The best gift parents can give to a child is what is called “a positive mother/father complex.”*

A mother complex is the way you relate to the universe and see your place in the world.

If you have a positive mother complex, you see the world as a place that is good to you. You believe that everything will ultimately turn out right for you. You feel that people generally like you and luck favors you. You see every problem as a small temporary blip on the radar of your general happiness and contentment.

If you have a negative mother complex, you see the world as mostly alien, confusing, and threatening. Every instance of joy is a small temporary blip on the radar of your general anxiety and worry. You find it hard to believe that things will go right for you and luck will favor you.

A father complex is the way you relate to others. It has to do with your social and professional realization.

If you have a positive father complex, you see yourself as a valuable member of society with a lot to contribute. You are confident in your capacity to be professionally successful and valued by others. For instance, before giving a talk in front of an audience, you know for a fact everybody will love you.

If you have a negative father complex, you struggle professionally and keep seeing yourself as an impostor. You find that remaining law-abiding bothers you. The feelings of your badness and worthlessness keep bothering you. Before giving a talk in front of a large audience, you fear people wil not like you or even ridicule you.

Mind you, these complexes are not about the actual state of affairs. They only have to do with individual perceptions that need not have any basis in reality.

If you can wake up every day knowing that you are good and the world is good to you and everythhing is bound to work out, there is nothing more valuable than that. This is why I believe that parents who create an environment of drama, worry, anxiety, insecurity around their children over silly, unimportant things like Disney princesses, Pledge of Allegiance, school prayer, etc. are jerks. If you spend all day and every day praying to Disney princesses, that will not inflict even a tiny percentage of harm done by negative mother / father complexes.

* I know everybody hates terminology but I promise these will be the only terms I will use. They have nothing to do with the actual mother and father. I also agree in advance that the terms might not be very fortunate, so let’s skip the discussion about the evilness of the terminology and concentrate on the concepts it denotes.

I’m preparing for a lecture on the history of machine translation, and my father is helping me by sharing his memories of the field’s development.

In 1982, there was a huge (and hugely important) international conference on machine translation held in Moscow. I’m sure you all know how tense things were between the two major organizers of the Cold War. So when the North American scholars arrived at the conference, everything they did and said was analyzed under a microscope on both sides.

My father was a young, promising scholar in the field of applied linguistics who was making the best use he could of his perfect English (which was an impossible rarity in the Soviet Union.) Coupled with his Jewish last name that made his origins confusing, my father’s American accent often attracted people who thought he was a fellow American. “Ah, it’s so great to see a fellow Texan here!” he would often be told. “I’m from Dallas. You?”

So my father spent all his time with the North American scholars. After the panel meetings, he went to the university cafeteria with a group of American scientists who were all in their seventies. After the meal, my father decided to take a walk around downtown Moscow. Soon, however, he started feeling really bad. Remaining conscious was an effort, and he was in excruciating pain. He ended up hospitalized and discovered that the North American scholars were all at the same hospital in critical condition.

The BBC immediately released a report, “A terrorist act or KGB’s provocation? Why is the USSR poisoning American scholars?”

Of course, the KGB immediately started investigating because it didn’t want an international scandal to develop. What it discovered was actually worse than any deliberate provocation. It turned out that, on the day when the American scholars ate at the cafeteria, the food was served by a dishwasher who forgot to wear rubber gloves over her fingers that were infected with fungi. So the food got infected. My father, who was the youngest person among the scholars, recovered quickly, while the academics who were both older and less accustomed to Soviet cuisine, barely managed to survive.

I’m sure at this point the KGB wished this had been a result of deliberate provocation than something this shameful.

Evelina Anville (yes! a new name!) has left a link to another scary article. What is it with the abundance of weirdness these days?

Remember: lack of psychological hygiene makes the psyche explode during complicated moments in life. If you are somewhat bearing up but just barely, starting college, graduation, pregnancy, new job, loss of employment, menopause, andropause, physical illness, bereavement, etc. will sap the little strength you still have, and the psyche will crash.

Of course, people who refuse to grow and choose to consume their children instead (like the person in the article) are incapable of any psychological hygiene that doesn’t involve cannibalizing the children even more.

David Gendron (and I have no idea why I have to start every post with his name today) left a link to an article about a woman who is using her second-grade child as a weapon to battle against a minute of silence in Arkansas.

I think this is an example of a really horrible mother who is willing to sacrifice her small child just to promote her own beliefs. I hate this type of parents. We all know how I feel about religious fanatics, but there is a gazillion ways to fight them without involving children.

As we all know, I have many very passionate beliefs. But I’ll be damned if I ever use my own kid as a pretext to voice these opinions and make her an outcast at school or among  her friends as a result.

I shared this before but I will do so again. It was only in adolescence that I discovered that my parents were passionately anti-Soviet. Before I grew up, they didn’t make me carry the burden of hating the place where I lived. So I enjoyed all of the books about little Lenin, all of the fuzzy Soviet cartoons, and the activities of young pioneers, and so on together with other kids. As you might have noticed, none of this prevented me from developing a healthy hatred of the USSR in adulthood.

So if my child’s friends are all crazy about Disney princesses, I will be, too. If they all love football and admire cheerleaders, I will do, too. If they are into bake sales, I will be into that. And if they decide to pray to whatever God they wish, I will only be supportive. When the kid grows up, s/he will have all the time in the world to decide how to feel about all these things.

It is a lot lot LOT less damaging to an 8-year-old to participate in group prayer to whomever than to be singled out as a weirdo by other kids.

April is the worst month for an academic. It just started, and I’m already overwhelmed. For the past 2,5 hours, I’ve been trying to get up and go get dressed, but the work email keeps beeping and I keep receiving new assignments that have to be completed RIGHT NOW. And yesterday was like that, too.

One and a half days down, 28 and a half to go.

In this series I discovered that people know me so well that I can’t come up with the final question in the series. Nothing of interest came to mind. Now, however, I finally have our very last question, after which we will find out the winner. Here is the question:

We all know that I hate collective identities and refuse to join any of them. Except one. Which is this single collective identity that I not only acknowledge but am proud of possessing? (For one point).

And a supplementary question: Why? What makes this identity so much more attractive than others? (For 2,5 points.)

The answers for the previous two questions are under the fold:

Continue reading “The Final Question in How Well Do You Know Clarissa: Identity” →

David Gendron just delivered the joke of the week:

“And how can you describe someone who’s good in both research and sales?”

“A Nobel Prize Winner!”

I don’t know whether he came up with it himself but it is hard-core. Thank you, David!

Since the beginning of the semester, “Jennifer” has suffered the following misfortunes:

– her apartment burned down;

– her mother ended up in a hospital;

– she was mistakenly arrested and incarcerated for several days;

– she had a car accident and her car was totaled;

– she got evicted from her new place;

– her elder son broke his ankle;

– her younger son dislocated his shoulder while playing football;

– she got fired;

– both of her sons were laid up with the flu;

– she had a food poisoning.

I don’t want to be insensitive but I’d rather Jennifer didn’t come too close to me or her bad luck might rub off on me.

Jokes apart, though, how do you explain such a collection of misfortunes within the framework of your worldview? Mind you, I’m sure “Jennifer” is not lying about any of this. She is a mature person who is in no way obligated to take my course. There is no reason for her to lie.

For those who still insist that depression is caused by chemical imbalances in wherever:

Mental Attitude: Decreasing Depression Symptoms in Adolescents.
Teenage students who received mindfulness training (a form of meditation therapy focused on exercising ‘attentiveness’) in school were almost half as likely to report depression related symptoms than their peers who received no such training. At a six month follow-up, these results held up.
Mindfullness, March 2013

Or they could guzzle some pills and continue doing so for as long as they live. If you can call that life.

When a student develops an argument that I find deeply offensive to the only kind of collective identity that I acknowledge and maintain, I’m torn between the personal outrage and the desire to honor the student’s freedom to believe whatever s/he wants. The latter always wins but it is a harsh struggle.