OK, folks, I have finally managed to get some sleep and I’m back to blogging. Here are the answers to the most recent questions in our “How well do you know Clarissa” contest.

1. Career choice. Many of you said correctly that my father suggested that I learn Spanish. However, he didn’t suggest I choose Hispanic Studies as a career because he – like everybody in my country – had no idea such a career existed.

I got the idea of choosing Hispanic Studies as a career because I really loved one of these endless Colombian soap operas that had become so popular in the FSU countries during the early nineties. I was always very successful academically but I knew it wasn’t really my achievement. My father had made great sacrifices to ensure that I spoke good English. This was what fed me back in Ukraine and what made me feel successful.

Still, I kept wondering whether I would have amounted to anything on my own, whether I would be as successful without my father’s help. This is why I decided to find a career where I would start from scratch and even be at a disadvantage compared to my competitors.

The Colombian soap opera showed to me that there was an entire world, a culture, a language that I knew absolutely nothing about. I was so ignorant of Hispanic culture that I hadn’t read a single line of Spanish literature. I had read extensively of British, German, French, American, hell, even Australian literature. My knoweldge of the Hispanic world, however, was absolutely and completely non-existent. This would ensure that the experiment I wanted to conduct was done right. I needed a field which was entirely new to me but which I would be able to love.

When I tell people this story and mention that emigrating to Canada and taking my entire family with me was the first stage of this experiment, they think I’m a raving lunatic. The experiment was quite successful, though, as you can see.

In connection with the Newport, CT massacre, I’m wondering why we still haven’t seen the “video games are to blame” and “male immaturity is to blame” narratives. I think they will still crop up, though.

It is next to impossible to find out what really happened because instead of communicating the news and describing the events, people keep delivering pre-fabricated narratives where the names of actual participants and places only serve to create an erroneous impression that what is being discussed is related to what really happened.

Here are some of the pre-fabricated narratives that are being rolled out under the pretext of the CT mass shooting:

1. An idyllic place in CT with a low crime rate and a tight-knit community is plucked out of its innocence by a tragedy. I’m away from a computer right now, so I can’t provide links. If you need, though, I can give you half a dozen links to major media outlets that push this version of the story. I don’t know what the story’s creators are smoking but it is so ridiculous that there has got to be some medication involved. I lived in CT for years and it’s an economically devastated, extraordinarily ugly, hopelessly crime-ridden place that is depressing and tragic. Out of all the US states that I lived in or visited, Connecticut is by far the worst. I have no idea what made it this way but it is what it is.

Of course, I’m not saying this because I think the hopelessness of the state somehow made the shooter kill his victims. You understand that, right? What I’m saying is that the cheesy “trouble in paradise” narrative that is being created around these events makes me want to vomit.

2. Autistics are creepy and unpredictable. And even non-autistics who happen to be unsociable and shy are also a mass murderer waiting to happen. Adopting this narrative allows people to feel self-righteous and vindicated. “I’m good, I’m not a mass murderer or one of those crazy autistics.” It isn’t that hard to find people with worse social skills than you do, which is why dumping on autistics (who get unfairly equated with bad sociability) allows anybody to feel better about oneself for no real reason.

3. And, of course, there are the “gun whisperers” who are delighted of yet another opportunity to engage in the “guns-good-guns-bad” debate. Both sides of this debate like to inflict their phallic obsession on the world whenever they can, so I expect a major flare-up of activity from them in the coming weeks.

I have only been able to look at about a dozen articles on this subject but I have no doubt that more narratives will emerge over time. Of course, it is absolutely normal and very human to see everything in terms of a story, a neatly packaged, well-plotted narrative that has no loose ends and that answers all questions. I just wish that the stock of stories we operate with expanded a little bit.

I’m too exhausted to post anything but this photo of a gift a student gave me. It’s a snowman made of little jars filled with the ingredients needed to make cocoa. How cute is this? Achievement of the day: final grades calculated and submitted. Disappointment of the day: feeling too weak and sick to attend the departmental party at my favorite restaurant. The #1 enemy of the day: people pleasers who create too much hustle and bustle in their attempt to make everybody happy and who end up causing only trouble and annoyance. Tomorrow I have to be at work, too, by the way. And then I will probably just drop dead.

From the final exam in the second section:

“Spanish Civil War was an armed conflict between the Republicans and the Liberals.”

You have no idea how many times, how many fucking times during the semester I explained this shit. This student deserves to be failed just for this atrocity.

I think I might have exaggerated the horrors of Spain’s economic crisis. One of the students wrote on her final exam: “If I lived in Spain, I wouldn’t be able to  study at a university. Instead, I’d live in a cardboard box and would have to sell my body in the streets.”

I swear to God, I said nothing about cardboard boxes or selling one’s body.

One of the questions on the exam was, “If you were a citizen of Spain, which of the parties would you vote for and why?”

A student responded, “I would support the Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain because I’m against the government having too much control over people’s lives.”

I now don’t know how to diagnoze this. A language problem? A confusion in terminology? A simple mistake? Or something bigger than that?

In the two sections of the course, almost everybody responded that they would support the Spanish Socialists, a few said that they wouldn’t support either PSOE or PP because both parties are too conservative, and only one student said she would support the PP because she is repulsed by the endless corruption scandals among Spain’s Socialists.

I have this unfortunate tendency to concentrate on minor setbacks and obsess about them and I have no energy to resist it, so here is more bitching.

How is it possible that students at the same university, with the same prof, in the same course achieve such disparate results on the same final exam? I glanced at the second section’s exams and most of them are bizarrely poor. Compared to what the first section produced, they look like they were written by semi-literate first-graders.

If the first section rocked the course and the exam, I know the problem can’t be me, right? Is it really as simple as people getting too tempted by the idea of leaving early in a late afternoon section?

Mind you, this is not an elective. The people who major and minor in the program don’t graduate without this course that is only given once every two years.

I put so much work into this, and now I have to finish off the semester by reading a bunch of crappy final exams where half the people wrote in huge letters to take up more space and mask their indifference and lack of knowledge in this way.

What a major letdown after last night’s beautiful experience of grading the other section.

Since people don’t like happy posts as much as miserable once, here is my contribution to daily misery. That very same exam in which the students in my morning section excelled yesterday proved to be an unmitigated disaster in the afternoon section. True to form, these students started rushing out 15 minutes into an exam that was supposed to last 1 hour 40 minutes. Obviously, nobody can write 3 thoughtful, detailed essays in Spanish in 15 minutes.

First of all, let me tell you that I love labor unions. I love the idea behind them, I love everything they have achieved for all of us, love them, want to kiss them, and put them under my pillow at night. I was a union organizer for a while, too, so believe me when I tell you that I have very warm and fuzzy feelings towards labor unions.

But I think that the so-called “Right to Work” legislation should absolutely be passed everywhere. People should have the right to choose whether they want to be in a union. If we respect workers and consider them to be reasonable, intelligent, adult people, we have to respect their right to have a job without joining a union.

There is a large group of people in this country that wants to deprive me of my right to choose what’s best for my body claiming a concern for my well-being. These folks insist that women are persuaded and talked into terminating pregnancies by evil doctors as if women were brainless machines with no capacity to make rational decisions.

I know, of course, that employers go to great lengths to prevent workers from joining a union. There is a high probability that I have a much better practical knowledge of this than you do. However, this is not a valid excuse to force the people who don’t want to be unionized into a union against their will. The good of many can never be used to excuse the removal of the right of a few to make their own decisions. Otherwise, we have no rational argument to oppose to anti-abortion bans, anti-blasphemy laws, censorship, forced medication, etc.

We cannot support freedom of choice only when it’s convenient to do so.