How completely and utterly horrifying:

Once the 2007-2009 recession hit, the female retreat from the workforce halted for a couple of years: Women and men alike returned to the workforce when their spouses lost jobs or when their incomes fell, and also to make up for a loss in the value of housing and stocks.

But as the economy stabilized in the past two years, there have been signs that the retreat has resumed, Albanesi said. Of all working-age women, 58.6 percent were either working or looking for a job in 2010, down from 59.2 percent in 2009. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expected the rate to fall further by 2020.

According to Albanesi, it’s not the tug of looking after young children that makes most educated women give up their career.

“These women usually give up their jobs when their children are school-age and not babies any more,” Albanesi said.

This means that 40% of adult women do not work. Can that be true?

Well, what can you expect when even feminists are chirping merrily about the joys of being a kept object at a man’s disposal with no life of their own.

Jeez, people, this is so depressing. I still cherish some hope, though, that this study is a conservative fake aimed at convincing women that it’s normal not to have a professional and social realization because their husband has one. The last lines of the article this quote is from makes me think that might be true:

“Stay-at-home wives are a status symbol for men. The opposite is not true.”

This might have been true 50 years ago. Today, however, one never gets to meet a man who doesn’t feel intensely uncomfortable and apologetic over owning a kept woman instead of sharing his life with a partner who is an equal and a fully valid human being.

Am I too sensitive if I’m bothered by an email that tells administrators to “hand this information down the ranks”?

I don’t really see myself as being beneath anybody on this campus. Or anywhere else. A Dean, a Chancellor and the President of the US are not “above” me. They just have a different job, and there is no guarantee that they are doing it better than I do mine.

This interesting post on how students address their teachers really hit home with me. I don’t care how I’m addressed as long as students don’t use this very annoying “Miss”, which they pronounce as “Mieeeeess!” It takes all I’ve got not to bark that I haven’t been a “Miss” for longer than they have lived.

I also can’t wait to announce in my classes that I am now exactly twice as old as my 18-year-old students. I already see some male members of the student body making googly eyes at me, so this should be a sobering reminder that I’m an ancient old boring lady. In exactly two weeks, I will be able to make that announcement. (This is a hint that people should remember to wish me a Happy Birthday on April 18.)

I just found a great post addressing an issue that has bugged me for a long time:

I have long been a critic of the “niceness police” who regularly patrol online forums. Such figures are often hung up on “tone” to a pathological degree, dismissing arguments based on an overly harsh tone while completely ignoring objectively “mean” statements that are stated in a superficially more even-handed style — and of course, they always feel empowered to cast personal aspersions on the person supposedly guilty of “meanness.”

I agree with this blogger completely. I write passionately, honestly, intensely, and aggressively. On the one hand, this is something that really helps me because I can channel my aggression into my writing instead of letting it fester and eventually damage my health. On the other hand, I am absolutely convinced that one of the reasons why my blog has become so popular so fast is precisely that I don’t mince words and many people identify with my passion.

There are blogs whose authors are so dedicated to the goal of being as inoffensive and mild as possible that you have to get through several paragraphs full of apologies and disclaimers before you arrive at the point that the author is actually trying to make. It is perfectly fine to write this way and to prefer to read such blogs. If you identify with this “Excuse me for existing” position, that is your right. What is not OK, however, is to descend on the blogs of  people who write differently and try to police their styles of writing.

The funny thing about the enforcers of niceness is that they are just as aggressive as the passionate, angry writers like myself:

Of course, the highlight is the omnipresent concern-trolling, the patronizing recommendations that “you’ll attract more flies with honey,” etc. The entire strategy of the niceness police is a strategy of delegitimation, a performance that places the niceness police on the side of reason and moderation while the violator is an irrational, easily irritated crank.

The representatives of the niceness police are incapable of being honest and direct about their aggression. This is why they don’t challenge your opinions head on but, instead, try to shut you up by addressing the form of your utterances, rather than their content.

If you are consulting this post because you need to write an essay or hand in an assignment at school, not only are you a cheater and a fraud, you are also an idiot. Essays and book reports based on my readings get people very low grades. And you are too young and too stupid to understand why that is.

Reader el asked me to write about one of my favorite books, The Great Gatsby. I read it a long time ago, so bear with me if I get some minor details wrong.

F.S. Fitzgerald’s greatest novel is a powerful response to people who believe that money can buy social mobility. Gatsby, whose parents were “”shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” attempts to buy access to a higher social class with his new-found money and fails miserably. He can purchase a huge house, organize lavish parties, and get the people whose social status he covets to attend but he cannot become one of them. His sensibilities will always be those of a poor farm boy from North Dakota who dreams of accessing a way of life that he has only seen from afar and cannot even hope to comprehend fully.

Like a poor person who makes some money and immediately buys a huge plasma screen TV to signal his social mobility (without realizing that the people whose social class he wants to join don’t even watch television), Gatsby tries to massage Daisy’s incomprehensible reality into a familiar narrative of a life-long monogamous bond. It is crucial for him that Daisy state publicly that she never loved her husband. Gatsby needs her to participate in the creation of his fairy-tale of “for better or for worse, they lived happily ever after, and died on the same day.”

Daisy, of course, is incapable of understanding why this is so important to him because this petit bourgeois dream of Gatsby’s is not something she can share. A search for a monogamous partner for life is crucial for the representatives of the lower classes who cherish hopes of upward mobility. Life is tough for such people, and joining forces with a partner you can rely on is very important.

Please don’t think that I’m trying to denigrate this petit bourgeois dream of monogamy and social mobility. It is my reality and my dream, too. I identify with Gatsby here and not with the spoiled, rich, satiated Yalies and Southern belles who have had everything handed to them on a diamond-studded platter and who are too bored even to have sex, like Nick and Jordan.

I think that my students are lucky to have me. I really do. I’m now creating the final exam for my language courses. Creating an exam for a language course is a huge headache. An exam needs to test all of the language skills simultaneously: reading, writing, listening comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary. The final exam doesn’t test speaking skills because we have a separate oral exam for that. Speaking in a language course is too important, in my opinion, to be crammed into the final.

Each assignment has to contain a certain percentage of new words that students are not familiar with. The goal is to create a situation where they can handle unknown words and deduce their meaning from the context. All of the exercises have to be connected in some way and have to test more than one skill. They should also cover everything we have learned. Making these activities is a humongous pain in the behind.

So the reason why I say that my students are lucky is that I prepare two such exams for each course. They are identical in structure and in the material they cover. One is a mock final exam that we do in class before the week of the finals. During that activity, I approach each student individually and help him or her make a list of what they need to go over before the exam. Then, when the day of the final arrives, they feel very comfortable with the format, nothing unexpected happens, and even just that security of knowing precisely what will happen during the exam and what activities it will contain makes students feel more relaxed.

And what do you think I do during the 2,5 hours that the exam lasts? Sit there, reading a book? Yeah, right. I barely even manage to spend 15 minutes altogether sitting during an exam. I walk around the classroom and help students. I believe that learning is a lot more important than assessment. If we have 2,5 hours together, why spend it doing nothing but assessing? If a student makes a mistake with, say, the personal “a” at the beginning of the exam, s/he will then reiterate that mistake 15 times in a row. How is that helpful to anybody? If, however, I point out the mistake from the beginning, the student can self-correct.

Helping doesn’t mean giving out the correct answers, of course. Normally, I just point at the mistake and make big eyes. Or I underline it and say, “Ay yay yay.” That is always enough to get a student to think instead of just reproducing a mistaken response.

I wish I had a prof like me when I was learning Spanish. In the only Spanish language course I have ever taken, the prof never got out of his chair. At all. I, on the other hand, walk up to 5 miles inside the classroom during each teaching day. I know for sure because I’ve been wearing a pedometer and creating a graph.

In case it isn’t clear why I’m writing this, the post is my response to people who say, “Why do we need to pay so much (ha, ha!) to people with PhDs to teach these language courses when any native speaker can do it?” I have four native speakers in my Advanced Spanish course and they are thanking me profusely on a regular basis for helping them to learn to read and write better in their own language.

I’m very annoyed with the person who made this comment to me today. And it isn’t the first time either.

I went to the webpage of a very prestigious journal in my field where I’m thinking of submitting my new article. The Table of Contents of the most recent issue of the journal is populated by scholars who were in the same graduate program with me at McGill University.

That department does not exist any more. It was closed down last year. A department that, in recent years, graduated a group of brilliant young scholars who are getting published in the best journals in the field of Hispanic Studies. I cannot begin to tell you how great that department was and what kind of an amazing intellectual environment existed there.

Whenever I pass by the buildings of McGill University, I feel like I’m seeing a tomb.

I promised a while ago to write about the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. This is the place that a group of pseudo-feminists in Russia has defiled as part of its self-promotion strategy. As I said before, you have to be a real hater of the Russian culture to vandalize a cathedral with such a painful and tragic history.

The foundations of the Cathedral were laid down to commemorate Russia’s defeat of the invading Napoleonic troops in 1812. For decades, people from all over the country donated money (often as little as a few kopecks) to create this beautiful work of art. This was a huge project for such a miserably poor country. Only in 1883 was the Cathedral finally finished and consecrated. For seventy years (which is the same number of years that the USSR managed to exist), people saved and donated money, while the most outstanding Russian artists worked on decorating the cathedral. It became a symbol of Russian creativity and a beacon for all Russian Orthodox believers.

After the death of Lenin, Stalin, who wanted to eradicate every vestige of religious feeling and put his own brand of religious Communism in its place, decided to demolish the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He was planning to erect a temple to the Communist God, Lenin, in its place. It was going to be called “The Palace of the Soviets.” You can see in the picture on the right what it was going to look like.

In 1931, the cathedral was demolished. Remember that the Cathedral had been filled with frescoes by the leading Russian artists of the XIXth century. You do not need to be religious to appreciate the barbarity of this destructive act. One of the goals of the Nazis was to destroy the cultural heritage of the Slavic peoples. The Soviet Communists had started this project long before Hitler even came up with this plan.

It took almost a year to clear all the rubble from the site. Then, the construction of the Communist Temple began.

It never managed to progress beyond the attempts to lay the foundations, though. The site where a humongous cathedral had stood for years with no problems whatsoever suddenly started to get flooded. Stalin exterminated several groups of architects and engineers but nothing could be done. The flooding continued. For the religious people, it was a sign that God was not going to allow this site to be defiled by the Palace of the Soviets. Soon, the project was abandoned.

In 1992, the Russian Orthodox Church started collecting money to rebuild the Cathedral. Once again, people from all over the country began to donate money for the construction. These were the years of great poverty for the Russian people, yet they found money for this testament to their desire to salvage their cultural heritage from complete oblivion.The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was consecrated in 2000.

I hope that now everybody understands why it bothers me so much that the pseudo-progressive Western media are glorifying a bunch of money-hungry idiots who vandalized this place of worship with its unique and painful history.

. . . of any kind are a way of diluting one’s individuality in the cud-chewing bliss of a stupidified community.

In a recent thread, I mentioned that it is incredibly hard for me to approach people at conferences, professional events, university-wide celebrations, etc. Contacting people by email for professional reasons is something that I also can’t really face. (I’m talking of initiating contact, not writing to somebody I already know.) At parties, I dread the need to approach new people. The LinkedIn format of professional networking is just as terrifying. Writing to somebody and then expecting a reply, fearing that they won’t notice you – no, I’d just rather do without networking altogether.

The reason for this fear is that such situations immediately take me back to childhood experiences of approaching a group of kinds, trying to start a conversation, and not being noticed. That’s my greatest fear, communication-wise, that I will speak and people will not hear me and I will feel invisible.

One area of life where I feel the exact opposite is meeting men. When I mentioned that, reader Hazel Catkins made the following comment that I want to address in this post:

I’m fascinated by that, Clarissa. Why was approaching guys so much easier for you? What would you say? Would you just be your regular self, or would you adopt a more confident, outgoing persona? If this needs to be expanded into its own post, so be it.

I’m very happily married now and do not plan to meet any men for romantic purposes ever again. However, when I was on the dating scene, not only did I really enjoy approaching attractive men, I actually preferred to initiate contact. Men who made the first move immediately lost points in my eyes because I don’t like aggressive men. I prefer to make my own choice and then communicate it to people.

So what does it mean that I find it so incredibly easy to approach a person and exhibit a romantic / sexual interest but dread being the first one to express any other form of interest?

If we take friendship, for example, I need to be “courted” for a while by a potential friend. A person who is trying to become a friend needs to prove their intentions to me (seriously, that’s how it feels and how my closest friends describe the experience of developing a friendship with me). This potential friend needs to suggest and organize several occasions for us to socialize. I will also decline his or her offers a few times which, yet again, is a way of gauging if their friendly intentions towards me are serious. I know that this sounds very bizarre, but this is my blog, and I want to be honest here.

I guess the answer is that I feel complete security in my sexuality and I don’t feel this kind of security in other aspects of myself.

Thank you, Hazel Catkins, for getting me to formulate these important insights about myself.