Here is the list of topics people have asked me to blog about. I have crossed out the ones I already covered. Feel free to add anything else.

– American Senator review.

–  about Don Quixote by Cervantes (for Dummies version – can one without any knowledge about Spain & its’ history understand it, at least on some level?)

– How do *you* feel RE Obama’s kill list and steps against Iran he supposedly takes?

– anything about language learning;

– Where do you draw the line between “culture” and “trash?” What attributes does a movie or book have to have in order to fit your definition of culture?

– Is closure an American phenomenon? Do other cultures just say “piss off” and go on their merry ways?

– you list “voting is useless because all politicians lie anyway”. I’d be interested to see a post explaining why this is a misconception.

– book called Truth, Reality, and the Psychoanalyst: Latin American Contributions to Psychoanalysis;

– What to you think about 50 Shades of Grey. Doesn’t matter if you’ve read the book. What are your thoughts on all the fuss about it?

– thoughts on it and on the larger regulation/personal responsibility theme;

– thoughts on the privacy article;

– more about the Ukraine, especially regarding the current political situation, Timoschenko etc.;

– I’m curious as to how you learned about Asperger’s and how you learned you are autistic;

– In the archive, you have advice for parents of autistic children. What advice do you have for next-degree relatives (aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc.)? What would you advise these relatives if the parents are going bankrupt trying to cure the child’s autism?

– I’d like to know more about what made you want to study and teach Spanish.

– opinion on the “killing feminism” article.

–  I find some parts of US history fascinating, and wondered if you have any opinions about US history? Either the facts themselves or how you see us thinking about our own history.

– “PRINCETON, NJ — Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. ”
Is that a problem?

– What are you language personas? Of the languages you are fluent in, what are the beauties/limitations of each? I know people have asked you to blog about language/language acquisition. Maybe this can be the subject of a future post.

– What is the meaning of life?

These are great, people. Thank you, everybody, for contributing. I promise to cover all of them gradually.

Do you know what I’ve been doing since morning? Explaining to my students why “Communism” and “Fascism” are not interchangeable terms. The stupid mass media throw around words like “fascism,” “Communism” and “socialism” all over the place to the point where they become emptied of all meaning. I keep explaining and explaining, yet the students keep saying, “But Communism and fascism are both against free enterprise, so they’ve got to be the same” and “fascists and communists are all leftists.”

Reader H.A.S. left a link to a really great article and asked me to comment on it. The article condemns the lazy and pathetic “choice feminism” and explains why taking feminism in the direction of “all choices are sacred” will kill the movement:

I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time — by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits — is her feminist choice. Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it?

What can I say to this other than, “Hear, hear!” Like the article’s author, I’m beyond tired of hearing the pompous “Respect the woman’s CHOICE!” whenever I offer an opinion about something done by a woman. How would you qualify a philosophy that insisted on the impossibility of ever judging or criticizing any choice made by a man? If I accompanied any suggestion that a man might be an idiot who makes ridiculous choices with an outraged, “But he  is a MAN! Respect his choices!”, what would that make me? Wouldn’t the word be “sexist”?

If we are in favor of equality, we have got to treat everybody’s choices equally. Women are as capable as men. Capable of greatness and stupidity, genius and silliness. Capable of making great choices and idiotic ones, too.

Let’s please be serious grown-ups: real feminists don’t depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.

If the movement had been serious about being serious then the idea could not have caught on that equal is how you feel. Or that how anyone feels about anything matters at all.

Again, I could not agree more. You can’t be a feminist – that is, a person who believes that women are valid and complete human beings – and not be, or at least try to be, financially, intellectually, socially and personally self-sufficient. You can still be a great person and feel good about your choices. But you are not a feminist. The word needs to mean something. Some limited range of very basic actions should come attached to it. This is why I agree completely with the following:

And there really is only one kind of equality — it precedes all the emotional hullabaloo — and it’s economic. If you can’t pay your own rent, you are not an adult. You are a dependent.

Of course, we all have difficult moments in life. We lose jobs, suffer economic hardship, get into debt. Everybody finds themselves in a position to ask others for help. That is normal and good. However, if a healthy adult hands over all financial responsibility for her or his life to another adult, there are no other words to call this but a complete and utter dependence. And people who are really secure and happy about their choices, would not need to mask this simple reality behind the pretty verbiage of feminist choices. They would just accept it.

The part of the article I disagree with is the author’s claim that only rich women are housewives nowadays. That is absolutely not true since this is a format of existence that people choose for reasons completely different from whether they can afford it. I know several brilliant young women who chose not to work and who now live extremely modest, not to say piss-poor, lives. These are women who could have made really good money based on their skills and education. I also want to dispel the myth that housewifery is necessarily linked to taking care of children. Once again, this is a choice that is made for reasons that are not really related to practicalities and conveniences. Childless and passionately anti-children housewives are in no way different from the ones who have children.

This is not a class issue. This is an issue of a personal choice. And that choice has nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.

The article ends with a very important thought:

Something becomes a job when you are paid for it — and until then, it’s just a part of life.

This is undoubtedly true, people. I speak foreign languages all day long. However, it only becomes a job several times a week when I walk into the classroom and get paid for speaking these languages to students. What would you think if I claimed that when I speak in Russian to my husband and in Spanish to my brother-in-law that was my “job” and my “career”?

I thank reader H.A.S. and hope s/he keeps coming by the blog with these great links.

P.S. Who wants to bet that I will receive at least 3 comments in this thread exhorting me to “respect women’s choices’?

Dear student,

I don’t care if every professor you’ve ever had told you that you are a brilliant writer. I also don’t care whether it’s true that you have received “statewide prizes” (sic!) for your writing. I don’t care in the least that, as you point out, you are a native speaker of English while I’m not. And I really don’t care that you always believed that your essays were great. Be that all as it may, nobody will convince me that the following sentences are not completely and utterly horrible:

It should be taken into consideration that the fact that Latin America is a big and important nation is a crucial fact that is perceived by everybody on a variety of occasions that are frequently discussed, however they might say that it is not true and deny everything. Which I find wrong. Completely.

Please understand that after I was forced to read 6 pages filled with this kind of nonsense, I have to conclude that your writing awards are either non-existent or are given out by idiots.

P.S. I will die a happy person if I don’t have to explain ever again that Latin America IS NOT A BLOODY NATION!!!