Clarissa's Blog

This type of conversation is why I abandoned most forms of sociability:

Yes, malls and department stores are wonderful for exactly the reasons described here. So why don’t people just go then? We have three within driving distance of us. We’ve been at least a dozen times this summer. The weather is bad. It’s hot and nasty, so one needs indoor activities with the kids, and this is an excellent one. We went for back-to-school shopping on Saturday. Then I went by myself on Monday because I like to walk around and clear my mind.

On Christmas, we went to, I think, three different ones in Montreal. Yes, the decorations, the displays, the festive mood. That’s why we went.

As for the gift wrapping, we went to our local mall, and there was a pop-up wrapping store run by a young African American woman, a single mother. She told us about how she really wanted to give amazing gifts to her children for Christmas but didn’t have the money. Then she remembered that she’d always been very good at wrapping, and the idea for this Christmas-time business came to her. Now she will be able to afford the best gift for the kids. And the two very cute kids are running around looking mysterious about the great gifts they will be getting. This all contributes to a great Christmas mood.

Another cute mall story, and I have dozens of them, is when we had to buy sneakers for Klara. It proved very difficult because she suddenly grew very picky, and nothing we tried was satisfactory. A very young store assistant noticed our struggle, came up to us, and talked to my kid like they were peers, with such kindness, patience, and respect that my daughter was immediately charmed. It means a lot to a 10-year-old to have a teenager with a job pay attention to her and treat her as an equal.

Why are people sitting there and complaining instead of going and experiencing all this? There’s mini-golf and cotton candy and funny Tik Tok trend goods. It’s great. Of course, I will now start hearing that I somehow lucked into the two only spots on the face of the earth where malls and department stores still exist.

Isn’t it more of the Covid era situation, though? People would go on and on about how they can’t do this and can’t do that because it’s supposedly not allowed, when it was allowed the whole time. I kept having these maddening discussions with colleagues who kept repeating how much they missed teaching in person and how desperate they were to return to the classroom. I was teaching in person and naively tried to share with them that it was very much possible. It took a while to clock on to the fact that they didn’t want to go back into the classroom.

Do people understand that this fake-complaining is trashing their nervous system? Even if the suffering is not real, the constant discussions of how you are miserable and deprived convince the brain to start believing them. It’s so much better psychologically to simply say, “I decided not to teach in person because I don’t feel like it” or “I decided not to go to the mall because it’s such a hassle, and I like shopping online.”