People, reader Stringer Bell contributed a link to an incredibly intelligent and nuanced analysis of the current political situation in Russia. Please read it. 

The author gets every nuance right, and I’m immensely pleased to see somebody write in such an insightful way in English about Russia.

One little quarrel I have: there was enormous, Dickensian-style inequality in the USSR but it was less visible because of how segregated the society was. But that’s just nitpicky on my part. The piece is extremely valuable.

Commenting on this thread is closed. If you still feel that you have something important to contribute, post your comment in this spillover thread: SPILLOVER THREAD.

I don’t want to hire any more women.

Yes, I said it. You cringed when you read it and I cringed when I wrote it, and even more so when the thought first occurred to me. I am a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a passionate entrepreneur. I don’t just stand for equality – I have crashed the glass ceiling in every aspect of my life. I get extremely angry when I come across articles that insist there are gender differences that extend beyond physiology. I am fortunate to have had female role models who taught me through their own examples that I can accomplish absolutely anything I desire.

Over the years, I have hired outstanding women – educated, intelligent and highly articulate. Yet, I am exhausted. I have become profoundly tired of being a therapist and a babysitter, of being drawn into passive-aggressive mental games and into constantly questioning my own worth as a manager. I have had several women who quit to stay home to “figure out what to do next”. No, not to stay home and care for children, but to mooch of a husband or a boyfriend while soul searching (aka: taking a language class or learning a new inapplicable skill that could be acquired after work). Incidentally, I have not had a single male employee quit with no plan in mind.

I have had women cry in team meetings, come to my office to ask me if I still like them and create melodrama over the side of the office their desk was being placed. I am simply incapable of verbalizing enough appreciation to female employees to satiate their need for it for at least a week’s worth of work. Here is one example to explain. My receptionist was resigning and, while in tears, she told me that although she was passionate about our brand and loved the job, she could not overcome the fact that I did not thank her for her work. It really made me stop in my tracks and so I asked for an example. “Remember when I bought the pictures with butterflies to hang in the front? And you just came and said ‘thank you’? That is a perfect example!” – “Wait”, I said, “So, I did thank you then?” – “Yes! But you did not elaborate on what exactly you liked about them! Why didn’t you?” She had bought them with the company credit card and I actually did not like them at all, but I digress.

I have developed a different approach for offering constructive criticism to male and female employees. When I have something to say to one of the men, I just say it! I don’t think it through – I simply spit it out, we have a brief discussion and we move on. They even frequently thank me for the feedback! Not so fast with my female staff. I plan, I prepare, I think, I run it through my business partner and then I think again. I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough. We talk forever, dissect every little piece of it, and then come back to the topic time and time again in the future. And I also have to confirm that I still like them – again and again, and again.

I am also yet to have a single male employee come to my office to give me dirt on a co-worker or share an awkward gossip-like story. My female employees though? Every. single. one.

When I opened my company, I was excited for many reasons. One of them was wanting to make it an amazing place for women to build their careers. After all, we were two women, both mothers with very small children, opening a company in a very competitive industry. I was going to celebrate the achievements of my female hires, encourage them to find their voices, celebrate their pregnancies and year-long maternity leaves, be understanding and accommodating when they would have to juggle work/daycare/school schedules. Yet, I had no idea that the problems women faced in their workplace were often far removed from the typical inequalities feminism continues to address. It is not men who sabotage women and stump their career growth – it is women themselves!

What is at the root of the problem? Lack of confidence? Wrong upbringing? What am I not seeing? Is there something else I should be doing as a manager? I welcome your comments, as I secretly continue placing the resumes of female applicants into the “call later” folder.

The post was written by a guest blogger but the veracity of every aspect of the story has been verified by Blogger Clarissa.

WARNING: People in the past 2 hours I have had to Spam 63 comments from losers who tried to inform me that “men and women are psychologically / emotionally, etc. different.” Once again, anybody who embarrasses him or herself by chirping idiotically “yes, men and women are different” will be banned outright. This will be my small investment into sparing these losers further public embarrassment. Stop wasting your time, such comments are not going through on my blog.

Please read this and this to inform yourselves already.

Still no Internet in our house, so here is another flash of brilliance from your favorite blogger.

Many people think that introverts are bad at interpersonal communication. This is a silly stereotype. I’m an ultra-introvert who can talk up a storm, can be the life of the party and can handle people better than a bunch of lifelong extroverts. My sister is another introvert who has turned her phenomenal interpersonal skills into a career and is kicking ass at it.

The real difference is that extroverts gain energy from communication with people and introverts lose energy from it.

If you say, “I’m so tired, I need a break. I’m going out with friends”, you are an extrovert.

If you say, “I’m exhausted, I need to rest. I need to be alone for a while”, you are an introvert.

Easy peasy.

OK, a really stupid question. I have to work on my translation but I have no Internet. What is the English word for a dog’s face? I mean, the actual animal. What does it have where people have faces?

There are 2 signs that you will recover from a tragic situation, loss, abuse, etc:

1. If you manage to cry about it.
2. If you manage to laugh about it.

Until you do both these things, you can’t say you have entered the recovery stage. That’s fine, too, because grief takes as long as it needs to take.

When you are experiencing something tragic, it’s a good idea to seek out people who are good at managing the emotions of others, bringing them easily from tears to laughter and back and then back over again.

After Eric died, I started seeking out the few Hispanic people I know in this area and bringing them to my place because Hispanics are so incredibly good at managing the emotions of others. An hour with a Hispanic is like a very intense therapy session.

Russian-speakers are bizarrely bad at compassion and verbalizing anything but anger and blame.

English-speakers are great at compassion. They are kind and will always descend into the depths of your depression with you. The problem is that they don’t know how to come back out of it. I have the best, kindest, most wonderful Anglo friends but after the endless, “This is horrible, you will never get over this, you will never be happy again, your life is over” I started avoiding the subject with them altogether. I felt like I was supposed to console them, and I wasn’t really up to it.

The only exception is my BFF who is an English-speaker yet is an absolute genius at managing people’s emotions. Of course, she has a bunch of degrees in Spanish, and I’m sure it’s not a coincidence she’s so good at getting the Spanish language and the Hispanic culture.

I originally went into Hispanic Studies because I couldn’t process my emotions worth a damn and was mesmerized with people who do it so effortlessly. I’ve made great strides but I’m still too prone to the Iron Lady act, and that’s not good.

As for managing other people’s emotions, I’m quite bad at it. I tend to rationalize and interrogate people with “But what exactly are you feeling and why? Let’s find a cause and remove it and you’ll be as good as new.” And that isn’t extremely helpful to most.

These are just some musings as I wait for my Internet finally to be fixed.

Just to help you guide yourself among a mountain of articles that are appearing on the Donbass Region in Ukraine, here is a little tip:  if the report you are reading doesn’t begin and end with the word “Akhmetov,” what you are reading is a bunch of crap by some idiot who has no idea what is really going on and uses Wikipedia to get informed.

Akhmetov is a crime boss in Donbass who has an “army” of bandits of his own. These bandits have been terorrizing the population of the region for over 18 years. The bandit wars of the 1990s never ended in Donbass. This is why there was never any business or any attempts to develop normal capitalist and democratic functioning in the region.

Akhmetov owns the police and the district attorney’s office. His bandits are the ones who are fighting in this war today against the regular citizens, especially the miners and the factory workers. Akhmetov is waging the war on direct orders from Moscow. He is part of a greater mafia organization and his bosses are other bandits. Right before the current disturbances in Donbass started, Akhmetov traveled to Moscow. After he came back, “pro-Russian uprisings” began.

So if you want to know about Donbass, find out about Akhmetov.

Reader el brought me a link that reminded me of what teaching English to Russian-speakers was like.

English sounds way too expressive and emotional to Russian-speakers who are notorious for their flat intonations and their inward-looking emotional range. I remember how my Mom always seethed whenever she heard my Dad speak English on the phone back in Ukraine.

“Why does he have to become this way? Nobody will take him seriously if he speaks like a clown!” she’d worry. I tried explaining that he had to sound “like a clown” to a Russian-speaker’s ear in order to be understood by an Anglo but she was not persuaded.

“You are trying to tell me that everybody in America does these weird things with their faces when they speak?” she’d ask. “That’s ridiculous.”

By the way, after sixteen years in Canada, my mother still doesn’t speak any but the most basic English.

When I started teaching English to Ukrainians, I had to tell them things like, “Imagine that you are a little kid. Open your mouth wide, make faces at me, make your voice do a sing-song. Try to be as goofy as you can.”

My students were adults and they didn’t appreciate these suggestions.

I also tried teaching my (first) husband to speak the language but every attempt ended with a fight.

“Why do you have to act so fake?” he’d ask. “You become this over-the-top, completely fake person whenever you speak English.”

Learning a language is easy. The very first thing you need to do is become a completely different person.

At the graduation ceremony, I was sitting next to my Ukrainian colleague.

“Have you noticed how many last names that are just like ours there are in this region? They all sound so familiar,” she said as we listened to the names of our graduates.

“What do you mean???” I asked. “There are no last names that sound familiar here.”

“But listen: Wiezniewski, Kaczmarek – they are all just like ours.”

“These are Polish last names,” I said.

“Yes, exactly. So familiar.”

And this is how we discovered the only real difference between East and West of Ukraine.

The wind and hailstorm in Saturday brought snow to the lucky folks of Colorado and Wyoming. To me, however, they brought nothing but an interruption in my Internet service.

Now if I want to check my emails or blog, I have to stand in front of my dentist’s office and catch her Wi-Fi signal. My constant hovering by the dentist’s office has already prompted the receptionist to call and say that even though my next appointment is scheduled for Wednesday, if I’m in pain, it is OK to come in right now.

Why couldn’t it have snowed here instead? I have no doubt the folks in Wyoming are not nearly as appreciative of the snow in May as I would be.

I get a feeling that we are witnessing the birth of a new genre of writing: articles by over-fed dumb rich kids who manage to attract enormous attention by writing whiny pieces about how upset they are that the world is a bit too complex for their understanding.

First, there was that Harvard kid who wanted to abolish free speech because it hurt her sensibilities. Now my blog roll is exploding with discussions of a piece by a Princeton kid who’s unraveling because somebody said something he doesn’t like to him.

I’m not troubled by these kids being confused and overwrought. They are young, feeling aggrieved is their natural state at this age. What I find strange is how seriously people take this kind of writing. I had colleagues who went into fits over the silly Harvard piece.

“If these ideas are gaining currency AT THE TOP,” one colleague said, “it’s just a matter of time before this becomes governmental policy.”

Many young people don’t handle the transition to college all that well at first. For the first time, they are not Momma’s little darlings but lost among many. So they erupt in disaffected tantrums. I work with students and I know enough about their emotional states not to take these outbursts seriously.

If you read the linked piece by the Princeton kid, you’ll see that there is such a wild mish-mash of unconnected bits of ideological talking points that all we can do is smile sadly and nostalgically for the times where we were just like this. But whatever we do, we shouldn’t take these tantrums seriously.