Clarissa's Blog

Local Snapped 

Something horrible happened in this town. A 32-year-old mother of 7 shot their father in the head, set the house on fire, and drove into a lake with the 3-month-old youngest baby. 

The baby was rescued from the lake by a paramedic and survived in spite of the freezing temperature. All seven kids have survived, and the town is collecting things and money for them. 

The father seems to have been a total deadbeat. He left the family and moved out of state. The mother divorced him back in 2012 and worked two jobs to make ends meet. But the creep came back and fathered more children while punching around the older ones. There were dozens of 911 calls from the house in the last year. Finally, the woman seems to have snapped. She has recently given birth and was probably not in a good mental state. 

This is all going on literally next door. 

And Typically Spanish

The chair of the MLA panel I applied for sent me such a beautifully written, typically Spanish, extremely florid and convoluted response that I have no idea if the proposal has been accepted. 

Maybe I’ll use the email as a classroom assignment and ask students to decipher it. 

Typical

We are having a family outing at a mall because Klara is teething and keeping her at home with no special entertainment would be cruel. But while we are being typically American, here is a photo of a car with weird wheels for your entertainment. 

I find these typically American Midwestern weekends to be indescribably enjoyable. We are at a Barnes and Noble now. Then we’ll go for weird ice-cream, visit Yankee Candle, a Teavana and an Ulta. And we’ll have lunch at Olive Garden because we want to be typical until the end. 

The added enjoyment is derived from the game we call “Imagine if we saw this while back in the USSR.” Good times.