On the Poll About the Reasons Why People Read This Blog

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Clarissa

August 29, 2011

More people (14 votes) come to the blog because they are self-confessed suckers for punishment than because I’m pretty (12 votes). This should either mean that I’m not very pretty or that masochism is more important as a motivating factor in blog-reading than aesthetic enjoyment.

P. S. This is meant to be a humorous post, folks. I’m finally feeling quite healthy and am experiencing a renewed joy in existence. I’m going to make herb-roasted chicken today to celebrate the fact that I finally feel like eating. I’m going to read good books instead of going over mysteries I’d read many times before. I will take walks and blog a lot. Yay for health!

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7 responses to “On the Poll About the Reasons Why People Read This Blog”

Rimi

August 29, 2011

Don’t knock re-reading mysteries, girl. It’s #1 on my comfort-reading list. ‘Good books’, feh. If they’re no good to be when I’m down and out, they’re not good enough 😛

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 29, 2011
  
  Once, I was very depressed, to the point of not being able to get out of bed. So I stayed in bed and red 24 mystery novels by a very trashy popular mystery writer from Russia. Three days later, my depression was gone and I was as good as new. People from my country with whom I share that I read these novels look down upon me, but I don’t care. It cured my depression, so who’s to say the novels are no good? 🙂
  
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  1. Rimi
    
    August 29, 2011
    
    Damn straight.
    
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Kathryn Bjornstad

August 30, 2011

I personally keep coming back to this blog because I keep track of every autistic-run blog that I find out about using Google Reader. Your blog is a little unusual compared to the others I read because you only post about autism occasionally, but I find a lot of your commentaries here to be interesting or entertaining. Sometimes I skim past certain posts but I read most of them. I don’t always agree with everything you say, but I think it’s nice that you’re so civil about things and when I come to look at discussions I notice that you respond to a lot of the comments.

Also, your stories about life in the Soviet Union are really interesting to me. Since I grew up in the US the only things I know about the Soviet Union are things my history teachers told me, and it was mostly propaganda they’d heard growing up. In middle school my history teacher told us that the Soviet Union put impossible quotas on people’s productivity in factories (which is true as far as I gather), but they also told us that if the factories failed to meet the quotas the soldiers would kill the owner and his entire extended family, then bring in a new owner and give him a higher quota. I believed this when I was 12 but now I find it highly suspicious. They’d run out of workers very quickly that way. They also taught us that the Russians were on Hitler’s side in World War II and no one mentioned how much Nazi butt the Russians were kicking until I was in AP US History in high school. But since all the discussions there were framed as “The US is the best country ever and we were better than Russia because Russia was evil, and here are some American-written accounts to prove it,” it’s really refreshing to hear about what it was really like from someone who doesn’t have an ulterior motive and who actually lived through it.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 30, 2011
  
  ” the Soviet Union put impossible quotas on people’s productivity in factories ”
  
  -This happened in the 30ies and the 40ies. But not since then.
  
  ” if the factories failed to meet the quotas the soldiers would kill the owner and his entire extended family, then bring in a new owner and give him a higher quota.”
  
  -This really makes no sense. In a Communist system, the means of production are always owned by the state, so there can be no “owner” to a factory. 🙂
  
  ” They also taught us that the Russians were on Hitler’s side in World War II”
  
  -Very weird. Has nobody heard of Hitler’s plan to exterminate all Slavic people as an inferior race? It wasn’t only the Jews Hitler hated. The high school history education in this country is bizarrely low-quality. 😦
  
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Steve

August 30, 2011

I’ve never responded to your poll on why people read your blog because my answer would be “none of the above”. I read your blog because I’m a retired academic, and you write about academia, and I see similarities (and some differences) between the responses of your students and mine. And, looking back to the time when I was a student, I must have frustrated my teachers in the same way that my students frustrated me.

And though literature is not my field, I find what you say about it quite interesting.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 30, 2011
  
  It’s great to have you here, Steve.
  
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