Month: July 2011

Cabinet Confusion

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I really liked the apartment where I lived as a grad student except for one thing: there was no bathroom cabinet. For four years, I bitched to everybody in sight about the inconvenience of living without a bathroom cabinet and having to put my shampoos and cosmetics on the floor. “Who designs such a tiny bathroom and then forgets to add a cabinet?” I ranted. “Why couldn’t a cabinet be placed behind the mirror, like in all normal bathrooms?”

 “Are you sure there is no cabinet behind the bathroom mirror?” asked my sister who knows me better than anybody in the world when she came to visit me.

“Of course, I’m sure,” I scoffed.

“Well, let me check anyways,” my sister suggested and walked towards the bathroom.

I followed her.

“This is a waste of time,” I insisted. “There is no cabinet. I don’t know what kind of an idiot designed a bathroom with no cabinet!”

As I kept denouncing the evil bathroom designers, my sister approached the bathroom mirror, pulled it back and revealed a spacious cabinet behind it. She was kind enough to make no comment about the real idiot of that situation.

It seems like the lesson of the bathroom cabinet taught me nothing. Two months ago, I finally got myself a real desk and was very excited about it. Since then, I have spent a lot of time at this desk, working, blogging, doing research, shopping, etc. And in all this time I had no idea that the desk had this convenient and spacious slide-out drawer you can see on the picture.

Of course, there is progress, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t need four years to discover this cabinet.

Happy Emigration Anniversary to Me!

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

Thirteen years ago I left my country forever and came to this great continent. Since then, I haven’t had a single reason to doubt that decision. This was the best thing I could have possibly done and it has made me very happy on many levels.

This is the journey I made 13 years ago

For reasons I find hard to understand, I never felt at home in my own country. Everything seemed weird, confusing and incomprehensible. When I first got off the airplane in Toronto on July 4th, 1998, though, I immediately knew that I was in a place that suited me perfectly. This is the best continent to be a Hispanist, a feminist, a reader, a scholar, and, obviously, a blogger.

Thank you, North Americans, for making me feel more welcome here than I ever did in the country of my birth!

Happy 4th of July!

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

To celebrate this great holiday – my favorite holiday aside from New Year’s and my birthday – I wanted to share with you these artistic renditions of our local fireworks.

Surreal Fireworks

Of course, to be completely honest, I’m not really artistic. I’m just a clumsy photographer. Still, I hope that the photos manage to transmit some of my enthusiasm for this holiday. Happy 4th of July, everybody!!!

Carlos Ruiz Zafon As A Torture Device

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

This review of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Prince of Mist reminded me of how I once took revenge on a group of extremely obnoxious graduate students.

These students had a huge issue with the fact that somebody who was their age (and looked the way you saw in the photo I posted yesterday) and who had just received her PhD was supposed to teach them and grade their work. The topic of the course was the same as the topic of my doctoral dissertation that I had just defended. This meant that I really knew what I was talking about in class. The grad students, however, kept interrupting everything I said with exclamations of “Just a moment, I’m going to check on my laptop whether what you say is right!” I can’t count the number of times when I would say something completely trivial only to be interrupted with a sarcastic, “Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure that Goethe wrote Wilhelm Meister,” I’d respond patiently.

“Wait, I’ll check it on my computer anyways,” the students would invariably say.

I got so tired of this constant struggle with the students that I plotted a revenge on them. Over the break, I assigned to them Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. Zafon is a bestselling  writer, and I knew that my snobby grad students would be humiliated by the need to read a book that had been robbed of any intellectual prestige by its huge popular appeal.

“You want us to do what??” one student asked looking terrorized. “I’m going home for the break. I can’t have my friends see me with this book. They will ridicule me forever!”

“Yes, our profession demands certain sacrifices,” I announced gravely. “It pains me to assign it to you but our love of scholarship should be placed above our private concerns.”

A week later, students returned from the break.

“So did you manage to get through the book?” I asked.

There was a long pause.

“I have to confess,” one student said, turning around and glancing at the door to make sure it was shut completely and nobody could overhear his confession from the hallway, “I enjoyed it so much that I stayed up all night long reading.”

“Oh, thank you for saying this!” another student exclaimed. “I discovered that I literally couldn’t put this book down and thought something was wrong with me. I mean, I know it’s a really crappy book, but it was so enjoyable.”

After that, the students lost some of their former superciliousness.

IntenseDebate Also Sucks Dick

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

What is it with bloggers who keep installing weird commenting systems on their blogs? Don’t want people to comment? Just disable comments altogether instead of making them go through some weird new-fangled system that makes you feel cool.

First, there was Disqus that was so bad it forced me to drop over 15 blogs out of my blogroll. I kept trying to comment but faced with the need to battle with the Disqus that seemed dedicated to revealing my RL info, chose to drop these blogs altogether.

And now there is another commenting system that is even worse than Disqus. It’s called IntenseDebate. Whenever you comment on a blog that has IntenseDebate, it creates a profile for you and begins storing all the comments you made on blogs that have adopted this system. Of course, you are never informed that this is going on. A little dossier of your comments (torn completely out of context) is created. Any obsessed cyberstalker can easily access them and fuel their insanity. (I have such a crazed follower who dedicates endless hours to following everything I do online. Thanks to this strange creature, I discovered that IntenseDebate had created a profile for me. Without being in any way authorized by me to do this, of course).

I have no idea why some bloggers keep being so disrespectful to their readers. If a person decides to comment on your blog, this isn’t the reason to put them through a system that traces their every online move and treats them like suspects in some crime.

If you have any respect for your readers at all, you need to put a huge banner on you blog warning them that you use IntenseDebate to spy on them. Otherwise, you don’t deserve to have any readers at all.

Happy Canada Day!

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

I got so annoyed with the article on Asperger’s that I wrote about in the previous post that I even forgot about Canada Day. Sorry.

Happy Canada Day, dear fellow Canadians!