OK, people, foreigner in need of help here. I have a question for you : do people negotiate furniture prices at furniture stores like Ashley Furniture, Pier 1, Pottery Barn, etc.? Is that something that’s done? Or not? N. and I have been debating this for hours.

I often avoid doing things because I have no idea how they are supposed to be done. But this time I’m set on buying a buffet this Saturday, and I will buy one no matter what.

I encounter the following beliefs so often among my students that I’ve grown sick and tired of offering explanations how things really work:

• Communism and fascism are the same thing.
• All government is bad all taxes are evil.
• Unlike citizens, illegal immigrants in this country are entitled to free medical care.
• Until 30 years ago or thereabouts, women never worked.
• “Columbus was a hero, almost like Jesus or something.” That’s a direct quote, by the way.
• Voting is useless because all politicians lie anyways.
• You cannot be a college professor in the US if you are not a US citizen.
• Trying hard should be enough to succeed. Especially if your Mommy can testify that you did try hard.
• People who receive emails have a magic way of finding out who the sender of the message is. This makes signing or addressing emails redundant.
• Punctuation is vastly overrated. Nobody really needs to use it.
• People who break up a text in paragraphs do that because they are weird.
• Analyzing a text or a painting means saying whatever you want about them without offering an ounce of proof. If the professor objects, just tell them indignantly that this was your opinion and you thought the point was to share opinions.
• There isn’t a whole lot of a difference between “Essay is due on Friday at 5 pm” and “Essay is due up to a week after Friday at 5 pm.”
• Saying “Reading is booooring!” will make a literature professor adore you.
• It makes total sense to take an intensive online course if you have no access to the Internet.
• Cold War was a war between the Soviet Union and the Nazis. (I’m always afraid to ask who won.)
• Emails need to be checked once a week, at most. Facebook, on the other hand, has to be updated every 10 minutes.
• Latin America is a country. So is Africa.

And my favorite: “Oh, so Hitler is dead?? Really?? That’s fantastic!” I mean, I’m always ready to brighten up somebody’s day, so yeah, the jerk has been dead for decades.

This is an intensive course I’m teaching right now, people, so I need to vent often. Especially now that the course is drawing to an end. I promise to stop bitching soon and start writing happy posts.

I’m sorry, everybody, I need to keep sharing this.

A student: So you are saying that Jews were persecuted both in Medieval Spain and in Nazi Germany? Wow, that’s quite a coincidence! I mean, these were completely different cultures and completely different historic eras, yet they both chose the Jews to persecute? How weird.

This is progress, though, after those students who had never even heard the word “Jews.”

My summer course is going to be over soon, so please bear with me. I need to unload all this on the blog in order to be patient and kind with students.

I’m not a climate change denier, believe me. Neither am I indifferent towards environmental issues. But there has got to be a limit to how often people bring up climate change in completely irrelevant contexts.

You know that stereotype of beauty contests where a contestant always ends her response with, “. . . and world peace!”? This is what happens in my class discussions. Whenever we start enumerating the problems faced by medieval Spanish Kingdoms, the Aztec Empire, the colonial Latin American societies of the XVIIth centuries, Argentina in the 1860s or Cuba in 1898, there is always a student who adds, “And climate change!”

“And pollution!” another student immediately chimes in.

“And toxic waste!” somebody immediately adds.

I’m waking up at night in cold sweat because I dream of somebody interrupting my lecture on Lope de Vega to say, “And there was toxic waste lying all over the place, polluting and causing climate change!”

If a student handed in the following essay to you, what would you think?

Cervantes is a Spanish writer of the late XVIth – early XVIIth centuries. Wikipedia defines a writer as a person who produces literature or nonfiction, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, articles, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images. Cervantes was very good at portraying ideas and images. An idea is a concept or mental impression. And an image is an artifact that depicts or records visual perception, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject–usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it. Cervantes did not paint pictures but he wrote beautiful texts. A text is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. Cervantes transmitted many important messages in his art.

This is, obviously, not the text of the essay, but it’s exactly what the essay is like.

N. is convinced that the student is being facetious and I should be appreciative of the student’s great sense of irony. I suspect the student is condescending to me because I’m an immigrant who speaks English with an accent. I have to grade eight pages of the text where every other sentence is a dictionary definition. And I’m getting progressively annoyed with every sentence. How would you feel if you were a literary critic and a student started offering you Wikipedia definitions of the words “writer” and “text”?

Am I missing something or is the following a suggestion that people should have sex when they don’t want to in order to please their partners and keep them around?

It’s not an obligation, to start with. It’s not necessarily about physical pleasure, per se. It doesn’t have to be a “release” or even a distraction. It doesn’t have to be AWESOME. It’s a thing you do with your partner because your partner likes it and you like your partner and it won’t do you any kind of harm to have some naked time. You do it because you see how it’s good for your long term happiness: your partner feels welcomed into your heart and mind, feels connected and accepted, may even feel all the pleasure, release, etc that sex is hyped to be. You do it because it’s Good For You. . .

Look, if you only exercised or ate vegetables or showered when you really WANTED to… well, I know I’d only do each one about once a week, most weeks.

Obviously, we all know that the people encouraged to force themselves to have sex as an investment in long-term happiness can only be women. It is much easier for an uncaring, nasty partner to pretend not to notice lack of female arousal than of a male erection.

The idea that female sexuality only exists to service the needs of others (men, the family, society) has been Within a patriarchal model, each woman needs to be claimed by some man as her own and proclaimed as valuable in society’s eyes by this act of ownership. A woman who is “not in a relationship” becomes a useless creature who hasn’t fulfilled her role of servicing the needs of others.

The especially passionate proponents of this sexual self-violation are women who have sacrificed their sexuality for the sake of this Holy Grail of a relationship. They know how much they lost when they chose to betray their sexuality. This is why the idea that there are women who don’t self-violate in the same manner drives them to distraction. Hence, the efforts to talk all women into following in their footsteps.

So here is an alternative piece of advice from a non-patriarchal woman:

Dear women! Do not violate your bodies and force yourselves to have sex when you don’t want to and with a partner you don’t desire. Rather than an investment in long-term happiness, you are investing in  a host of physiological ailments and psychological problems. This self-violation will cost you very dearly. Every time you fake interest in sex, you remove the possibility of ever having happy, orgasmic, fulfilling sex even farther away from yourselves. If you need to have sex to “feel accepted” by your partner, that means you have a really crappy partner who doesn’t care two straws about you. Dump him today, he is a jerk. A normal man – I don’t even say a loving man, just a man who is reasonably healthy in his head – would be horrified at the suggestion of having sex with an unwilling partner. (And a woman, too, of course.) You don’t need to be “in a relationship” at all costs. Nobody does.

If you are past the age of 30 and you need to think of long-term happiness, investments, relationships or posts you read online to talk yourself into having sex, please know: you are with the wrong partner. He might be the best guy in the universe, but you do  not desire him physically. You are exchanging your sexuality for societal validation. Just think about it.

I was asked to say something about the following comment:

I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard there are pretty big cultural differences between the United States and Russia when it comes to acceptance of certain non-scientific modalities, and that they are taken much more seriously in the former USSR.

I find it pretty hilarious that people from a country:

– where huge chunks of population do not “believe” in evolution,

– where many people seriously suggest that creationism should be taught in schools,

– where police officers employ psychics and there are hugely popular shows about that process,

– where there are people who speak in tongues and touch snakes because they are incapable of understanding a metaphor from a book that is thousands of years old,

– where a presidential candidate has to fake that he is religious in order even to be considered,

– where a political figure with a huge following says in public (and keeps insisting!) that the number of contraceptive pills you take depends on the number of sex acts you engage in,

– where there are Departments of Happiness founded at universities,

– where The Secret becomes an instant mega-bestseller;

– where a president bankrupts the country and drags it into two ruinous wars because God told him to,

– where millions of people can’t get the difference between an abortion pill and a morning after pill because the science behind how the pill works is too complex for them

would proclaim with a straight face that people in the FSU they know absolutely nothing about are more anti-scientific.

They keep writing strange and disturbing things like these:

Megachurches give their members an instant and all-encompassing community, complete with youth ministries, classes for adults, service opportunities, and support groups. They offer one-stop shopping for all your community needs. And today, I miss that. It’s a lot harder to build your own community from scratch than it is to plug in to one that already exists. And then there are the things I didn’t even mention here: the feeling of a higher purpose, the feeling of solidarity with other church members, the sense of mission.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like and admire the blogger I quoted here. It is not my intention to criticize her in the least. I just want to point out that it would probably be easier for me to decipher a text in Chinese than this series of statements.

When I read the words “an instant and all-encompassing community” I feel an onset of a panic attack. Then, when I realize that the author sees this horrible, terrifying prospect as something positive, I’m completely baffled. The idea that somebody would want to build something as useless, restrictive, castrating and invasive as a community is extremely strange. Also, the idea that one would be able to combine a feeling of higher purpose while being dragged out by the leveling, grinding down machine of a community just leaves me speechless.

Once again, I’m not criticizing anybody. I’m just sharing something that makes me different from many people.

I sometimes despair of ever finding any mutual understanding with a non-autistic. Of course, there are always non-autistics like my husband who has been bribing me for years into not inviting anybody to visit us at home.

I know I promised a semi-open thread on Obama a while ago, so here it is, people.

The subject is the recent string of revelations about the kill list of terrorist suspects supposedly personally vetted by President Obama. Do you approve of the list? How did finding out about it make you feel about Obama? Did it make you more or less likely to vote for him in the elections?

And what about the revelations of the cyberwar Obama has been waging against Iran?

Feel free to share anything else that comes to mind about Obama.

And you say that Russian people are bad at business. Here is one who even manage to peddle her hugely expensive Tarot readings on what is supposed to be a feminist website. The readings are done through email which reminded me of the following Russian joke:

“Thank you for recommending me this great massage therapist! In exchange, I can recommend my priest. He is so fantastic! He takes confession by fax.”

Of course, here in North America, you can get a personal Tarot reading for $20 (I have a friend who is a huge fan, so I’m very aware of the prices), which is much cheaper than the online Russian reading. But the American Tarot specialists are not smart enough to dupe silly American pseudo-feminists into letting them peddle their services on their feminist websites.

Remember, folks, if you are planning to have any business dealings with Russian-speakers, you need to know that you will not win. My people are way too tough for you. They are too tough for me, too, which is why I emigrated in the first place.

Seriously, people, what’s with this trend towards drowning everything in triviality? The Montreal protests dissolve in a clownish display of stupidity, feminists advertise card tricks, and my students believe that slavery is bad because it caused the slaves to have low self-esteem. Does anybody take anything seriously any more?