Opinions, art, debate
Sometimes, what gets called “empathy” becomes a rationale for selectively attending to the feelings that are comfortable for the therapist, or that support the therapist’s self-image as caring and nurturing.
If so, it’s not empathy at all.-Jonathan Shedler.
Shedler talks about therapists but remove that word from the quote, and you’ll see how well it works in other contexts.
Tomorrow I have to drive to a small town 40 minutes away to see my GP. Then I drive back to work. After lunch I’m driving 45 minutes in another direction to another small town to take my car in for servicing. Then I drive back to pick up Klara.
I feel like it’s my very own form of Christmas. I love driving to these little towns, taking country roads, alternating between listening to my right-wing podcasters and my Commie Spanish writers, chugging my Bai water or gas station coffee.
It doesn’t get better than driving around in the depths of America.
When these people start riling themselves up like this and feeling sorry for themselves, it does not bode well:
Misty is not the first cat in my life. I already had a relationship with a cat but I never share that story because even now, 30 years later, I feel horrible about it.
In Ukraine, I lived in a large apartment building, like we all did. There were many stray animals back then. Crowds of stray animals. Inside the entrance of my apartment building, there lived a stray cat. Every time I’d come home from the university, the cat would follow me to my apartment and I’d feed her and play with her. She always wanted to leave and insisted I let her out once she was done playing.
We had regular blackouts. Can you imagine a blackout in a big city? It’s fucking scary. I’d have to go up to the fourth floor in complete darkness, unlock the door and go inside, every time fearing that there would be a rapist hiding somewhere on the staircase. 1990s, and the crime situation was not great.
Once, I climbed up to my apartment in the dark, unlocked the door with shaking hands, but when I tried to close it behind me, it wouldn’t close. Like somebody had put a foot in to prevent it from closing. Yes, I should have remembered the cat. But I was terrified and not thinking straight. So I started pulling the door against the imaginary rapist I thought was trying to force his way in. I persevered until the poor cat who had followed me upstairs as usual in hopes of food and a cuddle managed to make a sound.
The cat was fine. She didn’t die or anything. But she never wanted to come near me after that.
The funny thing is that I was married at that time. Not to N, obviously. Strangely, it never occurred to anybody that my husband who was living on the money I was making that entire time could walk me home in the dark.
That’s exactly what I tell students about the need to learn to pronounce my last name. “Nobody passes the course without pronouncing it correctly. On the first try,” I say.
I do it to gauge their level of language competence. If they laugh at the joke, I know their Spanish is good. Obviously, I don’t really care how they pronounce it as long as nobody tries addressing me by my first name. If they do, I stare at them morosely until they desist from this strange endeavor. Usually, they settle on “profe”, and that’s perfectly fine.
Yet another scam in higher education is “dual-credit courses.” High school students take classes in their high schools and for some incomprehensible reasons these classes are supposed to count towards both high school and college completion. Which is nuts on every possible level.
I’ve been sent a bunch of high-school “syllabi” that I’m supposed to evaluate and say to which of my courses they correspond. It’s a total joke because these are not real college-level syllabi, nor are they supposed to be. All they have is “learning objectives” and diversity statements. There’s nothing about actual material covered. To me, Spanish 101 covers conjugation in the present, object pronouns, verbs like gustar, comparisons and preterite of regular verbs. Everything else is not Spanish 101. I don’t care what “culturally relevant and inclusive projects” they do in high school. If you can’t conjugate in the present and use object pronouns, you haven’t completed Spanish 101 and are not ready to go into 102.
All of this crap exists to pander to parents. They want a shortcut which does not exist. But we are supposed to pretend that it does, and it’s annoying.
The cat is now used to me playing with her in the evenings. If I’m slow on the uptake, she pretends to play by chasing an imaginary toy, flipping on her back and pretending to hold the toy with her paws. Then she stares at me meaningfully as if to say, “do you get it now? Playtime, lady. Chop chop and look spry.”
Outside of playtime, she wants to lie on me and stare into my eyes. If I’m holding a book, she tries to swap it away with her paw. I don’t know why everybody says that cats are aloof and want alone time. This cat doesn’t want any alone time. She wants to be with people all the time.
I almost never go on Facebook but today I did because I wanted to see if people were saying anything about the new construction project here in town. While a was doing that, the cat jumped on me (I swear, this cat is friendlier and needier than most dogs) and I pressed something that sent out “friend requests” to a whole bunch of complete strangers. Now they are all accepting these friend requests. And I still don’t know anything about the construction project.
I hate Facebook and everything about it. But maybe I should post something so that all those people I accidentally harassed at least get something out of it.
I went from being annoyed by students’ grammar and spelling mistakes to loving them as evidence that, at least, they are writing their own papers.
It’s the same with social media. Any sign of humanity in posts is highly appreciated.
When did transgenderism become a working-class fad?
It’s very shocking to see how eagerly the working people embraced it even though they have zero financial means to buy even a sliver of freedom from its worst consequences.
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