Clarissa's Blog

So the morning section of the experimental poetry course wasn’t working. I know it’s not the course because the afternoon section is amazing. Everybody talks up a storm, and it’s just good.

So I took radical measures and held the morning session at Starbucks. And oh my God. It was great. People who I feared would never talk (in Spanish, obviously) suddenly revealed amazing language skills.

In this course, we have no textbook, no homework, no workbook, no electronic digital blah blah, no quizzes, no tests, no grammar exercises – just poetry. And talking. We will also have several classes on music.

I swear I’ll have them all speaking at an advanced level by the end of the semester. I’m psyched.

Imagine a scenario in which the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus happened in a place that was as black or brown as Iowa is white. What do you think would happen?

https://twitter.com/samsanders/status/1221999816441417728?s=09

Meaning what, Guatemala? Ghana? It’s obviously not any state in this country.

In The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell says that Reaganism didn’t represent a break with the countercultural movements of the 1960s. It was the continuation of them.

Fiiiiiiinally somebody said it.

Just this one thing makes the book totally worth it.

I am absolutely fine with people who don’t give a toss about Ukraine. But I absolutely can’t stand the people who spent the entire 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 telling me how Ukrainians are Nazis and there’s a civil war in Ukraine but are now wailing over the Ukrainian soldiers who died during “Trump’s aid freeze.”

Ukraine is a country of 46 million people. It’s not a pretext for your Trump tantrum.

I keep observing, with fascination and incomprehension, women in their late thirties who keep trying to give birth to a first (and quite large because that’s how the babies of old mothers are) baby vaginally. The result is always a dangerous and traumatic emergency C-section.

This fixation in getting the mechanics of birth and breastfeeding “just right” at any cost is disturbing.

Recovery from carrying to term and giving birth after 35 is brutal. Every year it gets exponentially harder. Why make it even harder by complicating the birth is a mystery.

It’s a very American thing to pretend that the body doesn’t matter. That the age, the weight, the lack of sleep don’t matter. But they do. Every extra pound of weight you carry has an impact on blood sugar, for instance. Every 20 minutes of sleep you steal from your personal norm are detrimental to your mental health.

In short, if at all possible, give birth to your first child before you turn 30. I paid an enormous price to find this out, so now I feel compelled to share this message.

Human Rights Campaign is extremely stupid. Apparently, there’s no biggest threat to “countless marginalized groups” than Bernie Sanders. It’s so pathetic.

And yes, the double entendre in the title is intentional.

WashPo suspended a journalist who tweeted a link to Kobe Bryant’s rape allegations. Of course, it was just some insignificant hotel maid he raped, so who gives a fuck. #MeToo is only for rich actresses.