Today is the 1 year anniversary of this blog’s existence on the WordPress platform. In this year, we’ve had 641,000 hits on the blog. This is 41,000 more than I envisioned having ideally.

Here are the visits from just the last 7 days:

United States 4,735                     South Africa 1,635                             Canada 1,157

United Kingdom 567                   Germany 263                                        Australia 258

Belgium 101                                     Netherlands 98                                    Denmark 81

France 72                                         Israel 71                                                  Ireland 66

India 65                                            Poland 52                                                 Slovenia 49

Sweden 49                                        Switzerland 42                                      Philippines 40

New Zealand 39                              Croatia 37                                               Italy 30

Czech Republic 28                       Spain 27                                                 Japan 19

Greece 19                                         Romania14                                         Brazil14

Singapore 13                                   Argentina 13                                       Puerto Rico 13

Thailand 11                                      Latvia 11                                              Finland 10

Malaysia 10                                    Viet Nam 9                                             Saudi Arabia 8

Ghana 8                                            Mexico 7                                             Serbia 7

Norway 7                                        Turkey 7                                               Russia  7

Portugal 7                                     Albania 7                                              Indonesia 6

UAE 6                                              Bahrain 5                                             Iceland 5

Ukraine 5                                        Cyprus 5                                            Jamaica 4

Slovakia 3                                       Taiwan 2                                            Panama 2

Venezuela 2                                  Hong Kong 2                                     Uruguay 2

Azerbaijan 2                                 Estonia 2                                           Guam 2

Barbados 2                                   Mongolia 2                                      Nigeria 2

Colombia 2                                  Georgia 2                                             Rwanda 1

Chile 1                                           Netherlands Antilles 1                 Pakistan 1

Lithuania 1                                  Macedonia 1                                  Austria 1

Bosnia and Herzegovina 1

Overall, moving to WordPress has been a great idea, and I congratulate myself on making the move. In the past year, Blogger has crashed several times and has undergone an interface change that makes it a pain in the ass to use.

One reason to visit Germany is its amazing food and its great beer. Here is a slideshow I have made of my German culinary experiences. If you need more time to read the captions, you can always press the Stop button. I find that the speed of the slideshow depends on everybody’s own Internet and computer speed.

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On the evaluations of my Elementary Spanish course, one student answered the question of how the course could be improved with “Get Professor Clarissa to teach every section!” I know the student was trying to say something good about me but the idea of teaching 12 sections of Elementary Spanish per semester is not making me very happy.

As I was looking at the Berlin Wall memorial, I kept thinking, can there be a more obvious and humiliating symbol of a system’s defeat than the need to build a wall to keep people running away in droves? Remember that we are talking about a system that advertised itself as the only one that existed for the people and was run by the people. When it comes to the point where you have to announce the complete failure of this ideology by building the wall to keep the working people by force in the workers’ paradise, isn’t it time to give up on such a system entirely?

What is especially scary, however, is that there are still many people who cling to the senseless belief in the possibility of a Communist state where the people’s only dream would not be running away from it.

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At the Berlin Wall memorial, there are plaques dedicated to the people who died while trying to escape from behind the Wall. The last one of those people perished in March 1989, months before the fall of the Wall. I asked my friend Olivia, who is a Germanist and who was showing me around Berlin, why there was such a desperation to leave the GDR and cross over to the Western side of Berlin.

“In the Soviet Union, we saw the GDR as a consumer paradise,” I told Olivia. “The people there lived in impossible comfort compared to the way we lived in the 1980s. Why were the Germans so desperate to leave?”

As my friend explained to me, it wasn’t as much about poverty and the lack of consumer goods as it was about the general hopelessness of life in the Eastern Germany. The Stasi cultivated an environment of general distrust and suspicion where everybody was either spying on their friends are relatives or being spied on. There was a general hopelessness and a feeling that nothing had meaning.

I could really understand that. The greatest tragedy of the Soviet Union and the Socialist regimes it kept installing all over the world was not the absence of things to buy. It was the lack of things to want. A human being cannot live without a plan, a goal, something to work for, something to want. Of course, you can reduce your horizons to the attainment of simple material comforts, which is precisely what many people in the Soviet bloc did. What a sad, miserable existence that is, though. The crushing, hopeless materialism of the Communist existence bred cynicism and stupefied people to the point where their basic humanity was getting eroded.

I have to confess that I have been a little out of things recently. The end of the academic year, the grading, and the trip to Europe made it a little hard to follow the news. This is why I haven’t been able to form an opinion on France’s new president Francois Holland. So I am now asking those of you who have to share your impressions of him. Good? Bad? Better than Sarkozy? What are we to expect from him?

Due to my massive traveling, the Link Encyclopedia is late. And quite short thanks to people who make it impossible to scroll down one’s Google Reader feed by clogging it with endless pictures of their ugly cats. Still, here it is:

I’m very much afraid that the following is, indeed, will be the future of Greece: “The lesson, not just for Greece, but for every democratic nation, from this debacle, is that democracy is severely constrained in a globalized world. If an electorate votes inconsistently – as it appears will be the Greek outcome – the inconsistency will not survive. Anti-austerity for Greece implies the return of the drachma. It also implies economic turmoil and ultimately – in my judgment -the replacement of democracy in Greece by military rule.” I also find the idea of the limits that the globalization places on democracy to be very interesting. For smaller, less powerful countries, this definitely seems to be the truth.

Autism and oral exams.

I always wondered where the following way of responding to people’s concerns comes from: “Women are trained and expected to be ‘nice.’  Especially with their friends.  If a friend says, ‘I think I blew that audition because I didn’t have time to prepare,’ the ‘proper’ female friend response will be ‘oh, no, I’m sure you did fine…”  We are Nice.  Reassuring.  This we call, “being supportive.”” Words can’t describe how this attitude bugs me. The last thing you want to hear when you share that you have messed up is this kind of careless dismissal. It always makes me feel completely diminished and brushed aside with my puny little concerns. I don’t think it’s a gender issue, though. In my life, there are 2 men and 1 woman who routinely drive me up a tree with this kind of a response. What do you think?

Why are there so few women in physics? An insightful analysis by a woman who is a physicist.

A very good post in RUSSIAN from a woman who remembers Stalin very well and explains how Putin is obviously trying to imitate Stalin. A very interesting post.  If you do not read in Russian, maybe you can translate it with an online translator.

Writing with beans. A very creative post on academic writing by a talented academic.

I completely agree with this blogger’s ideas on what should be done to prevent “casino banking” from undermining the entire economy of the country.

Why introducing the voucher system for public colleges is a horrible idea.

This is something you should never say when applying for an academic position. Immaturity is not all that attractive in a professor.

A really great post on the wrong questions mothers ask each other and themselves.

And the title of the worst piece of the month goes to the following: “Women are nicer than men. There are exceptions. Most people of both sexes are probably fairly nice, given the nature of their upbringing and opportunities. But in terms of their lifelong natures, women are kinder, more empathetic, more generous. And the sooner more of them take positions of power, the better our chances as a species.” Now let me go and vomit for a while. Notice the insidiousness of this particular brand of sexism. This is precisely the kind of sexism I have always experienced: as a woman, you are supposed to be so much better, nicer and kinder than a man. And if you allow yourself to stop being generous, giving and empathetic at any point, then you have failed as a woman. You are nullified as a female because you cannot uphold this fake standard of self-sacrificial perfection. OK, I need to go vomit some more.

Plus, to compensate for the shortness of the link encyclopedia, here is a random observation: I have encountered half a dozen posts in my feed that make the earth-shattering revelation that Obama’s recent statement of support for the gay marriage is nothing but a ploy to attract more votes. Obama couldn’t care less for gay marriage, these bloggers say. He is just trying to milk the current growing public support for gay rights in this country. What such bloggers don’t seem to get is that this is precisely what a good democratic leader should be doing. He should keep his own convictions, beliefs, principles, religion and prejudices to himself and express the ideas of the people who voted for him. He is our hired manager, and it is his sworn duty to act as such. If the majority of people who voted for him support gay rights, so should he. What Obama believes as a human being is of absolutely no interest to me. All I care about is how faithfully he represents the wishes of the people who voted for him. The Democrat Presidents are not very good at that, normally.

After traveling for I don’t even remember how long, I’m still not home yet. It will take at least 3 more hours to get home.

This has been a journey from hell, people, with every single thing that could potentially go wrong going majorly wrong. On the way, I have encountered a bunch of extremely rude and aggravating Israelis, Dutchmen, Russians, and Slovaks and an extremely nice and helpful gentleman from Lawrence, Kansas.

To give you an idea of how I look after all this traveling and stressing out, here is what happened to me at the end of the flight from London to Chicago. I was sitting next to a gentleman of a very advanced age. I think he could easily be my grandfather. The flight attendant, however, asked me to pass a snack to this gentleman and referred to him as my husband. I’m not even upset because I kind of do look like I’m eighty right now.

And while I was writing this post, my flight out of Chicago was delayed once again. I think I’ll have to send a photo of how I look right now to my actual husband so that he can identify me at the St. Louis airport.

I loved this poster so much that I had to steal it from one brilliant blogger. Unlike her, I don’t have anything intelligent to say on the subject except, “And that’s my point exactly!”

Seriously, though. Low self-esteem doesn’t appear in a vacuum. You need to find out who created it in you and is now still fostering it. Then, you need to undermine the influence of those people on your life dramatically.

I’m going home, people. My trip is now over. You can expect the following on this blot after my return :

1. Reviews of books I have read on the trip.
2. Photos.
3. A belated link encyclopedia.
4. Discussions of controversial topics.

Stay tuned!