It’s no wonder that College Misery is steadily losing its popularity and that its hit stats are in the toilet. Even the greatest whiners tend to realize that if everything in the universe gets on their nerves, they need to get their shit together and find a mental health specialist who will help them.

So let me give a helping hand to the blog of the last few hardcore moaners who are still hanging around College Misery. It seems like they have run out of things and people to hate and are now ganging up on students who have the gall to give birth or undergo surgery during the semester. Here are some of the most spectacularly insensitive and nasty comments:

–  I had a run a while back of pregnant women who were due to go into labor 6 or 7 weeks into an 8 week class and wanting to know how I was going to accommodate them.

– I wonder why nobody has said to the mothers-to-be that maybe pregnancy and caring for a newborn is enough of a challenge to merit a reduction in other activities.

 – Replying to Lucy: The cynical part of my brain says that the mothers-to-be are relying on the financial aid they’ll receive from ‘attending’ these classes to meet the expenses associated with caring for the newborn in question.

– Idiot didn’t ask you to repsond, so why should you? And if you had been asked to respond, why not wait until the course begins? Maybe Idiot will have keeled over by then. I structure courses so that I don’t have to listen to or consider any of the stupid fabrications flakes like Idiot decide to whine about.

– They all think their special circumstances will automatically get them special treatment, as we all know. And who knows what this surgery is, anyway?

There was a potted plant that stood in the hallway of the school where my mother taught. Students tortured this plant all day and every day. They tore off leaves, spit at it, threw all kinds of garbage into the pot.

My mother felt so sorry for the plant that she brought it home. She re-potted it, put it in good soil, and took very good care of it. But the plant started to die. My mother is very good with plants. She talks to them, tells them they are beautiful, and they always flourish. But this plant was dying. She did all she could to make it feel better. But the plant seemed doomed.

So she took it back to school. Once again, children were tearing off leaves, spitting at it, and treating it with the utmost disrespect.

And the plant revived. The more kids went at it, the better it felt. Soon, it regrew its lush foliage and my mother swore that the plant seemed to smile all day long.

The moral of the story: you can only take a living creature who loves school out of it at the risk of making it intensely miserable.

It’s OK not to like Mitt Romney, I’m not a huge fan myself. But the following article is nothing short of disgusting:

Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned … French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?

If you don’t vote for Romney because he doesn’t conform to a set of antediluvian stereotypes of “correct masculinity”, then maybe you shouldn’t vote at all because you are an idiot. Reducing a presidential election to a discussion of who drove a JetSki and what anybody’s horse is called is beyond disrespectful towards a country that is attempting to solve many serious issues at the moment.

It’s really funny that the author of the article accuses Romney of being “an insecure wimp.” That’s an example of projection if I ever saw one. Insecure wimps are precisely the people who see something wrong with men who speak French and ride on the back of JetSkis.

Bleh, what a vile article. I know it isn’t very recent but I missed it when I was on vacation and I can’t keep silent.

This quote just slaughtered me with how scarily correct it is:

I got it here. The linked post is quite crappy but the quote is probably the wisest thing I have heard in a while.

I know somebody who keeps saying things like, “Some people might think that I’m worthless (garbage, stupid, useless, fat, etc.), but I’m not.”

After listening to such statements for years, I finally asked, “Who are these “some people”? Who do they sound like in your head?”

“My mother,” was the immediate response.

You’d be floored if I told you how old this person is.

See how our discussion of algebra ennobled the list of searches that bring people to my blog:

Of course, people who come here in search of discontinuous functions will be disappointed, but I believe that any means is good in order to lure intelligent people to the blog.

I’m starting to believe that Bloomberg has some sort of a mental health issue that makes him want to mess with other people’s bodies:

The latest round comes courtesy of NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg and his “Latch-On” initiative. The initiative will change the current protocol surrounding formula use in NYC hospitals, requiring new mothers who want to use formula while in the hospital to sign it out like medication. Nobody will be denied formula, but if a mother requests some, they’ll receive a mandated talk from staff on why breast is best.

And while the officious losers are delivering this bunch of idiocies to women, the babies are supposed to scream their heads off because they are hungry? And all that just because Mayor Bloomberg, who, I’m sure, has breastfed a platoon of babies and knows all about it, has decided that there are no other problems to solve in New York City than monitoring what women do with their breasts?

Who elected this idiot and why? And how come he is allied with the crazed religious fanatics from LLL?

Esther Tusquets, a great Spanish writer, died on July 23 at the age of 76. I feel like a horrible person because when I heard the sad news, the first thing that crossed my mind was, “God, now she will not be able to write any more books.”

I highly recommend Tusquets’s first and most famous novel The Same Sea as Every Summer. I first read this novel for an undergrad course at the age of 24.

“What a stupid novel,” I thought. “None of this makes any sense.”

When I reread the novel this year, I finally managed to glimpse what it was all about. The novel was written when Tusquets was 42, and the mature female sexuality that imbues its every page is not something that a 24-year-old woman can even begin to comprehend. What I find really funny is that the professor who assigned the novel was male. Since male sexuality develops in a different direction (has a different vector? Would that be a correct way of putting it?) than female sexuality, it probably never occurred to him that his all-female seminar of 20-year-olds was simply not physiologically equipped to understand the novel.

Here is just a random quote from the novel to give you an idea:

The howl that can unhinge the universe, that’s powerful.

R.I.P., Esther Tusquets.

P.S. Why are so many writers dying this summer? Carlos Fuentes, Hector Tizon, Ray Bradbury, now Tusquets. This is making me very sad.

OK, now I’m totally disappointed with Grandin’s book. I just discovered from it that the US somehow forced the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. You’ll ask what any of this has to do with Latin America. Your guess will be as good as mine. Now when my students tell me that Latin America is a country in Afghanistan, I will know where they are getting it.

I remember back in 1987, while still living in the USSR, I once sneezed. I was young then, so I blamed the sneeze on pollen. Now I’m beginning to suspect that it was caused by the US policy in Latin America. Because, apparently, every sneeze on the planet was engineered by the CIA.

So I’m reading Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop and I’m already getting frustrated. The subtitle of the book is “Latin America, the US, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.” Note that Latin America comes first in the title. In the book, however, it’s not to be found anywhere. It’s all the US all the time. We discover very minute details of what was happening in the US and what the US did, said or planned. The Latin Americans don’t make an appearance. Some extremely obscure insignificant folks in the US get quoted all the time. The quotes from Latin Americans aren’t there.

As you read the book you get a feeling that Latin Americans are not actual human beings with thoughts, actions, interests and will of their own. They are just things that, according to Grandin, the US handled badly.

I wanted to read about the history of Latin America. It is a history heavily influenced by the US but it’s still a history of, first and foremost, Latin Americans.

It’s funny how often people confuse this US-centric approach with progressive thinking. They believe that blaming the US for everything that ever happened under the sun is somehow less offensive to the world than praising it for everything. American historians don’t seem to realize that the history of humanity and the history of the USA are not the same thing.

This is the second post in a series discussing my experiences in the Soviet Union from the early 1980s to the happy demise of this monstrous country.

FOOD

During the “stagnation years” (the late 1970s and the decade of the 1980s), food was especially scarce. Grocery stores stood empty. Once a day, chunks of butter or sometimes cheese were thrown out of huge metal dispensers in the grocery stores towards the customers. You had to sweep aside all other people gathered around the dispensers and pounce on your own carelessly packaged portion of butter. There was no possibility of choosing the chunk you preferred. You had to grab whatever was close at hand and guard it carefully from the less fortunate customers. Of course, this contest was always won by the most aggressive people, the ones who were ready to push everybody aside and practically walk all over other customers in the store.

Then you had to proceed to the cashier’s and wait in an endless line towards the perennially angry cashier who’d insult you any way she could.

“What are they throwing today?” became a stock phrase. Everybody knew what “throwing” referred to. Food was something that powers that be threw at you, whenever they felt like it.

Have you ever seen animals at the zoo fighting for a piece of meat? At least, the zoo animals are not expected to work in exchange for it.

Every day, after finishing work, the Soviet women (it was always women, even though all our women worked as much as men) had to embark on a journey of hunting for food. They went from one store to another, waiting in lines for hours, trying to find enough food to make dinner. I spent half of my childhood accompanying my mother on these trips. Ask me again, why I hate the Soviet Union.

Of course, the grocery stores were not the only place to buy food. There were also farmers’ markets. The markets (we called them bazaars) were filled with beautiful fresh meat and delicious fruit and vegetables. (Not fish, though. We lived too far inland and never got any fish. Remind me to tell you a funny story about this one time we bought fish.)

“So what’s the problem?” you’ll ask. “Why not just buy whatever you need at these great farmers’ markets?”

The reason why we only rarely visited the bazaars was that everything was insanely expensive there. N. tried remembering the occasions when his parents bought anything at the bazaar but could barely think of any. Instead, his parents cultivated their own plot of land on the outskirts of town. This meant that every weekend they had to take the train to their tiny plot and spend the entire weekend tending to the plants. In the scorching heat in summer and in the rain in autumn, with no roof over their heads and no toilet facilities, his white-collar parents had to work the land because they had no other way to give any fresh produce to their two children.

My parents didn’t have such a plot of land because my father is prevented by a disability from doing any manual labor. So we had to scrimp and save to buy food at the bazaar every once in a while. Of course, the vendors cheated like there was no tomorrow. They had to pay all sorts of bribes to be given access to the market, so their scales were always fixed. But the scales at the state grocery stores were also fixed in order to cheat the customers. After I moved to Canada, it took me a while to get out of the habit of coming home and checking the weight of everything I bought at the supermarket on my own home scales.

I remember once when I was 7 or 8 (which means this was 1983-4) my mother bought some beautiful apples at the bazaar. I was supposed to eat only one apple per day but I started reading, got lost in my book, and accidentally ate 3 apples. That was a disaster because they were so expensive. We lived in Ukraine, people. The Ukrainian lands are the most fertile in Europe. Everything grows and flourishes. You are not supposed to lack for apples in Ukraine.

More than the absence of apples or sea-food, however, I was tortured by all the aggression, humiliation, dishonesty and anger that surrounded the process of getting food. As much as I love fish, I can do without. But if I can’t have self-respect, that makes life hardly worth living.

(There is more I have to say on this subject, so expect a third post in the series.)