Opinions, art, debate
I just bought a pair of precious extremely comfortable half-boots for a price that made me very confused – $10. I didn’t even know that anything could cost ten dollars any more. I can guarantee to you that in Montreal I’d be lucky to find them for $80.
I can’t stop staring at the receipt because this price is just too bizarre.
In his recent article in the New York Times, Paul Krugman takes down Charles Murray’s book on how the bad mean Liberals supposedly stole the good, traditional values of the working class. I have to say that I’m quite impressed with this article, people. Krugman is slowly rehabilitating himself in my eyes.
First, Krugman makes a very important point that doesn’t get made nearly enough: the erosion of the traditional family has not brought any disaster to society. Just the opposite, it’s been a positive development:
Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. . . Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
If by traditional families we mean couples who get married young and then stay together long after any semblance of love between the partners is dead and who bring up miserable kids whose only relational model is that of endlessly bickering, fighting, yelling or, at best, completely indifferent partners, then I say, to hell with those traditional families. Life without love or a possibility, a hope of love is meaningless. If people don’t seek a divorce as an escape from a dead relationship, that’s true tragedy. The more likely people are to bury dead marriages and move on, the happier the society at large will be.
All of these oft-lauded traditional values are based on nothing but endless self-violation of an individual who is supposed to stifle his or her own needs because, supposedly, that somehow serves society at large. Well, it doesn’t and we now have proof of it.
The second part of Krugman’s insightful article discusses what really constitutes a great problem for the working classes. Forget about the supposedly bad morals of the blue-collar folks, Krugman says. Let’s look at their economic reality, instead:
For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.
It makes me really annoyed to see how often people harp on the completely erroneous idea that working class folks are somehow less moral than the middle and especially upper middle classes. Sure, it’s easy to preserve one’s relationship as a couple when one can afford to go to a beautiful resort for a romantic getaway a couple of times a year, when any issues you might start having as a couple can be immediately addressed by high-paid therapists and psychoanalysts, when you can share such hobbies as exploring expensive restaurants, traveling the world and collecting exotic wines.
It might just be a teensy bit harder to preserve the romance when one is going nuts over the mounting bills or when one can’t find even a minimum-wage job. In other words,
The social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
And I couldn’t agree more.
P.S. Thank you, David Bellamy, for bringing this great article to my attention.
I think these are the most beautiful male names in the world (in that order):
1. Desiderio
2. Babatunde
3. Hermenegildo
4. Parminder
5. And, of course V. S. Naipaul’s name, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, is stunningly beautiful. He had no choice but to become famous with a name like that.
And these are the most beautiful male names in the world (in that order):
1. Clarissa (obviously, or why would I have chosen it for this blog?)
2. Soledad
3. Catalina Miranda (but only when both names come together
4. Евгения (pronounced something like “Yevgenia” with the “g” like in “great” in English)
What do you think? Which are the most beautiful names in the world?
In 2007-8, when the recession hit, most universities stopped hiring people for tenure-track positions. A little over a half of the universities where I applied for a job in 2007-8 and 2008-9 replied saying that the search had been cancelled due to budget constraints. Instead, universities started to create an ever-growing number of contingent teaching positions at an even faster pace than before.
There was a university, however, that adopted a different strategy. It responded to the recession not with lay-offs and cancellations of tenured positions but by hiring aggressively. In 2007-8, this university hired 45 new tenure-track faculty members. In 2008-9, it hired even more people. Fifty-three new scholars entered the university in the rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor in that year and I was among them. Next year, three dozen new TT professors were hired.
During the new employee orientation, these new hires were told insistently and repeatedly, “We want you to get tenure with us. We will do all we can to facilitate your tenure-track progress.” And it was all true. Since then, the university has demonstrated that it has real commitment to supporting the professional aspirations of these new hires. At the same time, the number of new contingent faculty members who were hired by this university during each of the academic years in question can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
These tenure-track hires were people who had graduated from fantastic graduate programs and had suddenly discovered that nobody needed them because of the recession. The university I’m talking about used this opportunity to hire brilliant, enthusiastic young academics who will raise the research profile of the school dramatically and are already doing so. Since the work conditions are very good and the benefits are very generous, this large group of new hires has the time and the energy to explore new teaching strategies and connect to the students on a personal level. As a result, everybody wins.
We keep hearing that universities are starting to act like businesses and it harms academia at large. The problem, however, is not only that we adopt business models but that we adopt really bad business models. Companies that operate on the revolving-door model, that hire people, squeeze them dry and throw them out within a few years represent a very poor, unproductive approach to business. They are oriented towards a short-term profit-making and soon create a very bad reputation for themselves. To give just one example, my sister and her business partner have created a very successful business from the ground and were aided greatly in that effort by the fact that their chief competitor, a big, well-established old company had abandoned its standards of excellence and had become a revolving-door place of employment. Now, the clients are abandoning it in droves and seeking out competitors who attract and retain talented, loyal employees.
I often have a feeling that when colleges hire administrators with a background in business, they select people whose business skills are not very good. They frequently don’t even realize that treating employees like crap and offering them no opportunities to grow within the company is a stupid practice both in business and in academia.
In 1975, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco finally died. All of the decent people in the country had been waiting with bated breath for the dictator to draw his last breath and to leave Spain free to explore life without fascism.
Just like many other countries who suffered from bloody dictatorships, Spain decided that the only way to go forward with its transition to democracy was to pretend that the Civil War of 1936-1939 and the dictatorship that the war put in place never really happened. There were no investigations of the crimes committed by the dictatorship, there was no restitution, no public apologies extended to the victims by people who tortured and killed them and their family members. Everybody was expected to get over it, forget everything that happened and just move on.
Of course, this strategy never works. I hasn’t worked in Argentina, in Chile, in the countries of the Former Soviet Union. And it hasn’t worked in Spain either. You can’t heal such deep wounds by pretending to forget.
Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón understood that. He was the only judge who accepted the case against the Chilean dictator Pinochet on his docket. Of course, Judge Garzón wasn’t a judge in Chile, but what else could he do if nobody else in the world was willing to listen to Pinochet’s victims?
And then Judge Garzón also started investigating the atrocities committed by the Spanish fascists during Franco’s dictatorship. Since there was no real transfer of either political or economic power in Spain during the so-called Transition to democracy, many powerful people got terrified. They are not prepared to open the discussion about the Civil War and the post-war era. They want to keep pretending that nothing happened in Spain between 1936 and 1975.
So Judge Garzón was accused of being a promoter of totalitarianism because he investigated the corruption of the ruling party in Spain and was reopening the cases of crimes committed during the dictatorship. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously condemned the Judge and ruled that he will be barred from practicing law for 11 years.
This is a sad moment for Spain because the last hope that the legacy of Spanish fascism would finally be addressed has now been extinguished.
People seem to enjoy stories from my personal life, so here is one I especially like.
N. and I have very different styles of communication. I’m very impatient, verbose, intense, passionate, loud (you would have never guessed, right?) I have these endless, animated monologues going on in my head. They spill out onto the blog, then when N. comes home from work, I continue the monologues aloud for his benefit, then my sister calls and I continue delivering them to her, and so on and so on. I speak very fast, think very fast, make decisions instantly, constantly analyze every aspect of my life and every shade of my emotional state.
In short, I’m a circus show. I have this very expressive gesticulation and this huge range of facial expressions that I use to entertain people and myself all day long.
N. is very different. He is quiet and he always thinks hard before saying anything. He feels things instead of analyzing, classifying and verbalizing them like I do. He often can’t explain why he feels a certain way, which drives me up a wall. I mean, how is it possible not to know why you are in a bad mood? It’s your mood, isn’t it? Weird.
And he never says things just to say something. He needs to construct each utterance very carefully in order for it to come out precisely as he wants it to.
The first two and a half years of our relationship were long-distance. So we talked on the phone a lot, which I, as an autistic, detest passionately. Once, when we’d just known each other for a little over a month, I called N. from Montreal.
“So do you miss me?” I asked in the course of the conversation.
A silence ensued.
“He doesn’t miss me!” I realized. “He wants to break up but he doesn’t know how to say this to me.”
The silence continued.
“The jerk!” I thought. “He must have met another woman. A really nasty, vile horrible woman who is going to make him miserable.”
The silence went on.
“And then she will dump him and he will be really sorry that he’d left me and he will come back to me and I will proudly reject him!” I thought.
“Yes, I miss you a lot,” N. finally said.
“Why did it take you so long to answer?” I asked.
“I was thinking about how to word my answer,” he responded.
It took time to get used to but now I don’t get worried when I sit in the bedroom reading a book and N. comes in and says, “Yes.” I know immediately that he is answering the question as to whether he wants any pomegranate juice that I asked him 20 minutes ago.
I have a hobby, people. I’m into makeup and facial care like there is no tomorrow. So I decided to share my knowledge of different products with my readers. For every pricier product, I will suggest a cheaper (or free) alternative because some of these products can be quite expensive.
1. Make-up removal is a very important thing to do. Please, people, never go to bed with your makeup on. It’s a horrible, horrible 
mistake. You can be sopping drunk or falling over with exhaustion but you should never forget to remove the makeup before sleeping, OK?
My favorite makeup cleanser is Bioderma Crealine H2o Ultra-mild Non-rinse Face and Eyes Cleanser. Mind you, it isn’t any Bioderma, it’s this specific one. A 500 ml bottle costs $27, which isn’t cheap. But it’s a very good, mild and, most importantly, effective. I tried many of those cleansers that come in the form of napkins, but they look like such a waste. And the napkins dry out soon, too.
When I don’t have money to buy the pricey Bioderma Crealine, I prefer not to buy any product at all. One can remove makeup with water, very easily and water is always good for one’s skin.
2. 
Facial masks are great. They offer one an excuse to relax in the bathroom and have a much needed break in a busy day. (I’m really not into this “How can I be expected to have time for myself” kind of vapid martyrdom, so please keep it out of the comment thread.) I have tried an endless number of masks and have discovered that the best mask ever is Clinique’s Turnaround 15-Minute Facial. A 2 ounce can costs $29, which is quite a lot. The good news is that you only need a small portion to create a mask, so the can lasts for quite a while.
Still, this is too expensive and many people can’t afford this mask. For such people, there is an alternative: Montagne Jeunesse masks. They are very good, there is a good variety of masks, and they only cost $1.99 each. Alternatively, one could make one’s own masks from different foodstuffs. My favorite is a sour-cream mask that only requires some good (not fat-free, of course) sour cream to be applied to the face and kept on for 20 minutes.
Sometimes, however, even that is more than a person can afford. The important thing to remember, though, is that the central thing about facial masks is not what’s in them. They matter because they are applied while one is lying in a bath, in semi-darkness, and enjoys thoughts about one’s spectacular beauty. So as long as you can spend 20 minutes lying down, thinking happy thoughts and not rushing anywhere, you don’t really need to have anything on your face.
3. I have dry skin, so a moisturizer is crucial for me. I tried I can’t even tell you how many, including the insanely expensive La Mer 
(which I didn’t buy and would never consider buying because I’m not insane.)
The very very best moisturizing cream I could ever find was Olay Regenerist Micro-Sculpting Cream. Everything they say about it in the commercial is absolutely true. It doesn’t last me very long because I use it at least twice a day, especially in winter. And it’s cheaper than almost everything else on the moisturizer market. What a wonderful product!
If you can’t afford it, you can still do many good things to moisturize. Don’t dry off your face after you wash it and let it dry on its own. (But don’t go outside in cold weather with a wet face, of course.) Never spend any time in direct sunlight without sunscreen. Wash your face with an ice cube at least three times a week. (This is a very good thing for everybody to try. If you do it in the morning, it also wakes you right up and gives you a beautiful natural blush. Highly recommended.)
A discussion of products that allow even the most clumsy people to create a beautiful smoky eye at home is coming in part two of this post.
I’ve just had a very shocking experience. My students are writing an exam. One of the students, let’s call him Peter, finishes and hands in his exam 35 minutes before the end of the class period.
The students continue writing their exams. Suddenly, the door opens and Peter returns to the classroom.
“The exam was hard!” he announces loudly and aggressively. “Can I drop the class and have my money back?”
“You can go to the Registrar’s Office and withdraw,” I say quietly to try to minimize the commotion.
“I want my money back!” the student insists.
I stare him down very aggressively and he runs away.
What the flying fuck was that, people? I’m really not ready for students badgering me for refunds because they didn’t prepare for an exam.
What’s the problem with the term “patriarchy”, if I may ask? I keep seeing all these posts on how this term doesn’t make sense because the majority of men never had access to power under this system.
So what, I ask? Does the word “capitalism” mean that everybody has access to capital? How many people do you know who have any capital at all? (Debts don’t count as capital, in case you are not aware.) Will you claim that this is not a capitalist country, then?
In feudal societies, most people were not feudal overlords. And during the Enlightened era, 90% of people were completely illiterate. So? Where are the posts disputing the terminology of capitalism, feudalism, and Enlightenment?
I just read a very long, rambling and stupid post (that I’m not going to link to because I don’t want to give hits to blabbering fools) that made this completely inane point about patriarchy as a useless term. And before you make comments about male chauvinists, the author of the post was a woman.
If there are intelligent objections to the use of the word, then feel free to share. But this kind of silliness makes me very annoyed.
. . . is that children always love their parents but parents often don’t love their children.
No matter how horrible the relationship is, how much abuse and heart-ache there has been, how many years have passed, a child always hopes that one day Mommy will say, “You know, I’m really sorry. I’m sorry for things I have done. I didn’t know any better and I’m sorry” and Daddy will say, “You turned out very well. You are a great human being. Remember how I said that you were a disappointment? That wasn’t true. I said it in anger and I’m sorry.”
Parents, however, often spend years and decades passionately disliking every aspect of their children’s way of being and communicating it to them in excruciating detail. And no amount of “I’m sorry, Mom, Dad, I’m sorry that I can’t be what you want me to be, I’m sorry but this is how I need to do things to remain sane” changes anything.
This happens because when children are small, their parents are always not just people but the people. The most important, crucial human beings whose every angry glare is perceived as the end of the world, whose every rejection confers a feeling of universal loneliness, of being abandoned by God.
For parents, however, the greatest struggle is always to see children as separate human beings. It is hard, indeed. They came out of your body, they were completely dependent on you for a long time. Besides, after everything one sacrifices to bring them into the world and keep them alive and healthy, it’s not unnatural to start expecting something in return. “I gave you life, so I feel it belongs to me,” is a tacit conclusion many parents reach. Seeing their children as people is a feat many parents never manage to perform.
“How can you do something like this to a person?” a daughter asks her mother.
The mother looks at her in bewilderment.
“What person?” she asks with heart-breaking sincerity. “I’m doing it to you. You are not a person. You are my daughter.”
If you have no idea what I’m talking about here, then you should thank your lucky stars, sit quietly in a corner and not comment on something that, for many people, constitutes the greatest tragedy of their existence.
Clarissa's Blog 