Clarissa's Blog

This should be front-page news in all newspapers, not just one unknown source in Arizona. This is unbelievably shameful and deeply immoral:

The Trump administration recently announced a new, get-tough policy that will separate parents from their children if the family is caught crossing the border illegally. It was a big news story. So big it overshadowed the fact that the federal government has lost – yes, lost – 1,475 migrant children in its custody.

I have no doubt that this will all be blamed on Trump and nobody will suffer any consequences.

I’m binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, and there are often patients with cholecystitis. They are all 95 years old and most of them croak during surgery. Maybe this is not the right show for me to watch.

Why don’t they ever have anybody not completely ancient with this illness?

The greatest amount of strategizing during packing involves Klara’s books. Her bedtime ritual is as follows:

– first, N and I read books to her on our bed.

– then, N gives her a bath and reads books to her.

– after the bath, I take her back to our bedroom and read books to her there.

– then I take her to her room and read books to her there.

– then I leave, N comes and reads one last story to her. And then she sleeps.

There are never any battles, tears or arguments around bedtime. We are very very fortunate people in that respect. But the ritual is inviolable.

So you can imagine how much reading matter we need to bring for a 3-week trip. It’s not only for her but also for us. Last vacation I had to read the same book to her about 5,000 times and I still detest that book. She loved the repetition but I was going nuts.

The head of the excavation team that is repairing our leak gave me a piece of the tube he removed to show my husband so that he can see the cracks in it. The cracks are very visible, and anyway, I have a better vision than N who wears glasses. The foreman starts every sentence with “please tell your husband for me,” even though he never saw the husband, and N and I agreed that taking care of the leak is my responsibility.

I find it very cute when older working-class men treat me like a tender flower who can’t comprehend the functioning of tubes. It’s like when a plumber came out to repair the toilet and asked me to leave because it was going “to smell real bad for a pretty lady like you.” The plumber knew I had a small child and was as used to dealing with fecal matter as he, but still he wanted to protect me from the ugliness. It was nice.

Novelistic depictions of child-rearing are very bizarre. I recently finished a novel where a 3-month-old baby sits in a high-chair playing with a toy. At 3 months. And she somehow manages to hold the toy.

Then the baby is taken home and she falls asleep. And doesn’t wake up until well after breakfast. Leaving her parents free to get drunk, take long showers together, watch TV, and fall drunkenly asleep. And it’s like that every night.

The author is a woman and the intended readership is clearly female. I don’t know what kind of a woman can read this and not get angry. This is more annoying than those TV shows where extremely thin actresses gorge on extreme quantities of junk food all day for 9 seasons while getting thinner and thinner.

This is very disturbing to me:

Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, addressing a novel issue about how the Constitution applies to social media platforms and public officials, found that the president’s Twitter feed is a public forum. As a result, she ruled that when Mr. Trump or an aide blocked seven plaintiffs from viewing and replying to his posts, he violated the First Amendment.

I don’t give a drat about Trump’s Twitter or the freakazoids he blocked from it. (Read the quoted article to find out why they are freakazoids.) But the idea that people’s social media accounts are “public forums” over which the authors should have no control is anathema to me.

I’m a public employee, so it can be argued that I owe access to my passworded posts to the taxpayers who pay my salary. The likelihood of somebody wanting to make this argument is tiny but even the shadow of the possibility that somebody is entitled to interacting with me online, whether I want it or not, is enough to scare me off line.

If you are a popular blogger, you know that “this is a public forum” is the favorite phrase of trolls and harassers online. Once an actual judge supports this vision of individual social media accounts, one more step is made towards demolishing online freedom.

Trumps come and go. And rulings that chip away at our freedoms remain.

It’s ridiculous how much one has to think, organize, phone, pack and remember to leave the house for three weeks. I never thought I had a complicated life but it feels complicated right now.