It is very easy for malicious people to manipulate a person like me who is honest and sincere to the point of simple-mindedness.

Bad, bad, evil manipulators.

They only put their own health at risk, though, because nothing undermines it more than guilt.

It’s +17C right now. That is what summer is like in Ukraine. Or almost. I’m wearing my favorite summer dress (the one you can see in the Angry Clarissa photo) and high boots. They cost a packet, and there is no chance I will let this weather trick me out of getting my money’s worth out of it.

P.S. I’m about to initiate a very unpleasant confrontation which is why I publish all these posts to distract myself.

This is SO true:

Team-building exercises usually make intelligent people despise each other.  This is because intelligent people resent being manipulated into a false feeling of camaraderie, and would rather remain wary and uncooperative with one another than prove a person that would initiate team-building exercises is actually capable of making us into a team. Brown-nosers that cooperate cheerfully (also known as the Education faculty, who love this sort of shit) are looked upon with the same malice as the collaborators in Vichy France. In the end, the only way we will coalesce into a team is if we decide to burn you in effigy.  Or for real.

This is the best paragraph I have read in a while. The Education faculty are, indeed, always at the forefront of every idiotic and humiliating group activity.

Yet again, the Russian Parliament is embroiled in trying to advance a bill that will prohibit “the propaganda of homosexuality.”

There is no bill prohibiting the propaganda of Stalinism but there is a bill prohibiting something that cannot be advanced through propaganda no matter how hard you try. Because if propaganda could influence human sexuality, there would be no gay people by now.

God, what a brainless jerk she is:

“As a child, I never heard one woman say to me I love my body. Not my mother, my elder sister, my best friend. No one woman has ever said, I am so proud of my body. So I make sure to say it to Mia, because a positive physical outlook has to start at an early age.” ~ Kate Winslet

Yes, it will totally help the kid to develop a healthy body image to have a stick-thin anorexic chirp about how she is proud of her body all day long.

Reader Steve says he does not associate me with a Chrysler PT-Cruiser and says this car is not in the least in my style. Here goes my fantasy of myself, getting out of a PT-cruiser in a huge black hat and a silver fox boa. . .

What car do you think would suit me?

Gosh, it is so sad to see people who know absolutely nothing about teenagers and have somehow managed to forget how they were in adolescence work with teenage kids:

What about the girl who tells me on a daily basis that she despises reading and writing (and can’t do much of either) but plans on going to college to be a lawyer? Would it not be wise for me to inform her that she’d be wasting her money and she should also consider other roads?

Oh but what about the young lady who plays nail salon in the back of the classroom, and refuses to do any work? Could I not suggest that she get a cosmetology license and maybe learn how to run a salon as opposed to wasting her time and money in college?

I was both of these girls in adolescence. I would go on long and intense rants about the uselessness of studying  literature and about how the only pursuit worthy of engaging in was the one that would be likely to bring in big amounts of money. I drove my high school literature teacher to distraction with my arsenal of inventive strategies aimed at demonstrating how much I despised her class. And if you asked me at 14 or 15 what was more important, painting one’s nails or doing work, I can guarantee to you that “work” would not have been the answer.

Still, I ended up teaching literature at a university instead of painting nails at a salon.

Teenagers’ main task in life is developing their identity. It is a long and painful process that, for a while, obscures pretty much anything else for them. In this search for an identity, adolescents try on a variety of behaviors, personas, ways of being. Their attempts to shock and outrage serve the purpose of distinguishing themselves as owners of an actual identity of their own. This is why it would be extremely stupid to take a teenager’s “I hate books and want literature to crawl into a corner and die” seriously.

The response to a teenage student that the author of the linked post is considering (“Would it not be wise for me to inform her that she’d be wasting her money and she should also consider other roads?”) is pretty much the worst response you can give to a kid at this age. If you get into a snark contest with a teenager, you are done for.

It would be very good if people who worked with kids familiarized themselves at least with the basics of the different stages of human development.