Do you read Clarisse Thorn’s blog? The blogger I always get mistaken for? If not, you really should because she keeps posting really fantastic stuff. Here is a quote from the most recent post:

My most problematic ex-boyfriend once told me “I just want to feel like you love me more than you love yourself,” which was the point that I should’ve walked out the door.

Yes. A hundred times yes. A person who undermines your love for yourself in any way is not somebody you want in your life.

Whenever N. and I fight (which we, of course, do because we are both alive), I always start by saying, “I love you, you are the most beautiful, amazing, intelligent person in the universe but this thing you did / said sucks.” If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably have realized that I don’t mince words when I’m annoyed. But I always make sure that I express my grievances in a way that does not undermine his worth as a human being. Whatever happens, he needs to love himself more and make his decisions based on that. And, obviously, I do the same. As a result, the relationship between us will blossom.

The only healthy attitude is to welcome your partner loving him or herself more than they love you. Otherwise, they might be driven to make sacrifices for your sake or for the sake of the relationship and that is always very dangerous. Believe me, I’ve had my first marriage destroyed by this kind of a sacrifice.

Talking about perceptions, my students just stunned me.

“We were discussing networking in another class,” they shared, “and when we had to think of somebody who has a personality that is perfectly suited for networking, we thought of you!”

“What?” I asked.

“You are the definition of a networker!” they insisted.

“What?” I could only ask.

So I probably have to take my most recent post back. The last thing I could have ever guessed I was projecting was a networking personality. There is not a single person in this world who detests networking as much as I do. The word itself makes me shudder.

But that’s the image I project, apparently.

Oy vey.

Here is a question that I found at one of the blogs I follow:

Do you think society forces women to pretend that they’re happy or that they’re unhappy?  Are there differences in these pressures between IRL and the internet?  Are there different expectations by cultural context?  For example, are working moms supposed to be harried and not keeping it together but professional single women are supposed to have it all figured out?  Or is there a “damned whatever you do” of competing pressures?

Of course, I do not find the idea that “society forces women” to do anything to be very useful because at least half of society consists of women. Any “supposing” about what women should or should not be like can only come in equal parts from women and men.

What is interesting, however, is how we form such perceptions of groups of people. To give an example, I have this image of women with 3 or 4 children as extremely organized, powerful, and in control. The reason for it is that I know three such women and that’s how they are. There is no doubt in my mind that these specific women would be exactly the same if they had no children at all because this is simply what their personality is like.

A personal knowledge of somebody’s reality always overrides any sort of stereotypical expectations. If you agree with the popular stereotype of accountants as boring creatures with poor people’s skills, meeting a single accountant who is fun, sociable and has a great sense of humor will change that stereotype in a flash. My students could have brought any kinds of stereotypes about “Russian women” to my classroom but I know for sure that they will be leaving my class with a completely different image of us.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we are all responsible for the image of the groups we belong to. I suggest we abandon the passive voice discussion of how we “are seen, perceived and expected to act” and start looking at how we actively contribute to such perceptions.

As for whether it makes more sense to be happy or whiny online and in RL, I believe that the best strategy is to be real. People who know us and blog readers sense fakeness in a flash. What they really respond to well is honesty and sincerity. It is normal for people to whine from time to time and to be happy from time to time. I don’t think that anybody will condemn us for being both on a regular basis.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have two very different sides to my personality. One, let’s call her Alpha, is very organized, overachieving, studious, punctual, and responsible. She achieves nirvana by making lists, reading serious books, and working harder than anybody else. The other side, let’s call her Omega, is happy-go-lucky, spontaneous, hard-partying, messy, and disorganized. Her nirvana is brought about by shelling sunflower seeds, watching reruns of silly TV shows, and reading tons of trashy books.

I think that from this description it’s obvious who Alpha and Omega are. Alpha is my Jewish part and Omega is my Ukrainian part. In every situation, I feel them offering their own solutions and fighting for control. (I don’t mean this in a psychiatric way of a split personality disorder, or anything of the kind. It’s just a personal way of being.)

So I have a question to my readers who have two or more ethnicities: do you feel anything like this? Do you perceive your personality as consisting of very different parts? Of course, this is more obvious to people who have very different ethnicities in their makeup, such as Semitic and Slavic.

Remember, people, I’m on a journey of cultural exploration here, so from time to time I need help.

Do you find the following bumper sticker offensive?

Would you feel “sexually harassed” by the sticker? If so, then why? I have a feeling that I’m missing some set of cultural connotations in this image.

It seems like today will be a “Negative List-Making Day” for me. I need to get all this negativity out before proceeding with the rest of the week, though, so bear with me.

I don’t like myself right now because:

1. I’m messy and disorganized. Or, rather, I have an organized, responsible persona and a disorganized messy persona, and the latter always ends up defeating the former.
2. I have a very bizarre system of priorities that keeps undermining me.
3. I keep forgetting that beating your head against a wall only results in brain damage and does nothing to remove the wall.
4. I’m infantilizing myself by not learning to drive, which is a very stupid thing to do.
5. I never answer emails on time, except when they are from students.
6. And the worst part of all: I keep putting off my research, the part of my life that never disappoints and that always gives my life meaning, for the sake of stupid and meaningless things that do disappoint on a regular basis. This way, I can continue being a receptacle for the shit people want to unload on me while nothing of value gets done.

So I’m using this opportunity to make this public pledge on my blog:

Never again will I do anything (no matter how much people exhort me, plead with me and cajole me into doing it) before I have finished my research activities for the day. Until I’ve done my writing, everybody and everything can go stand in a queue.

Believe me, folks, never again will I engage in this self-defeating, self-sabotaging game.

And now I will go and organize my papers.

And the world continues to annoy me. Here are some excerpts from an article on Ukraine published by Toronto Sun that, once again, makes me wonder how the hiring process for mainstream media occurs:

Why did my heart sag when I learned of the international conference in Ottawa titled “Ukraine at the Crossroads?” Over 30 notable academics, politicians and international experts gathered at the Chateau Laurier on March 7-8 under auspices of the Ukrainian Canadian Council (UCC) to discuss the state of democracy and freedom in Ukraine and its tenuous (and often tense) relations with Russia. Prior to that gathering — often involving some of the same “experts” — was the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Again, they rehashed what to do about the loss of democratic reforms that jeopardize Ukraine’s ties with Europe.

There is no explanation why the conference and the experts are dismissed in such a condescending manner other than the fact that some Conservative Canadian MP has not been invited to offer his precious wisdom about the state of affairs in Ukraine:

The big lapse in the standing committee is the absence of Conservative MP Chris Alexander, former diplomat in Moscow and former ambassador to Afghanistan who understands Russia better than the whole Harper cabinet and NDP caucus if you ask me.

Yes, really, how can any discussion about Ukraine be conducted in the absence of a former ambassador to Afghanistan who understands Russia?

Leaving aside the extremely poor writing and editing for the moment, let’s contemplate the author’s grievous  lack of knowledge about the country he has chosen to discuss in this badly written article:

Some 45 years ago, I lived and worked for a couple of years in Moscow, when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union. Even then, tension between Russians and Ukrainians was palpable. This always struck me as curious, because as an outsider it was hard to tell the difference between the two.

I remember asking a Russian why the thinly disguised hostility.

Forget the 300 years of vicious colonial rule, the genocide of the 1931-2, the annihilation of the Ukrainian cultural legacy, the endless prohibitions against the Ukrainians using their own language. Forget the glaring differences between the art, history, language, culture, etc. of the Russians and the Ukrainians. None of these things matter because, to an indifferent traveler from Canada, all those Slav people look exactly the same. So why on earth would these very similar people dislike each other? It isn’t like they might truly differ in the manner of, say, Canadians and Americans.

The journalist does not stop here and continues sharing his ignorance with the universe:

Now that Ukraine is an independent country, but still economically, socially and culturally dependent on Russia in ways that Belarus is, it cannot escape Russian paranoia about its desire to identify more closely with Europe.

Ukraine’s economic dependence on Russia is an issue that can be discussed. However, it remains a complete mystery to me how my country is “socially and culturally” dependent on its Eastern neighbor. Russia has been fighting to keep Ukraine as part of the empire for centuries, while Ukraine has been struggling to escape from its domination. So who’s the dependent party here?

The culmination of stupidity in the article comes when its unintelligent author dismisses the long-standing tradition of democracy in Ukraine:

Democracy is too new, too fragile in that part of the world, and is not yet a tradition as it is elsewhere.

I have got to wonder where that magical “elsewhere” that has an older modern democracy than Ukraine is located. If one decides to write about Ukraine, surely, one can be expected to know of the Zaporizhian Sich that existed between the XVIth and the XVIIth centuries and that was governed according to the principles of democracy.

If the article is bad, then the very first comment that follows it is even worse:

Who the hell cares what happens in the Ukraine? This is Canada, we have our own problems to worry about and this country isn’t one of them.

Yes, to hell with the huge Ukrainian Diaspora in Canada, with the globalization, and with foreign affairs. A true Canadian is too preoccupied with “our own problems” to notice that things are happening outside Canadian borders.

Thank you, Ukrainian Canadian, for pointing me towards the article.

It’s one of those days when a person wakes up and the world greets her with a surge of negativity. Which is why I feel a profound need to bitch. I have been awake for less than an hour and have already been presented with the following unpleasant discoveries:

• I have missed the delivery of an extremely important package. The content of the package is of such a nature that I cannot be at peace until I have it in my possession. Just once I decide to sleep in until 9 am and this happens.
• I forgot my own golden rule of action which is, “Never ever ever have any dealings with Russian people, especially if they are from Moscow or St. Petersburg. They are weird, unpleasant, dishonest folks, and it’s best to keep as far away from them as possible.” Now, I’m paying the price for this untimely forgetfulness.
• I had postponed my research in favor of other things that I decided were more important. The universe, then, demonstrated to me that this was an idiotic decision.
• My mailbox is inundated with messages telling me that every important event under the Sun has been scheduled precisely for the weekend when I will be out of town.
• People who should have listened to my advice chose to dismiss it and now we are all in deep shit.
• And the stupid Introduction to the article is still not working out.

A brilliant takedown of the moron who claimed college profs are lazy and overpaid.

And here are suggestions on how to combat such morons.

A recipe for orange-liqueur pancakes. Yum!

“You will not be less busy in the future than you are right now.”

“It doesn’t matter what a child chooses to spend his or her time doing, parents have no right to bully their children into partaking in hobbies they deem ‘worthy’.” A fantastic post!

“The world [is] in a post feminist reactionary period where Republican primary candidates are talking about making the American government small enough to fit in a vagina while their June Cleaver wives stood by theirman and baked cookies for the cause.”

It always drives me around the bend to hear my students drawl, “Oh, I’m not interested in politics!” I wish they could get acquainted with this post by a brilliant young person who is politically active and engaged: “The first thing that I learned was that politics affects everyone. It touches everything in our lives. This was the same fact that I told every person who skeptically, condescendingly, asked why I was studying English. Politics was why the roof of my urban high school leaked when it rained. Politics was why gas prices were soaring. Politics was why tuition was so dang expensive. Politics was why. Politics was. I had to learn as much as I could about this thing, this entity, this institution that touched every corner of my life. I had to know.” By the way, this was written by a young journalist. I have got to ask: how come we see articles from complete and utter morons in leading newspapers and never great stuff by promising writers like this one?

How to engage with a recruitment agency in a way that maximizes your chances to be introduced to a potential employer.

“The American education system has never been better, several important measures show. But you’d never know that from reading overheated media reports about “failing” schools and enthusiastic pieces on unproven “reform” efforts.” The scare-mongering about the completely fictitious horrors of the American public education are spread on purpose by people who are terrified of intelligent voters.

“In the kind of world the forced birthers want to exist. . . the minute a woman is pregnant the man who impregnated her would have extra rights over her body because of her pregnancy. She is now the aquarium for his future child, after all. That the aquarium is also a person is where the complications enter.”

“Political coverage is nothing but empty prognostication, with no indication about why we should even care about the outcome. Meanwhile, political debate is conducted via empty abstractions that are supposed to be vaguely “good.” All of it is utterly meaningless and useless.”

This is the most brilliant thing I have read for ages on the US foreign policy: “We try to analyze what happens and is likely to happen in North Korea as though we knew as much as there is to know about it. We seem to look upon it as a small state in a mid western part of the United States.  It is not. Korea has a far longer history than does the United States and is extraordinarily different culturally, historically and in just about every other important respect. . . Until we learn that people around the world are not necessarily the same as we are, don’t necessarily think in the same way and don’t necessarily appreciate the same things, we will continue to muck up foreign policy terribly. Our troops and those of our allies and enemies will continue to die unnecessarily, we will continue to spend money that we don’t have and continue to be impoverished in the process.  Are we stupid, naive, or just mistakenly well-meaning?”

It always shocks me to see how people use horrible crimes like the one committed against Trayvon Martin to write bizarre pieces on how things would have been a lot worse if Martin had been a woman. Because he’d be more dead, or something: “The president has promised a proper investigation. The case will go to a grand jury next month, and the Department of Justice plans to review it. The governor has appointed a special prosecutor, and the police chief has stepped down temporarily. Martin’s parents have spoken before a Congressional panel. I can only dream of a female president speaking out when a man kills a woman. Take Back the Night marches draw little or no media. Slutwalks do better, probably because they include young women in sexy clothing. Offhand, I can’t think of any time in recent history when hundreds of women and men took to the streets across the country because a man stalked and killed a woman.” Constructing an argument that presents Trayvon Martin as hugely fortunate could have only occurred to a very diseased human being. His parents have spoken before a panel, yippee, problem solved. This is simply outrageous.