Author: Clarissa

Q&A: Housework

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

One important thing to remember is that if you force yourself to do something on a regular basis that you hate, you’ll start to somatize. So don’t do it. Totally not worth it.

A healthier way to go about it is to find out why you hate it. You use very charged vocabulary with 4 strong, vivid descriptors in such a short text. A Stepford wife, a maid, a 50s housewife, on the one hand. Filth, on the other. You have an image of a person who cleans – subservient, robotic, pathetic. And you know that you are not that person. You have a strong personality and you value that in yourself. But you also feel some guilt for being strong and independent. You feel that it’s somehow dirty, filthy, not right. Somebody must have told you that being who you are makes you unclean. If you start cleaning, you’ll prove that person right, and that’s intolerable to you.

I suggest thinking in that direction. What makes you feel unclean? Who, in your mind, is the person that you associate with cleaning? Why do you feel that this person keeps encroaching on you? Instead of denying the emotion and trying to plough through it, untangle it. Only then will it lose its power over you.

Permanent Tracking

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

OK, I had no idea people did this. It’s beyond bizarre. 17 years with my husband, and I can’t imagine him requesting to have access to my location at all times (or at any time). Obviously, I would not agree because playing into a person’s neurosis is not a good idea.

The author of the article actually accesses an app before going to bed every night to spy on the location of several people she knows. And not one of them cares enough about this clearly unwell person to deny her access. That she’s on anti-anxiety meds and sleeping aids is a given, and nobody can be bothered to help her. That’s why she tried to track everybody so obsessively. She knows people around her don’t give a crap about her.

Q&A: Incarceration Rates

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I moved to Canada with my ex-husband, and then three months later the relationship was over. I was thus sensitive to issues surrounding failed marriages, and at the same time, I was trying to figure out my new country. That was when I heard on the news the story of a young man who murdered his ex-wife because she had started dating and he was upset. He was given some ludicrous jail sentence – a couple of years, if that.

I was stunned. A young woman was dead. He’d cut her up into ribbons but it was OK because he had wounded fee-fees? He’d get out of jail in a matter of months and go on to have more wives, children, beach vacations, etc while that completely innocent woman was gone forever. Her family would have to observe him prancing happily about while their grief never ended.

Then there was a scandal with a Canadian female serial killer who engaged in orgies while incarcerated, posing for photos with the luxuries she enjoyed at the expense of the taxpayers. This woman had participated in the rape and murder of several people, including her own sister. She served 12 years in resort-like conditions and then was released to a life of discarding husbands and children. Her victims never got a chance to form their own families, of course. The public kept begging the authorities to protect them from this vile creature as she flitted from one location to another. But nobody could do anything because she’d served her sentence and was free to do as she wished.

It gets worse in other countries. Spain releases its Basque terrorists who committed more than two dozen murders, and they joyfully scarper into the very communities that they devastated. The courts give them thousand-year sentences but they all get commuted to something insignificant. A dude murdered more than 20 people, and he gets to walk around free, like it’s all fine. I don’t want to imagine how the relatives of his victims feel, seeing his fat, happy mug posing for photos at some protest du jour.

We keep getting told that something is wrong with America where this doesn’t happen. But maybe the problem lies with how other countries keep their incarceration rates lower. What do you think?

Lost in Translation: A Riddle

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I was reading an article in Spanish and thought I was having hallucinations when the article informed me that there was a struggle among political parties on the entire territory of Soviet Ukraine during WWII. Then I realized that the author must be a great fan of Google Translate.

Who can guess, what was there instead of a struggle among political parties that the article’s author translated so hilariously?

[No parties were allowed to exist in the USSR except for the Communist Party.]

17 Years

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

N and I met 17 years ago today. Never were two people more meant for each other than he and I.

If I had known I was slated to meet him in 2007, I absolutely 100% promise I wouldn’t have gone on a single date and would have just sat there placidly waiting. Could have gotten some serious reading done in the meantime.

The Pendulum Swings

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

OK, that’s unexpectedly lucid. I’m tired of China-mongering, and it’s good to see Biden is being briefed by people who understand the region.

After this, I’m kind of getting interested in voting for Biden again. That debate can’t come soon enough.

The Greatness of the Human Spirit

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

This is a squirrel in my native city of Kharkiv:

The photo was taken today.

I love America but I still haven’t gotten used to how hideous American squirrels are. They are gray with pathetic little tails. Glorified rats is what they are. Now, what you see in the photo is a real squirrel.

Another photo of Kharkiv from earlier this week:

Look how clean people are keeping the streets in the midst of daily bombings:

These are people who have taken the suggestion to make their beds every morning very seriously.

I could also post photos of ruined buildings and devastation but my purpose here is not to make everybody sad. God knows, we’ve seen enough sadness. Instead, I want to inspire with this testimony to the greatness of the human spirit that reaches towards beauty and order in the midst of chaos and destruction.

In what concerns the bombings, it’s gotten better since the Russian offensive on Kharkiv spluttered.

Cruel Reviewer

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

I wrote a blindingly devastating (does anybody get the pun or is it too academic?) peer review of one article today. I will now write a second equally shattering piece for another article.

But hey, I’m not wantonly cruel. I actually told the author of the first piece how he can improve. I created an idea on the spot and gave it to him as a gift (I am 90% certain the author is male). Of course, I could write the article myself but where to find the time? I’m booked up with writing engagements until 2027.

In the second piece, there’s nothing wrong with ideas or the argument. The reason why I’ll reject it is linguistic. The author is clearly a native speaker of Ukrainian whose Spanish is… limited. I’m not even talking about the beauty of the prose or stylistic flourishes. Her basic grammar (and I’m 90% certain it’s a she) is what we call “Low Intermediate.” I don’t want to be a meanie who always rejects but “la autora ha escribido”? Seriously? If it’s too hard to find a native speaker to edit, how about turning on MS Word spell check?

Q&A: The Draft

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

This is a question that’s hard to answer without going into specifics of a particular country or situation. If we are talking, for example, about a war where the existence of a nation is at stake, then yes, everybody should fight.

Other than that, I don’t think it’s justified. The only reason to do it at a time when there’s no invasion is to take another step in the direction of genderist fantasy that denies physiological differences between men and women. I’m an old-school feminist, and I have no patience for this silliness.

So if there’s an actual, dire need, then yes. If there’s no need other than to posture, then to hell with that.

How Could We Have Known?

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I watched a clip from Fauci’s recent congressional hearing where he admitted that COVID vaccines didn’t stop infection and transmission. It’s really funny because, as people who were around in early 2021 know, I was aware before the vaccines were made available that they will do neither. I knew it not because I’m a clairvoyant but because I read the papers where Pfizer very openly and clearly explained what the vaccine was supposed to do and how it was going to work. The mechanism of its functioning was not impossible for a reasonably educated person to understand. Yet people confused “trust science” with “trust whatever news channels on TV say about science” and refused to look.

The COVID-era experience of somebody who didn’t access the news and only learned about the virus and the vaccines from scientific papers was, consequently, enormously better. Obviously, most people aren’t capable of reading such papers, so they are easily confused.

And now Fauci himself is saying exactly what I did in January of 2021, and everybody goes, “well, of course, nobody could have known back then.”

Gosh, that was a stupid time.