Today I’m exactly halfway through my pregnancy which made me want to list everything that I discovered in the past 20 weeks.

What I discovered while being pregnant:

1. If some people get a “glow” and other people get pimples, I will invariably land among the latter. And N. will invariably confuse the latter with the former.

2. I only thought that buying swimsuits was torture. Now I know that real torture is buying swimsuits when pregnant.

3. The habit of wearing dresses makes maternity clothes completely unnecessary. It’s only the pants and jeans-wearing people who suffer.

4. There is nothing “perfectly natural” in being pregnant. Pregnancy is a state of discomfort. If this discomfort is a result of one’s own choice, it’s quite manageable. But if it isn’t a result of one’s choice, then it is severe hardship.

5. Contrary to what I thought, I still had a long way to go in terms of not being masochistic. I know this because of how often I use the pregnancy to justify not forcing myself to do what I don’t want to do.

6. As I always suspected (and tried telling people in a discussion on this blog a long time ago), “hormonal mood swings” are still not part of my reality.

7. I feel afraid of and flustered by female medical personnel and feel nothing of the kind around male medical personnel.

8. Students always know everything. Mine somehow knew I was pregnant this entire time, although I obviously made no announcements to the effect.

9. Sleeping on my back became so pleasant as to be physically addictive.

10. Anti-choicers are even more horrible than I thought before.

11. People are afraid of me. Even the folks who in my presence used to make aggressive comments to other pregnant women (“You are having coffee? Really? Are you sure it won’t harm the baby?” “Shrimp? Are you sure it’s good for you?”) keep their peace around me.

12. People use the plural when addressing me (in Spanish and Russian). This feels very weird.

13. Huge, sausage-like fingers are among possible pregnancy symptoms.

14. Being able to say, “As an old pregnant woman. . .” is as pleasant as I always suspected.

15. Having to give up on baths is not as horrible as I always thought. Showers are actually quite fun! And I have this hilarious bath hat.

16. People who talk to pregnant bellies haven’t become less creepy.

17. A human body has an endless capacity to itch all over all day and every day.

18. Pregnant people sometimes develop special body language that other people can read. (“Oh, I’ve known you were pregnant since February,” a colleague said. “I recognized the body language.”)

19. Pregnancy caused me to hear, “Wow, you look thin!” for the first time in. . . yeah.

20. Evo psych is a bunch of crapola.

Let’s see what I discover in the next 20 weeks.

From a student’s essay:

A typical grandmother never brings stress to the life of a family, only love and patience.

What does one need to do to make them stop offering these inane generalizations in the midst of essays?

Among mountains of really stupid garbage that is being published on the Tsarnaevs all over the world, I finally found a good piece from somebody who actually knows what he is talking about:

 I did not know Tsarnaev’s motivations. But if he is guilty of the bombings—and I have little doubt at this point that he is—there must be a link to the deeply troubled history of Chechnya, and to the generations of anger, despair and trauma experienced by his people.

The article is not perfect, of course. The author identifies with the Chechens and forgets to mention the horrors that Chechen terrorists have been visiting on Russia for two decades.

The story of the two Chechen wars is not about good guys versus bad guys. This is a story about the horrors of nationalism that turn everybody – I repeat, everybody – into animals. The real victims here are neither Chechens nor Russians. The real victims are civilians on both sides. And now that the violence that the conflict has created has started spilling out from the area where it started, even more people can observe how high is the price paid for the imaginary comfort of an invented national identity. Sadly, this is a message nobody wants to hear, which is why the media are bursting with idiotic reports on the Boston bombings.

I knew that attachment parenting was horrible but I had no idea just how horrible it was. I feel very sorry for women who get duped into this insanity that makes other people rich and their own lives very poor. But I’m even more sorry for the children who spend a lifetime paying for this horror.

Funny Lenin monuments.

People who subject themselves to a lifetime of disgusting anti-depressants instead of treating the cause of their problem once and for all mystify me. As you can see from this post, they are well aware that anti-depressants do not work and will never cure them. Yet they keep repeating the insane mantra of chemical imbalances in the brain. What is it, immaturity or masochism?

This is why I think living in San Francisco is insane.

Putin and Obama connect over hatred of Chechens.

On the wild side of food in Montreal.

An idiot criticizes the stupidity of others: “A feminist will never see sexual violence against a man or boy as wrong, let alone as anywhere near as important as sexual violence against females, because their ideology states that “Patriarchy” makes only men rape only women in order for men to oppress women.” I’m a feminist and I do see sexual violence against men and boys as wrong and as just as important as sexual violence against women. I also don’t believe that “Patriarchy” makes anybody rape anybody else. Of course, this sad loser will not hear this because he only hears the voices in his head. Why he insists on calling these voices “feminists” remains a mystery for his psychiatrist to solve. And now please observe him leave a comment to this post, repeating like a brain-dead parrot that he is that “feminists will never see sexual violence, etc., etc.”

I never knew when I subscribed to The Smithsonian that I will read endless articles proving the painfully obvious: “It’s often believed that nobody can recognize a baby’s cry as accurately as his or her mother, but a study published today in Nature Communications by a team of French scientists led by Erik Gustafsson of the University de Saint-Etienne found that fathers can do it equally well—if they spend as much time with their offspring as mothers do.” Notice the coy “it is often believed.” One can have endless material for article if one says something patently ridiculous, attributes it some mysterious passive source, and then debates with that hidden source passionately. Of course, fathers can do it equally well. It isn’t like mothers hear with their vaginas, do they?

A more realistic Bush Museum.

I was going to read the Loners’ Manifesto, but after this quote from it, I realized the book is stupid: “The premise, the presumption implicit in any crowd, from concert hall to kaffee klatsch to office party, that shared experiences are the only ones that count. The only experiences toward which everyone aspires. The only real ones… proved — what? That anything worth doing is not done alone.” When people begin with listing “presumptions implicit in crowds” (???), I know that nothing but arrant idiocy will ensue. These “presumptions” belong to the author himself. He is the one who thinks shared experiences are superior to the solitary ones.  It is a waste of time to read a book whose author is too weak and dishonest to acknowledge his own prejudices and , instead, ascribes them to unsuspecting crowds.

Wikipedia is stupid and sexist.

A very good post on rape apologism. If you are looking for intelligent feminist blogs, I once again recommend this one. Just compare it to this completely ridiculous post on the same subject.

The tragic legacy of George W. Bush: “More sexual confusion, ignorance, guilt, and shame; more unwanted pregnancies and dangerous illegal abortions; more fundamentalist religious values imposed on the rest of the population; and the largest explosion of access to pornography the world has ever known—with a network of federally-funded snitches entrapping more and more adults fantasizing in adult chatrooms.”

In Australia universities permit gender segregation and Australian “academics” don’t seem to have much to say about treating women like inferior creatures. Shame on you, Australia.

And the post of the week is a response to a post of mine. Thank you, Roberto!

Reader Stille (@aperfectbalance)has left a link to a brilliant article on the reasons why terrorism exists:

People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. . . People join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community. . .It’s not that they’re ineffective; it’s that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group’s existence and cohesion.

This is very insightful and, I believe, absolutely true. Treating terrorists as people who resort to terrorism because they have well-defined political goals that they try to reach in this way because every other means has failed them is completely wrong. These are people who are in search for something far more precious than any political or economic goal, something that, as the Enlightened thinkers of the XVIII century discovered, makes people willing to die enthusiastically and joyfully: identity.

The less defined a group is, the more violence it needs to convince itself it exists.

Thank you, dear Stille!

My hair does this completely on its own. But only on one side of the head.

So, as you know, the university’s President spoke to us at length about the budget crisis in the sate of Illinois. He showed us the budget and went through it line by line.

“Please ask me questions now,” he said at the end. “I will answer every question you have.”

A chirpy person approached the mic.

“I’m from HR,” she announced happily.

“Oy,” I thought. “Something really bad is coming.”

And, of course, I was right.

“If, as you say, it costs us so much to maintain all these buildings, classrooms, labs, the library, the Science Building, etc.,” the HR person said, “then why don’t we shut this whole thing down!”

“Erm. . . I’m not sure I know what you mean,” the President said.

“Well, we could just shift the operations entirely online!” the HR person exclaimed with the joy of a person who just discovered the cure for cancer.

“No, we are not going to do that,” the President responded, looking scared. “The value of face-to-face education is. . . enormous. There is no likelihood of us giving up our mission to provide quality in-person education. . . This is just not happening!”

The teaching faculty applauded.

Zinn writes: “When we read the history books given to children in the US, it all starts with heoric adventure – there is no bloodhsed” (7).

Yes, and this is a disgrace. But you do not counteract a simplistic dishonest account with another simplistic dishonest account. Why is it so hard to discuss history without trying to make it serve your ideological purposes at every step of the way?

Page 5: “Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards.”

This is the best, people. I feel “back in USSR” because only there did historians manipulate facts with such ease as Zinn does. He changes the accounts that don’t serve his purposes and never has even a remotely critical approach to those that do. His reading of Bartolome de Las Casas is so literal and ignorant that I find it offensive. Did Zinn go to Yale? That is the only university in North America, I believe, that teaches that Las Casas is to be memorized verbatim, never analyzed, and given sainthood.

I’m very glad that Zinn starts his book with Columbus because this is something I know well and can judge whether the author’s reading has any value.

OK, I will try to leave you to enjoy your Saturday morning in peace.