Engineering Misery

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

Last week we had a barrage of complaints on X about how crushing, debilitating and downright horrific it was to prepare a lunch for oneself. People experienced profound compassion for themselves. The drama of preparing lunch still hasn’t fully subsided with people complaining that rented apartments don’t have refrigerators and kitchens (which of course they do), thereby forcing them to rely on Doordash in order to stave off horrific and instant starvation.

This week another great hardship dropped:

Brutally difficult, you know? Brutally. The author of the “brutally difficult” post is a man.

The most basic psychological trick that you’d think everybody would know at this point is that if you tell yourself that everything is bad, you will experience everything as bad and will be very miserable. We process reality through words. We perceive things the way we describe them to ourselves. If we describe the most blissful, amazing situation as terrible, we will experience it as terrible. And vice versa, of course.

People get trapped into distorting their reality in negative directions without wanting to. There is a lot of peer pressure that convinces them that enacting misery is the trendy thing to do. They go on social media and see everybody compete in how deprived and persecuted they are. They go to work or to any peer group and, again, observe a misery competition. It’s very tempting to participate and many people do just that. They have no idea why they start feeling sad and depressed. Gratitude rituals are popular because they allow a person to escape into a private bubble from these collective rituals of self-pity.

I’m Strange

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

A friend asked if I enjoyed the Memorial Day picnic at church. It’s strange that anybody would suspect me of being able to enjoy any collective pastime. I am almost physiologically incapable of enjoying something like that. I’m very glad I went because Klara loved it. I do these things for her. I enact normalcy for her benefit. But I myself will never comprehend what people get out of it. I used to wish I could but at this stage of my life I have accepted that I am weird and that I experience things weirdly.

I used to feel a lot of shame about my weirdness but, again, you get jaded even on the shame. I brought my notebook to a church lunch a while ago and sat there decorating it as other women discussed how strange I was. I know because one of them told me. “We were sitting over there,” she said, “discussing what a strange person you are.”

At the Memorial Day picnic I heroically engaged in small talk with four different people. Three of them looked slightly terrified of me. But Klara saw me engage with other people so my goal was accomplished in full.

Aunt Natasha

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

I have five aunts. The only one I kind of really get is my aunt Natasha. We don’t have any sort of a relationship because she doesn’t want one. Not just with me. Aunt Natasha doesn’t want a relationship, in its literal meaning of relating to another person, with anybody. The reason I like her is because she has a grand purpose to which she is dedicated with the fanaticism of a medieval monk.

Aunt Natasha’s purpose in life is to find money to send to her middle-aged deadbeat eldest daughter Dasha. Aunt’s status in life is what in Spanish we call una arrimada and in Russian приживалка. This is a person who lives in somebody else’s house and fulfills the functions of a companion / domestic servant. Aunt Natasha plays this role in the life of her twin sister. There is no depth of suffering or indignity into which she wouldn’t eagerly sink. Yesterday she had a medical procedure that involved general anesthesia. Pretty much immediately after coming to, Aunt Natasha returned to her slave-like duties. I know what it feels like to wake up from a general anesthesia and go from zero to a hundred without a break, pushing items off a to-do list in service of an overarching goal. I respect this degree of commitment.

Aunt’s life is utterly devoid of dignity but I still like her. She’s like Amy from Gone Girl or Mark Dooher from John Lescroart’s Guilt. These are both very negative characters. But their insane dedication to their purpose is irresistible. Just so you understand, Aunt is pushing 70. Imagine having a purpose in life that is so grandiose that it would drag you off an operating table at this age, ready to go and commit veritable feats in pursuit of your goal. Even a shitty goal, such as coddling an overgrown princess of a daughter, is better than no organizing principle at all. Yes, of course, it’s better to have a more meaningful purpose but at least this is a purpose. How many people just kind of exist without one altogether?

I know somebody who told me, “I don’t understand what my purpose in life is. I have no idea what I am living for.” Two months later this person received a terrible diagnosis. On the positive side, he now has an organizing principle. He has an overarching goal, which is to beat the disease. I keep thinking, though, that it would have been better if he had discovered an organizing purpose before locating one in a terrible illness.

Manipulating Language

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

I’m very annoyed by the insistent use of the word “teen” in reports of increased gang activity. Even conservative reporters repeat “teen, teen, teen” like crazed parrots.

The criminal in question is an adult repeat offender. In all of the videos of gang riots, most of the criminals look very adult.

Whoever invented the term “teen takeover”, with its air of playfulness supported by the use of alliteration, is a skilled propagandist. Let’s not buy into the propaganda and repeat the terminology unthinkingly. These are violent gang riots. We don’t know the age of the gangsters and we shouldn’t care anyway. If it’s not ok to mention the very obvious race of the rioters, it should definitely be out of the question to fixate on their assumed age.

Always a Conservative

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Of course, I couldn’t help myself and went along and re-read Lescroart’s Guilt, the best American legal drama. And here’s what’s funny. I first read the novel sometime in 2005 when I was at the apex of my leftism. The novel stages a confrontation between the conservative and the liberal viewpoints, and even back then my sympathies were completely on the side of the conservative approach. There’s a character named Sam who is a feminist, and I despised her passionately at that first reading. I still feel exactly the same. My entire perception of the novel changed not a whit in the past 20 years.

It was always destined that I’d become a conservative, is what I’m saying.

Best for Children

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

Children simply like to be with their parents. Travel is not the crucial factor here. It’s being together in an intentional way that creates the joy. It’s being together as the end goal and not a byproduct.

Of course, I’m talking about normal families which are a huge majority. I hated family vacations as a child because there was no break from the dysfunction. Thankfully for me, in the USSR husbands and wives were rarely given vacations at the same time.

Invented or True?

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

People live in a different reality:

At Klara’s school, they have two days a year when they are allowed to bring technology and use it without WiFi. Other than that, it would be scandalous if anybody even tried. Students are also not allowed on the premises unless they are dressed modestly.

These horror stories people tell about kindergartners massively on iPads don’t even sound true. How do they all have iPads? How do parents allow them to be brought to school? It all sounds invented.

Powerless

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

In academia it’s undeniably true. I had to learn to keep mum regarding my insights into how to publish more, keep running the lab when the budget is halved, make documents accessibility-compliant within minutes and without having to attend workshops, and so on. Nobody wants to know. Or they do but they want to be able to complain about life even more. So I shut up and make compassionate noises when people go on and on about problems that have a clear solution.

I often think that academia exists as a place where people compete in the art of complaining.

The Great American Courtroom Drama

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The American legal system is complicated and fascinating. It is not surprising, then, that its intricacies have given rise to a vast number of legal mysteries and courtroom dramas. I love this genre and have read extensively in it. If I have to name my favorite courtroom drama, however, the choice is extremely easy. Normally, this is not the type of book that you want to reread because, once the mystery is solved, there is not much point to revisiting the book. Guilt by John Lescroart stands out because I have reread it several times even though I remember the plot in great detail. This, too, is unusual given that I erase all of the non-essential readings from my mind completely almost immediately after I finish such a book.

Guilt was published in 1998 and there is something to it, an ambience, a flavor that is so perfectly the 1990s in a way that could not possibly be recreated today. It’s like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl but for men and about men.  At this point I know parts of it almost by heart but I still want to drop everything and go reread it. Aside from the deeply enjoyable legal intricacies, this novel introduces several different male types that are fascinating to observe. One might say that the novel is a study of different ways of being a man.

Like all of Lescroart’s novels, Guilt is set in San Francisco. This is, of course, the San Francisco of 30 years ago. Even then, though, San Francisco was way ahead down the road that we all walked since then. I don’t want to say more because I’d rather not spoil the pleasure of reading for those of you who decide to attempt this novel. I do want to reiterate that this is an outstanding representative of the courtroom drama genre.

The Word Not Ate His Homework

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

I noticed one post with a ridiculous take on education, and now the algorithm only shows me posts from out-of-touch “public education advocates” like this one:

Standardized tests are politicized by the use of the word “not.” Now I’ve truly heard every excuse.