I’m on my way to Montreal today and N was driving me to the airport.

“Are you sure we are going in the right direction?” I asked him. “Because I’m not recognizing this landscape.”

“I’m following the GPS,” he said. “It’s got to be right.”

We kept going, and now I was really not recognizing the landscape.  There was an enormous industrial facility to the left of us, and there is no way I could have missed it on my many trips to this airport. I’m obsessed with factories and never fail to notice them.

“This looks really unfamiliar,” I told N.

“Yes,” he said. “But I trust this GPS.”

Finally,  the trusty GPS informed us that we had reached our destination. We stopped and realized we were nowhere near the airport. In fact, we’d been driving for 40 minutes in the exact opposite direction.

Now in many families, this would have devolved into eye-rolling, frustrated sighing, sarcastic comments, snapping and the hateful “Why do you always have to” melodrama.

Not so in the Clarissa household, however. I’m sitting there thinking, “Let this be the greatest hardship I ever experience.” So what if I miss the plane? I’ll get on the next one. Or maybe I won’t get to travel at all today.  None of this is worth making the person I love suffer.

I grew up in a family where every little mishap was a reason to bark, feel aggrieved, and start a scene. So I taught myself to be different because life doesn’t deserve to be wasted on yelling and eye-rolling.

So we set out in the opposite direction feeling happy and content. And then I got an email saying that my flight was being massively delayed anyway.

Ultimately, the recent debate we’ve had on social mobility proves, yet again, that there is no single reality we all inhabit. Our vision is selective and only shows us what we want and are prepared to see.

I see the United States of overwhelming and absolutely fantastic social mobility that is unparalleled by anything in the world. As an outsider to this culture, I find it unbelievable how easy mobility is here. The people I know – immigrants and non-immigrants – are achieving incredible ascents, and to be fully honest, it isn’t like anybody is driving themselves into a grave with extremely hard work to do that.

The people who see nothing but sad, endless drudgery that barely allows to stay afloat are not lying and are not inventing anything. This is really what they see. Of course why they see this and not the alternative, and more importantly, what effect this peculiarity of vision has on their own lives, is a question I believe is worth asking.

Or not, if this worldview is too convenient to let it go. I know mine definitely is.

Does getting high make you a little gay? If so, you may just be a “highsexual.” The term, ensconced in Urban Dictionary since 2009, made its way onto two Reddit forums in recent weeks as a way to describe the alleged phenomenon of participating in sex with someone of the same gender or having same-sex fantasies when getting incredibly high. But while perhaps not common parlance, these two threads — “Can LSD make you temporarily gay?” and “Weed makes me temporarily gay. Anyone else?” — are example of a phenomenon that’s been around for awhile. It seems straight guys have wondered about “highsexuality” for a few years, given the plethora of online evidence. Are drugs the key to sexual fluidity in men?

Yeah, what an enormous mystery. Alcohol and drugs lower inhibitions, and people simply do what they always wanted to do but couldn’t because of their puritanical upbringing and the resulting inner self-censorship. Getting high doesn’t “make” anybody gay. They are gay already but afraid of acknowledging it.

It’s really sad when people can’t even allow themselves to fantasize freely without knocking out the inner censor with drugs. It’s not their fault, obviously, but it’s just tragic.

A guy who signs as “Community College Dean” writes the following in the IHE:

Given how lopsided the market is, why are we still subsidizing so many graduate programs? The first order of business should be for states to shift the burden of proof on graduate programs from “why should it be shut down?” to “why shouldn’t it be?” At a really basic level, apply “gainful employment” to graduate school.

You see what he’s doing,  right? The poor stupid lemming is actually cheering on the destruction of state-sponsored higher education. I’m sure he feels profoundly proud of championing a great cause.