The reason I wrote the previous post is that I got in touch with a colleague I’ve been working with on a project to tell her I’m going to be at the conference in Baltimore next week and “hey, I’d love finally to meet you in person.”

The colleague was very into the idea of hanging out together at the conference but, she added,”I have to warn you that I’m a very boring person.”

I can’t imagine a male Hispanist referring to himself as boring but female scholars do the self-deprecating thing all the time. The goal, I’m guessing, is to get people to start reassuring, “No, you are not in the least boring! In fact, you are super fascinating!”

Problem is, nobody will do this for you unless they know and care about you. Everybody else will take you at your word. They will file your name and the word “boring” next to each other in their brains. 

A propos group formation, I remembered this fun story from the times I was learning Spanish.

I didn’t learn my Spanish in class. The only language class I took did nothing for me. Instead, I joined a language exchange program. The program was organized by the university. For $50 a semester (which was a huge amount of money to me at that time), you could attend meetings in an enormous room where people would exchange their language skills. For instance, English-speakers would sit with Spanish-speakers. For the first hour, we’d all speak English and for the second hour we’d switch to Spanish. If you met people you liked, you could take your meetings outside and practice as much as you wanted for free.

Of course, everybody wanted to be part of a large group because there are more opportunities to practice. Initially, I was part of a tiny group of 4. But one of the 4 was very smart, and shockingly, that was not me. Within a week, he turned our tiny group into the largest group that everybody wanted to join.

The way he achieved it was absolutely brilliant. He started to address one of the guys in the group as “President.” Whenever the fellow would appear, the smart guy would loudly announce, “Hey, the President is here! Hello, President!” and we would all clap, greeting “the President.”

Immediately, everybody noticed. And of course, many people wanted to join the “it” group that had the President in it. Our group grew. People started approaching me to ask me in respectful, awed voices if it was OK to join the group.

To say that I had been an unpopular kid in high school is to say too little. I was the definition of unpopular. I was where unpopular goes to die of loneliness. So to become all of a sudden a member of the core group who had been with the President from the start was huge.

This was when I learned that you are what you say you are. Nobody ever asked us why the President was the President and what he was President of. People just accepted it. Nobody wants to invest too much effort into finding out. This is why people will accept your our narrative of yourself gladly.

Let’s take fasting as an example. I always thought that fasting was dumb and religious people were idiots. Surely, I thought, God can’t be so puny and trivial as to care about what you eat and when you do it.

Now I know, however – because somebody was kind enough to explain – that the reason people fast is because that’s a way of experiencing something larger than themselves and their own, individual need to consume. Fasting works and dieting doesn’t because dieting is turned inwards, it’s all about the self. Dieters do not form a coherent group because their desire is aimed inwards.

People who fast as part of religious ritual experience closeness to God and to their religious community because of this shared sacrifice of their own consumption whims to an objective that lies outside of themselves.

It is no surprise, then, that religions that abandon a shared system of seemingly pointless limitations on the desires of the faithful lose all meaning and are abandoned by said faithful in droves.

People need something outside of themselves to give their life meaning. Today’s liberalism in all its forms gives people nothing but the promise of endless consumption choices (see yesterday’s quote from a dumb starlet on feminism). It offers nothing but the idea that an individual is the source of all truth. Its recipe for every ill is to offer a chance to consume more. It cheerfully promises to maintain the basic biological survival and expects that to be enough.

But this isn’t enough. This doesn’t lead to happiness. This leads to depression, anger, and alienation.

Geert Wilders lost his election. This gives a chance to liberalism to start looking for something bigger than consumerism and bare biological survival as its big offer. Otherwise, people will look to other systems of thinking. Religion is dead – killed by that very liberalism because it was an obstacle to unbridled consumption and to the idea that an individual is the Creator. What’s left is nationalism and similarly scary things.

This is literally the last chance for liberalism to come up with something more satisfactory, something more collectively oriented, something less pedestrian and sad.

I just read (in Bauman quoting Forbes) that if the entire population of India and China were to move to the US, the resulting population density still wouldn’t be higher than that of Holland or Belgium. I knew there’s a lot of empty space here but really? 

Klara took a pen and defaced my new Zygmunt Bauman  (I’ve started a collection, hoping to gather all.books he’s ever published.) She’s smart, though, and only drew on a blank page. There’s a bunch of them at the end of the book, for note-taking purposes. 

This was when I realized that Klara is ready for working on art projects with me. I gave her a big white sheet of thick paper and a box of crayons, and she was truly ready because she didn’t even try to eat them.

After she drew, I showed her a sheet of stickers (I’ve had these materials ready for months). She’d point to a sticker, I’d give it to her, and she’d attach it to the drawing. This was hard because stickers keep sticking to little fingers but she did 8 entirely on her own. 

I hated this kind of thing when I was a kid. I hated everything that wasn’t reading. So now I can enjoy it vicariously. 

My doctor (the one who relented and took us on in spite of you-know-what) is sending out notices that she’ll no longer be prescribing long-term pain medication. The situation here is getting pretty dire. People at the gym, at the salon, everywhere are whispering about somebody they know who’s become addicted. 

We are a rich town but there are dozens of small townlets surrounding it that are quite devastated. 

“Feminism is about giving women choice,” chirps some dumb starlet. 

No, you stupid piece of fluff. That’s what consumerism is about. 

The reason I’m crabby is that on Monday I stayed at home with Klara but there was a snowstorm, and I couldn’t take her out. I stayed home today but it’s the coldest day of the year, and I can’t take her out. It will be warm on Friday but I’m in meetings all day long, so I won’t be able to stay home and go out with Klara. And I have such great, fun plans for taking her out! Grrrrr.

There’s good news, though, and it concerns Trump’s childcare plan:

“[The plan] was just a total sell-out to everything that the left has been clamoring for.”

Since then, many more details about the plan have come out. At an estimated cost of $500 billion over ten years, it allows families to deduct childcare expenses from their taxes, up to the average cost of childcare in each state. The proposal also includes a new tax-free savings vehicle for childcare expenses, and a smaller tax credit for low income families.

This is way more important than some ancient tax return that proves absolutely nothing and serves no purpose at all. But the dumb tax return is being covered non-stop while the childcare plan isn’t. 

And nobody can say anything against Ivanka working on this since both Clinton and Obama foisted their wives onto our collective notice constantly. And a wife doesn’t even have unbreakable permanency inscribed in the nature of her relationship with a president like a child does. 

As for the objection that the plan is somehow insufficient, it’s idiotic because Obama had 8 years for a “sufficient” reform but nothing was done. 

And since I’m in a crabby mood anyway, I’ve got to ask, what the hell is Michael Brown’s mother doing, trying so actively to paint him as a gangster? The boy is dead, why tarnish his memory? 

Or does she honestly think that being a drug dealer gives him a better reputation than stealing? That’s just dumb because you can steal once and do it entirely on your own. But drugs mean you are part of something,  a gang. 

I’d much prefer if in the Michael Brown story we all concentrated on what matters: an unarmed person was shot six times and left lying in the street like a stray dog.