The last post made me remember the interview I gave last week to a grad student at my university who is conducting research on the experience of recent immigrants in the US. One of the questions he asked me was about the cultural differences between my country and the United States.

“I find it very impressive how mature the young people here are,” I said.

“Immature, you mean,” the interviewer corrected me.

“No, I mean mature,” I insisted.

“Immature,” he kept correcting me.

So I had to explain that, in my culture, it is completely normal for a person of my age to live with her parents (or, more often than not, mother and grandmother) who help her out financially, take care of all her household needs, and bring up her children. In case the person in question is male, things are even more dire. A man gets mommied right until he is handed over to a wife who starts mommying him from then on. There are crowds of grown men who can’t even choose their own underwear, let alone wash it.

This is why I admire young people in this country so much. They leave home at 18, go to college, most of them work while in school, they all make efforts to figure out life on their own, many are politically active, they start all kinds of student clubs and organizations, they all handle their lives quite well.

Yet another article has come out on the “horribly spoiled” American kids. In my honest opinion, all of this endless drama about how irreparably damaged the young generation is has nothing to do with said generation but everything to do with the older people who resent their own adulthood and don’t want the responsibilities attendant on being parents.

The article is titled “Spoiled Rotten” and shares a bunch of boring myths about those far away places where the grass is greener, the sugar is better and the kids are of better quality. Of course, as usual, these better kids are located in two places that, for an American, signify the heights of exoticism: France and some faraway tribe in an obscure place. The children in those wonderful places hunt, fish, make food and clean the house while they are still in their nappies. In the meanwhile, those horribly spoiled American kids dare to expect to be fed instead of feeding their parents. What jerks.

So how do we transform the spoiled American kids into their better version that, according to parenting gurus, can be found in other countries? The secret to rearing these amazing, ultra responsible, super sophisticated children is to pay no attention to them. Because apparently, if you pick up a crying two-year-old and try to comfort her, you are damaging her for life. She might grow up expecting people to respect her emotions and wouldn’t that be just horrible?

You know who I find immature, though? People who choose to procreate and then look for every excuse they can find to spend as little time and energy as possible on their kids. Books and articles proliferate trying to convince parents that the children in a culture where kids get stuck in front of a TV since the day they are born get too much of their parents’ attention. All I see in these articles and books is an attempt by an overindulged and spoiled generation of parents to shoulder off all responsibility for raising their children. What can be more immature than this endless “just give me a reason not to pick up my own kid when he’s crying”?

The article shares all kinds of scary stories about kids who can’t tie their shoelaces at five and then become losers and underachievers in adulthood. As a person who didn’t know how to tie her shoelaces until the age of nine, I find such anecdotes hilarious. And the following story made me roar with laughter:

In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.

The reason why this anecdote made me laugh is that I had the same experience with my younger sister when she was eleven. I placed a plate of food in front of her and five minutes later noticed that she wasn’t eating.

“Why aren’t you eating?” I asked.

“Fork!” she commanded without lifting her eyes from a book she was reading.

In spite of this “horrifying” occurrence, my sister left her parents’ home at 16, worked all the way through college, and now has a successful business of her own. Neither she nor I were ever taught how to clean an apartment or do the dishes, so we have found male partners who do that for us. And we have both been called spoiled by resentful older women who were raised to be domestic slaves.

The young people today experience a greater freedom from silly social conventions and limiting expectations than their parents. They are more careful about choosing a career, a life partner, a way of being that will make them happy. And this is what makes their parents resent them. How dare they enjoy themselves in bars and clubs until the age of forty instead of saddling themselves with a mortgage and an unwanted child who is resented for having toys and crying from time to time, like their parents did?

Since my summer course ended last Friday, six of the students have been trying to access the course blog in search of new lectures.

Curiously, these students are the ones who received an A in the course.

That’s how you know good students: they don’t stop learning after a course ends and the final grades are in.

I just discovered that sleeping 4  hours a day six days a week and then making up for lack of sleep by sleeping all day long on Saturday is not the most brilliant idea I’ve ever had. It turns out that this regimen (that I’ve maintained for thirteen years, by the way) is not good for my health. Not only can generating a “sleep debt” cause anxiety and weight gain, it also can compromise one’s immunity, exacerbate psychological problems, and give one very tiresome, detailed and complicated dreams. I now understand why I’ve been tortured by such dreams all these years.

So I’m thinking I should reconsider this system. Which has made me wonder what people normally do about sleep. I don’t mean the parents of small children who have to take the few opportunities they get to sleep whenever they can. I want to ask those of my readers who actually do have a choice of when to sleep the following questions:

– when do you normally go to sleep?

– do you go to sleep at about the same time every day? Does the time vary based on whether it’s a work day or a weekend?

– how many hours do you normally sleep each night?

So do you remember the bad student who asked me for a letter of recommendation to graduate school (of a very prestigious university, as it turned out)? This blog’s readers were kind enough to help me write the letter, which is why I thought they would be interested in finding out how things went.

On my readers’ advice, I wrote something like, “Dear student, I have a policy only to write recommendation letters for students who received grades of A and B in my courses. Since the last two grades you got with me were “F”, I will not be able to recommend you for graduate studies. I suggest you get in touch with a professor who is more acquainted with your strengths than I am.”

In response, the student wrote, “It’s OK, you can still write the letter. Here is the form you will need to fill out.”

As we say in my culture, arrogance is a substitute for happiness.

No, seriously, why?

Here is yet another idiotic article by some illiterate fool who argues that tenure should be abolished and al professors should concentrate more on grading.

We are all to blame that such stupid freaks exist. We are afraid of hurting their feelings and never tell them that they are stupid, brainless cockroaches who should shut up and go kill themselves against a wall.

And then I get criticized for telling idiots that they are idiots in no uncertain terms on my blog. No, people, I know I’m completely right when I eviscerate every stupid creature who comes here to say stupid things on my blog. They don’t care about my feelings when they publish garbage and spread around their stupid beliefs, so why should I give a crap about theirs?

Is there anybody here that can tell me when was the last time you heard or read that a Pharma company has come [up] with something that cures a disease?  I’ll give you 100 Euro right now if you tell me. They don’t cure anything, they make you sick.
…
All of the drugs out there are useless. They are garbage. They don’t work, they give you serious side effects – and eventually many of them kill you.
John Virapen
former manager of the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly (1980 to 1988 Managing Director) and Novo Nordisk 

Exactly. Why try to cure anybody when it is a lot more profitable to get life-long patients?

I remember a doctor who was shocked that I wasn’t on any prescription medication other tan birth control at 32. I was shocked that he was shocked.

I’m not disputing anybody’s right to publish their books, not publish them or eat them for breakfast, of course. However, I have to say that I find the following declaration by writer Alice Walker to be nothing but a clumsy attempt at self-promotion:

Shining light human rights activist Alice Walker has refused to have her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple published in Israel. In a letter to the prospective publisher she writes:

“Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.”

If Walker were really interested in battling the alleged racist tendencies among the Israelis, one would think that she’d want her anti-racist book to become as widely known among the people of Israel as possible. I have to wonder how barring access to an anti-racist piece of fiction is supposed to stop people from racist practices.

The comparison between Israeli policies in Palestine with the Apartheid is a favorite toy of lazy minds. Instead of analyzing the complex phenomenon of Israeli-Palestinian relations, lazy people think they are being progressive by dismissing both Israel and South Africa through claiming that they are essentially the same. Who needs to look into the particularities of these boring conflicts between tedious foreign folks? It is so much easier to declare that they are all the same and the best way to deal with them is by boycotting them until they resolve their boring conflicts.

Walker claims that her novel is part of “the world-wide effort to rid humanity of its self-destructive habit of dehumanizing whole populations.” I believe, however, that dehumanization starts when you experience the need to conflate the problems of completely different societies (such as South Africa and Israel, for example) in an attempt to spare yourself time and effort by dismissing the complex and painful realities of others. I encounter this attitude only too often when  people react to my polite reminder that I’m not from Russia with an impatient gesture aimed at waving off my insignificant belief in my own difference.

“Oh, it’s the same thing,” they always say, jerking their heads impatiently, annoyed that I dare to expect a more nuanced approach to my reality than they are willing to provide.

Walker’s statement reminded me a lot of the attitude exhibited by these “you-people-are-all-the-same” folks.

A reader of this blog asked:

You list “voting is useless because all politicians lie anyway”. I’d be interested to see a post explaining why this is a misconception.

I don’t often get annoyed with my students. I know this is hard to believe if you’ve been reading my blog for a while but I’m the picture of patience and an unadulterated good mood in the classroom. I vent on the blog, which enables me to come into the classroom with no pent-up irritation. But there is a number of statements that my students make that really bug me. “Voting is useless” is one of them.

One reason I find this annoying is that my 18-year-old students who haven’t had a chance to vote for anybody yet could not have possibly arrived at this disillusionment with voting on their own. They are just repeating this boring platitude after adults who are disillusioned with life and feel powerless in their relationship with the world. It’s sad to see young kids condemn themselves to the same kind of impotence for no reason other than being surrounded by cynical adults.

The “world is big and scary and I’m little and insignificant” attitude tells us nothing about the surrounding reality. It does, however, tell us a lot about the psychological issues of the person making the statement. The childish petulance of people who believe that “all politicians lie, so how can I possibly make any sense of anything?” betrays the kind of immaturity that is frustrated by the complexity of the world.

Yes, politicians lie and political activism is hard. Transforming the world is not easy. Arriving at one’s own worldview and making sense of a multitude of political and economic issues is a pain in the lower back. It is much easier to excuse one’s apathy and ignorance by the dismissal of the entire political process as being flawed beyond redemption.

My Kindle is a total prude. Whenever I try to type the word “sex “, it tries to change it to “dex “. Seriously, what does this “dex ” even mean for the Kindle to suggest it all the time?