So my suitcase is still in Toronto. It feels like Quebec has already seceded because it is next to impossible to get oneself from Toronto to Montreal.

I have now found myself in the midst of an Arctic cold front without clothes. So I went out to buy a sweater. Knowing that everybody in Quebec is annoyingly tiny, I decided to stay on the safe side and bought an extra large size. And, of course, this extra large turned out to be a real extra large. Normally, a Quebecois version of extra large is everybody else ‘s medium but not this time. So now I’m floating around in this enormous sweater.

Moral of the story: traveling North in January is something only weirdos do.

Last night I didn’t sleep because I was chasing suitcases across Canada. And tonight I’m not sleeping because my sister said, “Look, this is an all-natural spray I bought in Vancouver. Let me spray it on your face, and you’ll experience an incredible surge of energy.”

So I experienced the surge of energy and spent the day flying up and down the stairs in her new house with stacks of books, plates, and toys. And now I’m wondering if “the all-natural spray from Vancouver” is cocaine-based.

My 5 – year – old niece Klubnikis stares at me with her deep, huge eyes and asks in a solemn voice,  “Clarissa, will you be willing to try some of the food that Canadians eat? It’s good!”

“Are you Canadian?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says very seriously.

“Am I Canadian?” I ask.

Klubnikis takes a moment to examine me.

“You are Ukrainian!” she announces with conviction.

Some of my father’s readers (who are Russian ethnically and in terms of their citizenship) wrote to him to say that they were burning his books because he trashed the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and because he was a beast from hell.

It is always incredibly cute when book – burning Russians lecture Jews on how to honor the victims of the Holocaust. It is especially curious that the book – burning frenzy erupted among the Russians after my father shared a couple of mildly pro-Ukrainian articles.

The shaman was right to begin with: I spent all night stranded at airports and then Air Canada lost my suitcase. And now I’m stranded in Montreal, in the midst of an icy snowstorm without clothes, makeup, ornaments, or hairbrush.

Should have paid attention to the shaman.

People come up with all kinds of bizarre shit for their New Year’s resolutions. See this one, for instance:

So this year instead of having goals for my physical health, I’m going to make goals for my mental health. . .

1. Take my medication every day, no excuses

I take what sometimes seems like a lot of meds – prescription iron pills for my buzz-kill anemia, Zoloft for anxiety, a tiny dose of Seroquel as an adjunct mood booster and Imovane, the tiny blue angel that floats me off to dream country every night.

Consumer society at its best, seriously. Mental health equals popping pills. It would be great, of course, if one didn’t have to make the inhuman effort of putting them into one’s mouth. But that’s where the New Year’s resolutions come in. The great personal victory of the diligent consumer is to muster the strength and the presence of mind actually to swallow the pills. 

This is what consumers see as mental health care.

If you still haven’t read this interesting, well-researched article on the murderer of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, I highly recommend. The following part of the article stood out to me (emphasis mine):

“I can’t even understand why,” Althea Hood, who had been a close friend of Mr. Brinsley since 2006 and saw him in Atlanta in early December at a recording studio, said of his death. “Other than, what he did in the beginning with his girlfriend might have been a mistake, and then he lost it.”

Some people are just irredeemable, in my view. “What he did”? “Might have been a mistake”? “A mistake”?” He shot her, you stupid fuck. That’s “what he did.” At least, have the decency to name the crime you are dismissing so flippantly.

The ending of the article is very significant:

“I was shaking,” [the murderer’s mother] said. “I said, ‘Jalaa, I don’t like the feel of this.’ We were both shaking. I had a feeling he was heading this way.”

She thought he was coming for her. Instead, he came for two police officers he had never met.

The guy spent his entire life trying to murder his abusive parents. The patriarchal prohibitions were too strong, so he kept lashing out at substitute figures.

I’m on my way to Montreal today and N was driving me to the airport.

“Are you sure we are going in the right direction?” I asked him. “Because I’m not recognizing this landscape.”

“I’m following the GPS,” he said. “It’s got to be right.”

We kept going, and now I was really not recognizing the landscape.  There was an enormous industrial facility to the left of us, and there is no way I could have missed it on my many trips to this airport. I’m obsessed with factories and never fail to notice them.

“This looks really unfamiliar,” I told N.

“Yes,” he said. “But I trust this GPS.”

Finally,  the trusty GPS informed us that we had reached our destination. We stopped and realized we were nowhere near the airport. In fact, we’d been driving for 40 minutes in the exact opposite direction.

Now in many families, this would have devolved into eye-rolling, frustrated sighing, sarcastic comments, snapping and the hateful “Why do you always have to” melodrama.

Not so in the Clarissa household, however. I’m sitting there thinking, “Let this be the greatest hardship I ever experience.” So what if I miss the plane? I’ll get on the next one. Or maybe I won’t get to travel at all today.  None of this is worth making the person I love suffer.

I grew up in a family where every little mishap was a reason to bark, feel aggrieved, and start a scene. So I taught myself to be different because life doesn’t deserve to be wasted on yelling and eye-rolling.

So we set out in the opposite direction feeling happy and content. And then I got an email saying that my flight was being massively delayed anyway.

Ultimately, the recent debate we’ve had on social mobility proves, yet again, that there is no single reality we all inhabit. Our vision is selective and only shows us what we want and are prepared to see.

I see the United States of overwhelming and absolutely fantastic social mobility that is unparalleled by anything in the world. As an outsider to this culture, I find it unbelievable how easy mobility is here. The people I know – immigrants and non-immigrants – are achieving incredible ascents, and to be fully honest, it isn’t like anybody is driving themselves into a grave with extremely hard work to do that.

The people who see nothing but sad, endless drudgery that barely allows to stay afloat are not lying and are not inventing anything. This is really what they see. Of course why they see this and not the alternative, and more importantly, what effect this peculiarity of vision has on their own lives, is a question I believe is worth asking.

Or not, if this worldview is too convenient to let it go. I know mine definitely is.

Does getting high make you a little gay? If so, you may just be a “highsexual.” The term, ensconced in Urban Dictionary since 2009, made its way onto two Reddit forums in recent weeks as a way to describe the alleged phenomenon of participating in sex with someone of the same gender or having same-sex fantasies when getting incredibly high. But while perhaps not common parlance, these two threads — “Can LSD make you temporarily gay?” and “Weed makes me temporarily gay. Anyone else?” — are example of a phenomenon that’s been around for awhile. It seems straight guys have wondered about “highsexuality” for a few years, given the plethora of online evidence. Are drugs the key to sexual fluidity in men?

Yeah, what an enormous mystery. Alcohol and drugs lower inhibitions, and people simply do what they always wanted to do but couldn’t because of their puritanical upbringing and the resulting inner self-censorship. Getting high doesn’t “make” anybody gay. They are gay already but afraid of acknowledging it.

It’s really sad when people can’t even allow themselves to fantasize freely without knocking out the inner censor with drugs. It’s not their fault, obviously, but it’s just tragic.