I’m worried about my magnolia tree, folks. Its trunk and branches are covered in white spots. And there are crowds of bees and wasps visiting it. See the photo:

Is my magnolia sick? Should I be taking special care of it?

I’m also worried about this bush:

I had something like this happen to a bush at my previous place, and then it died. 😦 Should I be watering it, or something?

There was another hilarious story from the memorable conference in Valladolid that I told you about in the last post.

At the end of the conference, there was a banquet where we were approached by our kind professor (the one who’d been feeding us during the entire stay in Spain) and his wife.

“You both did extremely well,” he told us. “Your presentations were the highlights of the conference. How do you feel about submitting articles on the basis of these presentations for this collection of pieces that I’m preparing?”

At this moment, Vivien delivered a vicious kick in the professor’s shin and he doubled in pain.

“What a sweet child!” he moaned politely. “Clarissa, your daughter looks just like you.”

“She is SO not mine!” I almost yelled. “Like I can’t begin to tell you to what extent she isn’t mine.”

Vivien kicked the professor even more viciously, aiming for the groin.

“My Mommy says you are a mean old jerk!” she announced. “You deserve to be kicked some more!”

“I said this about somebody else,” Leticia hissed. “It isn’t him! I’m so, so sorry Professor Moreno.”

“No, but Mommy, remember how you said that Professor Moreno is a dirty old man who keeps ogling you like a creep whenever his clueless wife isn’t around?” Vivien insisted.

“Excuse me?!?” bellowed the professor’s notoriously jealous wife.

“It’s just that there is a different Professor Moreno and he is totally different,” I interjected, trying to make things better. “And by the way, did I mention that this is not my kid?”

“Yeah, is that right? Another Professor Moreno, really?” the professor’s wife started walking menacingly in my direction. “Can you point him out to me?”

“My Mommy always pretends I’m not hers!” Vivien wailed, clasping me in a strong, sweaty embrace. “Mommy, this hurts my feelings! Everybody can see that you and I look exactly alike.”

“That’s true, Clarissa,” Leticia said in an accusing voice. “Just get ahold of yourself and accept your responsibility for this spoiled little brat. And now if you will excuse me, I need to go get myself a drink.”

So tomorrow is the biggest holiday I celebrate after New Year’s. I hope I don’t have to remind everybody why it is so meaningful to me. I find it extremely considerate of the American people to have such a huge yearly celebration in honor of my arrival on the continent.

Today I want to share my memories of the most curious 4th of July celebrations I’ve had.

On July 4, 2001, I was in Valladolid, Spain, at my first international conference. We stayed at a former convent that had an enormous iron gate that still closed at sundown and restricted our social lives to a great extent. We slept in former nuns’ cells. These were tiny, very narrow rooms with big windows in the doors. This meant that anybody passing down the hallway at night would see you lying in bed. Dressing and undressing was a very complex affair because there was not an inch of privacy in those little rooms.

We were students, constantly out of money and always hungry. The former convent served meals but every dish was covered with a blanket of salt that crunched on our teeth when we ate. Even in the absence of nuns, the convent was still stubbornly trying to mortify its inhabitants’ flesh.

The professor who brought us to the conference took pity on us and told the owner of the bar located in the same building where the conference was held to put everything we ordered there on his bill. There was this really fresh and amazing jamon serrano served with bread that was still hot from the oven and tiny cups of coffee, and this was what we subsisted on.

I’d planned a huge celebration for July 4th and even set aside some money for a real meal at a real restaurant. I was traveling with my Venezuelan friend Leticia and her daughter and I warned them that it was hugely important to celebrate the occasion in style.

In the morning, we visited several sessions at the conference and then passed by our favorite bar. Of course, Leticia just had to choose this moment to see a very cute guy and decide to hit on him.

“Can you take Vivien home?” she asked. I will get the guy’s number and see you in half an hour.”

Twelve hours later, there was still no Leticia and I was impotently trying to prevent her seriously hyperactive 9-year-old from razing the entire neighborhood to the ground. I had no experience with hyperactive kids, and Vivien’s pills (as well as her clothes and toys) were locked in her convent cell which could only be opened with the key Leticia had on her.

All of the money I’d saved for the fancy meal went to pacifying the irate Vivien who decided it would be fun to humiliate as many passersby as possible. The breaking point for me was when she saw a teenager with Down’s Syndrome and started yelling, “Hey, look at the retard! Let’s take pictures of him to show everybody.”

I managed to drag Vivien back to the convent even though she was yelling, “This is not my mother! This is a stranger who kidnapped me! Help! She wants to abuse me!” Passersby would stop but, as good luck would have it, Vivien and I look very much alike, so I had no trouble persuading people that she was my kid.

Leticia came back to the convent at 2 am. “This was the best day ever!” she said. “I haven’t had such a relaxing time in forever. Wait, where are you going?” she asked as I stormed off.

This is an exercise for established, committed, long-term relationships. If you met somebody amazing 4 days ago, that is also an extremely valuable relationship but this exercise won’t work for you. This is for couples who have been together in deep, profound relationships for a long time.

Make a list of 3 things that you love, admire, and adore about your partner. Now make a list of 3 things that annoy, bug, and disturb you about her or him.

While you are making your list, let me share mine. The things I love about my partner are:

1. He is very sensitive and emotionally generous.

2. He has no intellectual rigidity whatsoever.

3. He is very meticulous and organized.

And the things I don’t like that much about him are:

1. He’s so damn sensitive! There are so many emotions all of the time, and he expects everybody (meaning me) to walk on egg-shells around them.

2. He’s very fatalistic to the point of being superstitious.

3. Small things impact him excessively. For instance, he needs to get his 8 hours of sleep and will get them even if the end of the world begins.

Now, both of these lists are not really about my partner. These are the qualities that I possess but, for a variety of psychological, social, familial, personal, etc reasons can’t allow myself to exhibit. So he’s carrying the burden for me and enacts the characteristics I feel I can’t afford to have.

Of course, these are all genuinely his qualities. But he’s also enacting them a lot more strongly than he would without me being around.

So if your partner drives you nuts with, say, being irresponsible and profligate, maybe it’s time for you to allow yourself to be a little less responsible and frugal so that he or she doesn’t have to do it for two.

For me this means that I have to stop being the Iron Lady who overcomes every hardship and subsists on very little sleep. Of course, this is easier said than done but understanding the problem is the first step to solving it.

“We need to make this house more secure,” N frets. “These huge picture windows, these flimsy locks – anybody can get inside!”

“This is a very low-crime area,” I respond. “Why are you so worried?”

“Most instances of violent crime are perpetrated by people we know and not by random strangers.”

“But we don’t know any dangerous people.”

“Are you forgetting where you work? After your stories of what goes on in academic departments, I’d be less worried if you worked at a jail,” N exclaims, and I can’t really object.

Here is the problem: exploiting adjuncts is obviously wrong. But having tenured professors do nothing but teach 2-3 sections of Spanish 101 in a semester isn’t good either. They go nuts with boredom and make people want to turn their houses into fortresses.

There is a very interesting article by Gaiutra Bahadur titled “India’s Missing Women” in this week’s issue of The Nation. The article demonstrates the point that I’ve been making forever. Namely,  that capitalism is a pre-condition of feminism. Capitalism is the greatest hope of women world over for a life of dignity, independence, achievement, and freedom. The linked article discusses the liberation brought by capitalism to the women of India and the backlash against their newfound freedom.

It’s good to see The Nation going back to doing good, solid journalism for a change. 

So we have discussed the death of the nation-state at length. Now that borders mean less and less and warfare can be waged without asking citizens to sacrifice their lives, the question arises as to what form the new contract between the state and the individual will take.

This is a change that is in the process of occurring right now, so nobody knows for sure what the results will be. Many different scenarios have been advanced, and I find all of them somewhat unconvincing.*

The twentieth century saw a dramatic improvement in the standard of living (especially in the older nation-states because they’d had more time to perfect the terms of the contract between individual and state.) The state was invested in making sure that everybody was more or less content because, in the case of war, it would need people from all social classes to fight.

The future wars are wars of information, technology, security measures, communications, engineering, IT. It makes sense to expect the state to strengthen its contract with those who can help in this kind of war effort, kicking to the curb those who don’t. Obama’s reiterated statements that not everybody needs an education are a sign that the formation of a two-tier society is under way and is being conducted very consciously. Yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling is also part of this effort.

There is a lot of discussion about the growth of inequality these days. I believe that these discussions miss the point completely. We are gliding towards something enormously bigger than inequality. There will be a very large group of people who will be stateless within a state. They will have no contract with the state because the state has no use for them in case of war.

* Every scenario I have read includes the inevitable erosion of the welfare state. I can talk about alternative scenarios later if people are interested.

You know what sucks? Words like “butter”. The “tt” is pronounced as anything but a “tt” and it is next to impossible for a non-native speaker to make sound right.

Of course, my new address has to start with just this kind of word. Plus there are several plosives in the address, which are also unpronounceable. I have to repeat my address over the phone fifty times a day nowadays, and every time it turns into a production.

And while I’m on the subject of complaining about the English language, has the word “who” gone completely out of business? I’m reading the endless “He is the writer that wrote the novel that. . .” and it just feels wrong. But since everybody is doing it, it’s possible I’m the one who’s confused.

And now I will fetch a pitcher of water and practice saying “butter, pot, tip and put.”