Readers have been suggesting making a donation in Eric’s name to our university library. Thank you, readers, this is a very kind thought.

I would really like for something like that to happen because it makes me feel better to hear his name mentioned and his existence recognized. He wasn’t a mistake. He died in utero but he still brought a lot of love. I wouldn’t want him never to have existed.

One benefit of having had a C-section is that lying down is the most uncomfortable thing you can be doing. You can’t really lie on the side, and how much time can a person spend lying strictly on her back without changing the position? So the temptation to stay in bed crying all day long – which is obviously very strong at this point – is impossible to put into practice. You are physically forced to get out of bed, get dressed, and stay out of the bed all day long.

Today is very hard because Eric was supposed to be born today, at about this time right now. This isn’t something that bears much dwelling, so I will tell you about the operation instead.

I had an all-female team for the C-section, except for the anesthesiologist. I heard that this was one of the few remaining professions that required no people’s skills, and it seems like some anesthesiologists are enjoying the freedom from the constraints of sociability way too much. Our anesthesiologist had either learned a single, ultra-cheerful formula of initiating and maintaining human contact or was having the best day of his life. He beamed when he met us, remaining completely oblivious to the mood in the room, and kept making comments of the “Check out this really cool screen we have for you. How neat is it?” variety throughout the operation. I even felt some guilt that I was incapable of responding to his cheerful overtures with the same glee he seemed to be expecting.

I know that most people will find this strange but being arranged on the operating table in the position of a Thanksgiving turkey felt like a relief. The thirty minutes of being incapable of exercising any control or bearing any responsibility for anything were welcome. There is this moment during the procedure where the anesthetic puts you in a state of perfect indifference towards everything, and that felt very restful. These were the only drugs for physical or emotional pain that I would accept.

It turns out that I’m one of those weird people who don’t feel physical pain after an operation. All of the prescriptions I have been given are lying around unfilled. Maybe the reason why my body processed the operation so well is that it was what I had chosen and wanted from the very beginning. I can see how a non-elective C-section might be very traumatic to a person. In any case, I was standing up and taking a few steps on the very next day and walking outside on the day after that.

We feared that the stairs in our house would prove difficult two days after the operation but I walked with great ease up and down the quite steep staircase we have. What was really hard was getting out of bed. N had to place one of those portable lap desks you use to hold a laptop under my back and heave me up like a shored up whale. In the middle of the first night at home, I invented a way to get out of bed on my own and felt enormous relief. More than the actual difficulty of getting up, it was the knowledge that I couldn’t get out of bed whenever I wanted that was intolerable. Of course, by morning I forgot the magical method I had come up with during the night.

The advice I can give to people who undergo C-sections is to stay at the hospital for the three nights they are entitled to because by that time the body becomes ready to perform simple daily tasks on its own. Unless one has somebody big and very strong physically at home, I have no idea how one can manage to get in and out of bed, shower, car, etc. before the first 3 post-op days are over. Of course, this might be easier for people with good upper-body strength which I definitely do not have.

So what do you call a person who tries to console me by giving me a gift of – among other things – soap that features on its wrapper a picture of a bouncing baby boy and the brand name of “My Baby”?

Honestly, sometimes even the most robust psychological health might fail one.

Dear friends and readers,

I couldn’t talk about this before but now I feel it will be good for me to share. This is a tragic story and I don’t want to traumatize those who don’t want to be traumatized so I will put it under the fold.

Continue reading “Tragedy” →

Even really good parents often fail to resist the urge to engage in negative programming and turn their own psychological issues into the burden their children will carry for them:

There will be adults in your world who are very concerned about what you wear and how you carry your body and what you do with it. There will be adults in your life who care more about whether you sway your hips just so than about how good you are at science or how much you love gymnastics or the love you hold in your heart for your brother and others in your life. I wish I could change this for you, but I can’t.

Sure, there will be. It is so crucial to Mommy that her daughter encounter all this nastiness that the daughter will just have to accommodate.

What is really sad is that the little girl in question is only four and she already has to be exposed to her mother’s irresponsible drama queenishness. Children are not equipped to understand that Mommy is simply posing to get attention and feel important. They take this kind of crapola completely seriously and grow up seeing the world as a terrifying place.

See this part, for instance:

You are growing up in a world, Sally, that cares more about your body than your brain—or your heart.

I haven’t read anything more cruel since that horrible post by a mother who was fantasizing about her toddler growing up to become a rapist.

People, stop dumping your emotional garbage on tiny little kids. Just fucking stop already. For you this is a chance to feel important for 3 minutes and get some blog hits. For them this is a beginning of a lifetime of low self-esteem and crushing anxiety.

Scary shit:

Yesterday on Twitter I made one of those jokes that is bound to become a reality at some point: I proposed developing a “Great Television Shows of the Western Tradition” sequence similar to a “Great Books” curriculum. . .  Let’s assume from the outset that you have one 13-week semester to give a decent overview of the sitcom, and let’s limit it to the American sitcom just to make it more manageable (we can do British shows as an elective or something). Some shows seem non-negotiable — I Love Lucy, Dick van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Golden Girls, The Cosby Show, Seinfeld.

And this will be the moment when I retire and find a job in sales. It will be more rewarding to sell any kind of junk than to witness the endless navel-gazing of the most stupid and infantile among us.

The impending publication of the book based on my doctoral dissertation will mark an end of an important stage – that of my graduate studies. It is very symbolic that a book on the Bildungsroman genre will be a culmination of my development as an academic.

The graduate studies stage lasted for five more years after I graduated. This happened because I didn’t learn everything I needed to become a scholar and had to continue learning long after getting the diploma.

One reason I didn’t learn as much as I should have in grad school was that I was expending a lot of time and energy on my own psychological problems. When you don’t solve them, all you can do is maintain an endless cycle of compensatory behaviors that leave little space for anything else. The most powerful of these problems was the obsessive inner monologue telling me that women should not be spending all this time reading books and doing intellectual things.

Another set of problems was external. There was a grievous lack of mentorship in my graduate programs. For instance, we were taught that reading what other people in the field were doing in their research was an impermissible waste of time. Not only wasn’t reading literary criticism considered work, our professors made us believe it was a useless hobby of lazy people. I was well into my tenure track when I heard about the concept of the scholarly base and realized it was not only work but actually a professional obligation to maintain this base. Time management, long-term career planning – I had no clue how to do any of these things.

It is only today that I feel that I’m fully ready to graduate.

A journalist asks President Obama during a press conference, “Mr. President, we just saw you engage in a heated conversation with Mr. Kerry. Can you tell us what you were discussing?”

“We were talking about delivering a military strike on Syria in the course of which a million Syrians and a dozen of journalists will be killed.”

“Why will the journalists be killed?!?” everybody in the audience gasps.

“You see, John?” Obama says, turning to Kerry. “I told you nobody would give a rat’s ass about these Syrians.”

Rebecca Schuman has published a very interesting article in Chronicle of Higher Ed about the prospects of salvaging the field of Germanic Studies from disappearing into oblivion. The article offers an impressive contrast with the poorly written, extremely predictable and painfully embarrassing stuff CHE has been publishing lately, so do read it.

What I like the most about the piece is that it outlines a project that used to be my own but that was almost completely beaten out of me in grad school:

So here is my new mission: I want to inspire everyone to see that although worthwhile as entertainment and edification, German literature also provides praktische Erkenntnis (practical insight) into more-successful living. For example, also in Faust, the title character’s deal with Mephistopheles brings into stark relief an important point about boundless ambition at any cost. And we can recognize Gregor Samsa, the cockroach-esque monster from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as a cautionary tale of what happens if you don’t move out of your parents’ house. We can even take the descriptions of class struggle and the means of production in none other than The Communist Manifesto and recognize their part in the development of some of capitalism’s most successful (and worker-friendly) ventures: Costco, Trader Joe’s (owned by Germans!), and even that bastion of faux-hippie libertarianism, Whole Foods.

I also wanted to read and teach literature in this way. This plan horrified my professors, however.

“And here you go discussing the content of the novel again,” my thesis adviser would say in her best “and-here-you-go-peeing-in-the-middle-of-the-living-room” voice. “Stop talking about what happens to the characters and discuss the first-person narrator instead.”

I tried to master the art of discussing the first-person narrator without mentioning what that narrator was actually narrating but I was never very good at it.

“What matters about a text is not what it says,” a rising star of literary criticism with 2 books published in prestigious presses by the age of 30 explained to me. “What matters is that the text is a sort of a living body with bodily functions. The rhetorical devices used in it are bodily functions and you should concentrate on them.”

I wasn’t into metaphors as bodily functions all that much, so the prof called my research “pedestrian.”

“This story by Juan Rulfo has more adjectives than adverbs!” an elderly professor would exclaim. “While the other story has more adverbs than adjectives! And if Clarissa asks me once again why this is important, I will complain to the Chair. It is important because we are bringing the quantitative aspect into literature. How exciting is that?”

I didn’t think it was at all exciting, so the elderly academic did end up complaining to the Chair who scolded me gently for being intellectually rigid.

Still, I always hoped I was not the only person who cared what happened in a work of literature as opposed to concentrating exclusively on how the narrative was structured and delivered. I’m glad to see there are other people who are not terrified of looking at the content of a novel or a short story.