A fellow blogger E sent me a link about yet another bizarre and terrifying development in the psychiatric unraveling of Arizona:

Yesterday, a Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed Republican Debbie Lesko’s HB2625 by a vote of 6-2, which would allow an employer to request proof that a woman using insurance to buy birth control was being prescribed the birth control for reasons other than not wanting to get pregnant.

After I did some breathing exercises to prevent myself from throwing up, I continued reading the article and came upon the following quote from the egregiously stupid proponent of this barbaric measure:

Further, Lesko states, with a straight face, that this bill is necessary because “we live in America; we don’t live in the Soviet Union.”

I have a newsflash for the brainless, uneducated Lesko. In the Soviet Union, contraception was not available to regular people. (Except, of course, for the party apparatchiks who traveled overseas and purchased contraceptives there.) Oral contraceptives were not manufactured. Neither were the intra-uterine devices, hormonal patches, or anything of the kind. Condoms were impossible to come by.

The Soviet women’s bodies were policed in a way very similar to the one Lesko and her group of rabid maniacs propose to introduce in Arizona. Women were routinely subjected to forced gynecological exams. If unmarried women were found not to be virgins during such exams, they were publicly shamed and persecuted. Unmarried mothers were lepers in the Soviet society. People who were suspected of marital infidelity were subjected to mock trials at the workplace where bosses and colleagues publicly denounced them for being dirty whores and dirty bastards.

The very idea that an individual’s body belongs to the society, the collective, the group, or the government was the foundation of the Soviet society. It is not surprising that Lesko mentioned the USSR when defending her vile plan. Because the Soviet Union is precisely what she wants to recreate in Arizona.

I’m normally a very laid back kind of teacher but there is one thing students do that really annoys me. I try not to show it but it bugs me like I can’t tell you when students eat in the classroom.

I understand that sometimes people have no time to eat between classes, but it is very disruptive and plain annoying to see people use the classroom to have a meal.

For one, we have very small desks that are attached to the chairs. When one spreads an entire meal on the small desk, there is no space left for papers and textbooks. This means that every class related object goes on the floor, Then, I have to jump over piles of books and dictionaries that lie on the floor as I walk around the classroom.

At the same time, you have to remember that I teach Spanish. This means that students have to speak a lot during class. It is very annoying to see a whole group of students sit there in silence, waiting for a conversation partner to bite, chew, and swallow before she can respond to what is being said.

Of course, it also annoys me that I have to stand there uselessly while a student chews when I have 25 people in the classroom and I need to approach every one of them during a class meeting at least three times (that’s the absolute minimum).

And then there is the issue of extraneous smells that mix and make the air in the classroom really disgusting. The classrooms are very stuffy right now because it is hot outside and we still haven’t started the air-conditioning season. It’s one thing when one eats a small piece of chocolate, but there are people who come to class with bowls of soup, pizza slices, and even fried turkey legs.

Am I wrong in feeling uncomfortable that the two people told to coordinate a party in honor of a retiring colleague are both the youngest faculty members and female?

I’m seeing a suggestion here that women are somehow supposed to be in charge of the social aspect of things and I don’t like that at all.

There is absolutely no other reason why anybody could possibly assume that I make a good party planner other than my age and gender. I’m an intensely unsociable autistic who shudders at the idea of a party.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore the retiring colleague and wouldn’t mind organizing the party. But I don’t want to be assigned any duties based on my gender.

Life gets progressively better on the tenure-track because you acquire experience and can plan ahead to make your life easier.

I know, for example, that two weeks after the spring break, I become completely exhausted. I remembered that when I was planning my syllabi for this semester and scheduled an exam for next Tuesday in all of my courses. Now I will have a day free from teaching exactly when I really need one. And then there will be grading, which really relaxes me and brings me to a happy zen place.

I know, I’m weird.

There is one group of women I envy so much that my jaws hurt. I’m talking about these fortunate, mysterious creatures who put on a white shirt, top, or blouse, go through a very busy day, and emerge at the end of it with the white garment looking as fresh and clean as it did in the morning. I just met a woman like that and I have absolutely no idea how she manages it.

Whenever I put on a shirt, I somehow manage to mess it up while walking from my closet to the front door. And I don’t live in a palace, so it isn’t like there is a long stretch to walk.

How do some people manage to stay put together, crisp and fresh while others gradually fall apart as they go about the day? And it isn’t just the clothes. I always discover that by the end of the day, my hair looks like puppies have been sucking on it (that’s a Ukrainian expression), my makeup has ended up all over my clothes and my phone, and I’ve acquired a new scratch, bump or bruise.

I come from a strictly monoracial society (which nevertheless has a history of slavery). This is why many aspects of the race relations in the US still baffle me. And I don’t know how to ask about these things without sounding like an insensitive jerk.

In class, I always feel very uncomfortable whenever we discuss slavery. There are people who descended from slaves in the classroom and, unlike in my country where slavery was not based on race, it is very visible who the descendants of slaves are. So I feel like discussing slavery in a cold and detached manner in the classroom is not something that I can manage. I feel intensely guilty for being white in such discussions and it seems like no matter what I say, it will sound empty and meaningless.

Then, there are daily situations that confuse me. I was shopping at Macy’s in St.Louis today and the store assistants were black. Not only were they about a hundred times nicer than any white store assistant I had ever encountered, they also kept calling me Miss Clarissa. Nobody calls me Miss Clarissa. This form of address sounds like “Miss Scarlett” to me because Gone With the Wind is the only place where I encountered it. So, again, I felt very weird. And not in a good way.

So I decided that what’s a blog for if not to share things that bother one, right? Maybe my readers can offer some sort of a perspective on this issue. Or maybe there are books I need to read on the subject.

P.S. I know that people who read my blog are enlightened, intelligent folks. Just to be on the safe side, though, I warn everybody that arguments as to how slavery has been over for a long time, so why does it matter any more, are completely unacceptable. As a descendant of slaves, I can tell you that it matters a whole lot and it always will.

The security officer at the Immigration building who cannot possibly be older than me addressed me 3 times as a “young lady.”

How is one supposed not to giggle?

I have to say that even though I’m a great fan of the Kindle, nothing – and I repeat, nothing – beats being inside an actual bookstore and browsing for books there. Bookstores should continue to exist. And used book stores even more so. The very idea that a book passes from one person to another and acquires a second or a third life is magical.

There are relationships that just happen and then there are relationships that require hard work. Such is my complex relationship with St. Louis. I still haven’t been able to feel this city as my own and integrate it into my way of being.

Today I’m in St. Louis to have my fingerprints taken for immigration purposes, so I decided to use this opportunity to walk around the city and try to figure it out. Right now I’m having a raspberry mocha in a non-chain, real coffee-shop and planning my classes on my Kindle. Then I will go to the legendary Left Bank Bookstore because if there is anything that can reconcile me to a city, it’s shopping for books.

Another city I always had an uneasy relationship with is New York. Before visiting it, I spend several years watching Law & Order reruns with my sister. As a result, we became convinced that New York was a city where there was a corpse under every bush and a rapist or a killer around every corner.

The first time I went to New York, my sister was so worried that she told me to call her on the phone every half hour. “If more than 30 minutes pass without you getting in touch,” she said, “I will contact the police and they can start searching for you.”

My friends and I got to New York on a beautiful September day. My friends were eager to show me the city and suggested we take a walk in Central Park.

“No!” I almost screamed. “I’ll never go to Central Park because that’s where all the rapists are!”

Eventually, I realized that one can spend a day in New York without becoming a victim of violent crime but the sense of unease I associate with the city never entirely dissipated.

The cities where I felt immediately at home the moment I arrived there are Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, London, Kiev, Coimbra, Lisbon, and Seville.

Today was one of those days, people. The computer refused to cooperate, the printer ignored my attempts to establish a dialogue with it, the IT guy got lost on the way to my office, I keep dropping things, getting confused, misplacing office keys, etc. I bought lunch and tried to take it to the office but it somehow got lost on the way to the office, which is quite a mystery in its own right. And to make things even more joyful, the movie DVD I brought to my Advanced Spanish course refused to work.

This is a completely new DVD that I bought specifically for this course. I played it twice at home and then did a trial run in the classroom where I was planning to show it. Everything worked great. Until today when I actually had to show it.

When I say I was going to play this movie for the students, it means that I’d prepared a huge number of activities on its basis. There are exercises to do before watching, during watching, after watching, the movie-based lab assignment, the movie-based set of homeworks, and a midterm that integrates the knowledge we will have gained from working with the movie. Creating and coordinating all of those activities is a lot of work. A crazy amount of work. So, obviously, I freaked out completely when the DVD refused to play.

A student saw me in the process of freaking out and took pity on me. “Professor, this movie is available on YouTube for free,” he said, looking at me with the kindness normally reserved for very old and frail people.

Now, the reason I have just bored you with this story is that I have a question. It never even occurs to me to see if a movie, a book or a song are available for free online. I always just buy them or order them at the library when I need them. It’s like the free online option is not even there for me. Does this mean I’m hopelessly old? Am I getting completely irrelevant to the new generation?

I’m completely exhausted, and that’s what causes these existential questions.