Opinions, art, debate
As we say in my culture, an idiot’s dream has come true. 🙂
I don’t know about you, but I find this photo to be very very sad:
It would be one thing if we knew that they were heading to an event at her super impressive place of employment where he would wait for her to finish an important conversation. That’s not the case, though.
Well, at least this guy is a President. His term in office will end (in all probability, in 2016), and then she will go back to having a life. How many women, though, choose to spend their entire lives waiting in the background because they lack any professional realization of their own? How many women choose to be mere appendages to men? How many try to convince themselves that an adult human being can be content with the role of a spectator of somebody else’s life?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has come up with a very weird way of choosing documentaries that it will consider for an Oscar nomination. Now, only those films that have been reviewed by The NY Times or the LA Times will be considered by the Academy. We all know that these newspapers review only the most mainstream, boring, innocuous kind of movies anybody can imagine. As a result, the entire category of documentary films will be gutted.
I have always used the Oscars as a guide to movies I need to avoid. The only category that sometimes offered some good films on its shortlist was that of the documentary. And now that’s been shot to hell. The Academy has explained its decision by saying that there are too many films coming out and it’s hard to watch them all. So it decided to relegate the decision-making to the film critics writing for two papers selected in an arbitrary manner.
A colleague told me this story. Her mother is in her eighties and it has become impossible for her to live on her own. She has now entered an assisted living facility across the road from where I live (and where I love imagining N. and myself moving in our dotage.)
Everything is good about this assisted living facility except the kind of activities that are provided for its female residents. It seems like the people who manage the facility imagine that all women who are now in their eighties must have been bored housewives with zero intellect in their youth. While the male residents are provided with a discussion club, a political club, and an array of intellectual activities, women are stuck folding napkins, arranging bouquets, and watching soaps.
My colleague’s mother was not a housewife. She was a scholar, an educator, an intellectual. Of course, when she is segregated into a flower-arranging group of soap-watchers, she gets very upset. Just think about it. This is a woman who already participated in one feminist revolution. Should she now start another one in her assisted living facility to promote the idea that women have brains, too? Even women who were born in the twenties, the thirties, and the forties, too.
Maybe its time that we stopped projecting our TV-inspired vision of what the 40ies, the 50ies and the 60ies were like onto actual people who lived in those times. An 86-year-old woman can be as passionately feminist, politically engaged, an intellectual as any 30 or 20-year-old. And a 86-year-old man is not necessarily a mean, patriarchal, woman-hating ogre who will be traumatized by “a little woman” joining his discussion group.
. . . because you:
you need to know that none of this has anything to do with your loneliness. You are lonely because you are a self-pitying condescending misanthrope who despises everybody around and people have no interest in engaging with somebody like that.
I know I have written this before, but yet again I’m getting regaled with the statements about how “nobody wants me because I don’t have much money nor am I a huge actor or musician.” Do people not realize how offensive this is to hear? There is an immediate suggestion in this very statement that all women are whores who are just waiting to hand themselves over to a higher bidder.
And if it offends me in an online conversation, imagine how people react when you approach them with this attitude in real life.
And one more thing while I’m at it. I’m not suggesting that anybody change themselves for the sake of a potential partner. Do I make an impression of somebody who would change to please some hypothetical stranger (or even a real person)? That’s a very stupid thing to do. Don’t, don’t change to please anybody or to attract suitors.
All I’m suggesting is that people look for reasons why they are not blissfully happy inside themselves. And if after they resolve the issues that prevent them from being happy, they choose not to be partnered at all, then that’s fantastic.
Human beings have an amazing capacity for happiness. Yet many of us spend our lives in misery with only small pockets of happiness here and there. Shouldn’t it be the opposite, though? Shouldn’t we see happiness as normal and misery as exceptional? When I look back on my life and realize how much needless pain, suffering and depression I experienced because wallowing suited my unhealthy purposes at the time, I feel horrified.
I’m in academia, folks. This means that I’m surrounded by peddlers of misery everywhere. Nobody likes to wallow in self-pity as much as academics (visit the site called College Misery if you don’t believe me). I hope I can be excused for creating a refuge from “the universe is so hoooooorrible” mentality on my own blog, eh?
Even my Indian neighbors are getting desperate for some snow.
What I miss on this blog is the mood update option, like they reportedly have on Facebook.
The first day of classes did not go as planned. First, I discovered at the worst possible moment that somebody messed up and let me down in a very big way. Then, I had to spend the entire day redoing a shitload of work to correct their mess-up. I hate it when people mess with my plans. I’m extremely well-organized in everything that concerns my work, and it annoys me when anybody interferes.
And now my beautiful, perfectly planned syllabus is a flaming mess.
And there is a book that came out tonight that I’d been waiting for since 2010, but I couldn’t read it as planned because I had to correct somebody else’s huge mess-up.
And at this moment I can’t even enjoy the book because I’m still annoyed about how the day went.
And I couldn’t work on my midpoint tenure dossier because of redoing a shitload of work.
And the professorial bathroom has not been repaired since last semester, which annoys me.
So I made reservations for a Peruvian restaurant for Saturday. The really great restaurant in St. Louis I visited last time wasn’t featured on the blog because it was romantically dark and the pictures of food didn’t come out right. Instead, I’ll try to take photos of Peruvian food.
We’ve been to the only Peruvian restaurant of Chicago, and it wasn’t good at all. We have Peruvians in the family, so I know good Peruvian food from fake Peruvian food. Now let’s see how St. Louis stacks up in this area.
P.S. One good thing, though, is that I’m not teaching freshmen this semester. And what joy it is to have normal, alive, curious, engaged students for a change. They kept asking questions and even laughing at my jokes (in Spanish). After a semester in silent classroom filled with comatose freshmen, I feel transported to heaven.
OK, I feel less crabby now that I’ve shared. Blogging helps.
The first step in making meaningful changes in your life involves gaining a better understanding of yourself in essential areas that impact your life. This self-knowledge can provide you with direction as you try to maximize your efforts at change. Self-knowledge can also help you be more efficient and focused — and more effective — in producing change because you’ll know precisely what you need to work on.
What I find very strange is that people have no problem working on, say, their Spanish or their writing skills. But in the realm of their personal life, they just sit there expecting things to happen magically on their own. And even the fact that nothing all too positive (or nothing at all) has happened on its own for almost a decade is not an indication to them that maybe something needs to be done.
I know quite a few people who keep whining and whining and whining about how they are lonely and miserable and everybody they meet turns out to be a jerk. Yet, do they do anything to figure out what’s wrong? Oh, no. In the realm of their personal lives, things need to happen on their own.
If a person goes to 20 job interviews but gets rejected every single time, chances are s/he will work hard on figuring out what it is that s/he is doing wrong, will work on his or her CV, try to pick up useful skills, etc. Will this hypothetical person keep going to interviews without even trying to understand why they aren’t working out? Better yet, will s/he just sit at home, waiting for an employer to find him or her through some miraculous intervention of benevolent forces?
The stupid romance novels and movies are to blame, folks. That and this horrible “everybody is special” and “love yourself the way you are” slogans. And this other one that goes something like “there is someone for every one”, or whatever. Brrrrrr.
I used to know this guy who was permanently alone and “there is someone for every one” was his favorite expression. His second favorite expression was “all women are bitches.” Of course, it was very obvious to everybody around him that had he resolved the issue making him want to denigrate women, he would not have needed to console himself with fantasies of some hypothetical woman appreciating him in spite of everything. But who needs all that hard work when you can just sit there, hoping that things will work out somehow in the end?
A scholar who is not a native speaker of English was telling a story to me and to another colleague. Her English is phenomenal with maybe a tiny trace of an accent. As a non-native speaker, though, she sometimes uses expressions that sound a little quaint. This makes her speech very distinctive and enjoyable.
The colleague, however, was not appreciative of this scholar’s slightly foreign style of speaking English. He kept interrupting her with mini-lectures.
“I can see you don’t know this,” he’d say in the midst of an interesting story the scholar was trying to share, “but this expression you just used is outdated. If you’d used it in the thirties, it would make sense. Nowadays, however, the correct usage would be. . .”
The scholar is a very polite person and took these remarks in her stride.
I, however, am not. I see people who keep interrupting you to correct your language as bullies. As a language teacher, I never interrupt even my own students when they speak.
So I have invented the following formula I use to shut up language bullies.
“Oh,” I say, “I totally understand that you don’t want to hear me speak your language since I do it so poorly. So from now on, let’s speak mine instead.”
And I switch into Russian. This cures language bullies from their unhealthy linguistic hubris very fast.
A University of British Columbia student who once lived in Montreal was found stabbed and strangled with her hands tied behind her back near a Mexican beach, in a slaying local news media say may be linked to organized crime.
Ximena Osegueda, 39, a Mexican national who had become a Canadian citizen, was working on her doctorate in Hispanic studies in the town of Huatulco, about 500 kilometres southeast of Mexico City, when she went missing on Dec. 13.
Ximena was a wonderful person, people. A scholar, a thinker, a fighter. She did her BA in Hispanic Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and her MA at McGill University.
This is a horrible tragedy.
Clarissa's Blog 