People are upset about the admittedly stupid woman who took a baby wombat away from its mother in Australia. Yet they can’t comprehend why anybody objects to the existence of surrogacy.
Author: Clarissa
Cuban Communist
I talked to a Cuban Communist today. A lovely dude with an absolute soup for brains. He hates capitalism and believes in the cause of the Cuban revolution. But guess where he lives? Yes, in the US. I asked him how come and he stared at me, sincerely failing to understand the question.
The Cuban Communist is, of course, completely pro-Russian.
“The US is for Ukraine, so I can’t be,” he explained.
“So the US controls your brain,” I said. “You don’t have your own thoughts. Whatever the US does, you think the opposite is true. Heard about independent thinking or is that an unfamiliar concept?”
After that he started quoting Engels at me, and that was that.
Male and Female Complaints
When men pout about the “no fault divorce”, it’s very cuck energy. Nobody leaves a great marriage. Take the health of your relationship into your hands and stop seeing yourself as an object. You want the state to tie your woman to you because you are, what, impotent to do it, pun intended?
Women who whine that they do too much housework are just as annoying. Try to participate on your own relationship, is my advice.
Beauty at the Conference
Middle-aged German women dress with excellent taste and femininity. I’ve actually written down a couple of outfits that I want to imitate. Striking good taste and exceptional elegance.
There are also many Italians at the conference, and Italian women don’t make an effort to look nice. They are so beautiful, with such striking facial features and fantastic figures, that they feel they don’t need to. How do they maintain these figures well into their sixties? Don’t they eat pasta?
Of particular loveliness at the conference is an academic couple composed of an Italian man and a Spanish woman who have traveled with their troop of small children and take turns chaperoning them around campus. These are clearly conservative scholars who are living in accordance with their beliefs.
The Cost of Free Stuff
The governor of Illinois made it impossible for us to charge tuition on families with the income below $100,000. People thought it was great until it turned out that their kids can no longer learn such things as physics, borrow books at the college library, or get a job on campus because there’s no money to pay for any of it.
Free stuff sounds great until you realize that the quality of whatever you get for free is so poor that it’s worse than getting nothing.
Service Industry and COVID
At my German hotel, you are asked to leave a sign on the door if you do not want your room cleaned for whatever reason. Cleaning the room is the default.
This is a good approach that is, unfortunately, disappearing in North America. Since COVID, hotels have become grimly opposed to cleaning rooms. Even during long stays of over a week, you often have to battle the unfriendly hotel receptionists to get the room cleaned. Many hotels have byzantine procedures for guests to request room cleaning. At one hotel, I was told that I had a short window of opportunity in the morning to put in my request. I was there for work and scheduled to, you know, work at that time, so I didn’t get a maid to come by even once during my stay.
Overall, the service industry in North America went downhill after COVID. Restaurants push QR codes at a person, forgetting that in lockdown people learned to cook and don’t go to restaurants just to eat. They go for ambiance, and if that sucks, they won’t come. Many restaurants went out of business in my town because there’s no demand for indifferent service and an absence of Norma menus.
Real Russia Sanctions
For three years we begged Biden to close this loophole and he kept extending it. For three years, Europe and America said they stood with Ukraine while feeding the Russia murder machine. How is it possible not to be angry at treachery of such magnitude? Had this been done 3 years ago, there wouldn’t be any war today.
German Word Adventures
I just made my first play on words in German. Instead of frühstück, I said frohstück. Because breakfast here at the hotel is so good, it makes me glad. They serve herring in a fur coat. The real kind! For breakfast! Plus, separate slices of herring. And there’s fennel tea.
Duolingo really works. I’m having conversations everywhere. I ask questions and understand answers. I’m sure I make a goobizillion mistakes in the process but dialogue is happening, and that’s what matters.
Second Day of the Conference
The first talk of the second day of the conference was openly conservative. A Spanish academic said that the Left has created a hive mentality that is not in the least more open or less ideological than that of the Franco dictatorship. And it’s time to let go of the Civil War era resentments instead of stoking them with “historical memory initiatives.” Let’s get over our addiction to feeling virtuous by condemning the past and let’s concentrate on the actual problems our society faces, he said.
This might sound like the most boring of commonsensical approaches but I never thought I’d hear something like this at an academic conference. Of course, several Latin American women started henpecking the speaker for thought crimes but the next speaker said similar things and I nodded so much my head almost flew off into outer space.
After the session, I asked the Ukrainian organizer to tell me honestly if I’d died abs was now in an intellectual heaven. “What did you expect?” he said. “That I’d gather a group of leftist twaddlers?”
Q&A about Procrastination
First of all, I suggest removing the word procrastinate from your vocabulary because it’s neoliberal. You are not a robot that must be at peak productivity at all times. You are a complicated, profound human being with a soul, not a machine. We aren’t looking to fix you but to understand you.
Here’s what I suggest. Make a list of tasks that you are avoiding. What do they have in common? Is it a particular kind of thing that triggers your rejection? I have found, for example, that the emails I don’t answer the longest are those I really do want to answer. Things I delay are the ones I’d enjoy the most. This is a wrinkle in my personal psyche that might be completely alien to you. I have no idea what puts you in the rejection mode but you do. What are you gaining by avoiding these tasks? What image of yourself does this practice keep in place? Who is this person who “procrastinates”? What would you have to give up if you stopped being that person?
Yesterday at the conference I didn’t participate in the discussion or make any comments during the entire first session. I felt small an unimportant, a person that nobody wanted to hear from. I had to spend 10 minutes in the bathroom putting on my competent persona. It was an actual effort to remember that I’m brilliant, I’m great, and I was invited because people wanted to hear from me. I was successful and talked up a storm at the rest of the sessions. But if I hadn’t been successful, it would have been fine, too. It’s OK to fail. We need to get out of the cycle of the neoliberal guilt and self-blame.
I have a friend who’s also in academia. He was torturing himself because he didn’t publish much. I told him, “Dude, you are the most effective advocate for your program. You are seriously good at this shit. So you are not into research, big whoop. Look at how much you have done to defend the program from administration’s depredations. Thanks to you, several people have contracts. You love doing this, and you are achieving incredible results. Why are you so down on yourself?”
The guy thought he was a loser when he was one of the winningest winners I know. It’s ok to tell yourself, “I don’t like this shit and I’m not good at it but I’m good at this other shit, so I’ll do it.” I have had to accept that I’m deeply unsociable and have no circle of acquaintance after 16 years in academia. Everybody asks, “do you know this scholar? Have you met that one?” And no, I don’t know anybody and met no one. But I’m massively well-read because the time I didn’t spend socializing I spent reading. Years of feeling like garbage until I finally realized it’s OK to be how I am. And it’s OK not to.
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