anxiety depressive disorder, minor neurocognitive disorder, and attenuated psychotic symptoms syndrome. Yet we are almost as far removed as ever from understanding the etiological roots of major psychiatric disorders, let alone these more controversial diagnoses (which many people would argue do not belong in the medical arena in the first place).”