Oh, poor innocent child. It doesn’t work like that at all. Not the teensy wee bit.
The suggestions are all good. I recommend following them. But desire can’t be subjected to an algorithm. Good girls get dumped for bad girls all the time.
Author: Clarissa
Spain’s Life Expectancy
Everybody says that Spain’s life expectancy is higher than that of the US. The explanation is usually the food, and yes, the food is of a much higher quality. But there is another factor.
I’m walking everywhere in Spain. From the campus of the Complutense, I walked to the Almudena Cathedral. From there, I’ll walk back to Tetuán. Those who know Madrid will confirm that this is a fair amount of walking. Everywhere I go, I see elderly people walking. And I mean very elderly. Alone, in pairs, in groups. I’ve never in my life seen so many very old people walking. Many walk very slowly or use canes. But they walk outside. Fresh air, exercise, direct sunshine, new impressions. You need to stay sharp to avoid other pedestrians and traffic. This has got to have an effect on health and mental acuity.
But yes, the victuals are high quality. Here’s the traditional hake in green sauce.
The vegetable on top is some sort of squash. Low in carbs, light, delicious.
I don’t like Spanish cuisine and prefer that they serve fish that has been fussed with as little as possible.
The Dream of a Neoliberal Woman
The dream of a neoliberal woman is not to work. And not to get married or have children. The dream is to stay in bed all day, scrolling social media and ordering food from Doordash. There are several bestselling novels in Spain right now that express the deep hatred of neoliberal subjects towards work.
It’s funny how this plays out. Work, in the sense of a stable, reliable source of income, is retreating. And people are enacting the perennial game of every jilted lover who says, “well, I didn’t like you that much anyway.” They convince themselves that it’s their choice (that magical neoliberal word), that it’s better this way. It feels empowering (another neoliberal term). It feels like you are in control.
Weird and Disturbing
I wouldn’t be able to be around such a guy for more than two hours.
These are not his kids, mind you. And she’s not his wife. His job is a firefighter. Her job is writing on Substack.
She posts it as a flex but it’s creepy and bizarre. I feel boxed in even just reading about it. It’s good that she posts a lot because this feels like a lead up to “a local woman missing” story.
I don’t do this kind of minute caretaking even for my 9-year-old. She fills her water bottle and packs her lunch. With my help most of the time but we are moving towards independence.
Weird and disturbing.
Behind the Times
I was reading the right-wing historian María Elvira Roca Barea, and everything was going so well, the book was very satisfyingly right-wingy, when all of a sudden she went on a “libs are the real racists” tangent that I hoped had been relinquished by conservatives a long time ago.
Roca Barea is upset by the idea that Spain is behind, and after harping on about it for 500 pages, she goes and shows that yes, it’s very behind.
Disappointing.
The End of Mass Culture
It was really great to be at a book presentation at a real bookstore, with real books, a real writer, and real people. Matt Walsh says that soon we’ll be consuming AI-produced content tailored individually for each of us. Lonely people will stare at kitty videos, reels, jokes, and music clips created by a machine for the audience of one.
Walsh is right. Many people already spend quite a bit of time on fake “bunny saves toddler” videos that an algorithm feeds to them having analyzed their preferences and concluded that the bunny-toddler pairing will keep them watching. Soon they will accept that everything they consume is AI slop.
There will always be a minority of those who’ll reject the fake entertainment and go to bookstores for real books and to the symphony for real music. But mass culture, mass entertainment, which for all their flaws at least brought people together, will fade into completely solitary, ego-enhancing, strictly individual experiences.
Don Héctor and I
My very very dear friend is friends with the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince. He introduced me to the author which was very cool because Abad Faciolince is pretty much the only famous Latin American writer who supports Ukraine. He was almost killed in a Russian airstrike when he was visiting Ukraine, and now he wrote a book about it.
I asked don Héctor why Latin Americans were so Putinoid. He said, “in Latin America, being pro-Ukraine means being right-wing. And for a Latin American intellectual being considered right-wing is the kiss of death.”
He told us that when he was trying to tell his friends in Latin America, highly educated, supposedly intellectual people, about his near-death experience in Ukraine, their reaction was very crazy.
“We were having a coffee at a pizzeria in Kramatorsk,” he would say, “and Russians hit us with an Iskander missile. Civilians! Parents with children. Old people. We were targeted for no reason.”
“No,” people would tell him, “there was a NATO headquarters on the second floor of that pizzeria.”
“There was no second floor,” the writer would try to explain. “It was a one-storey building.”
But when were Putinoids ever able to listen to reason? These are Putinoid leftists, so they are double the stupid.
In Abad Faciolince’s new book about Ukraine, I actually know most of the characters. In person. This is weird because I’m a hermit and try very hard not to know anybody.
Helping a Cause
You know what I don’t like? When you support people in a cause that is not yours but that you want to promote for absolutely no reason other than kindness and compassion, and people start getting picky and pouty. You used the wrong word, you spelled something incorrectly, don’t you know that this is not the right way to speak about the cause? Don’t you realize that you are harming the cause by not using the precise terminology approved by the in-crowd? Don’t you know that it’s well-meaning people like you who cause the most harm?
I’m not going to say which specific two causes I have in mind but this is such a pig-headed way of going about it. If people want to help when they don’t have to, shut your cake hole and be grateful. Or at least don’t scare them away with your intransigence. Nobody owes you anything.
I understand that it’s impossible to lash out against people who never showed up to stand with you because they are not there. But hitting those who did show up to let off some steam is not good.
Take it in the spirit in which it was offered, is always a great way to go about it. If people reach out in kindness, that should be enough.
Chirpy Bauman
What I can’t get over is how Italy, a country that produced the leading thinkers of today, manages to put out such abysmally low level of scholarship. I listened today to a long talk by a chirpy young scholar who thinks that Bauman discussed liquid identity as something positive and liberating. When I asked a question about this, I don’t think she even understood it.
The whole talk could have been given in 2005. Online feminism is going to change the world for the better! Fluid identities are the best! We should always be ready to change because that helps women fight against patriarchal societies! Slutwalks are true activism! And then, utterly incongruously, there’s a lot of antisemitism and we have to battle it! How slutwalks will defeat antisemitism remained unexplored.
I listened with gritted teeth and wasn’t going to say anything but when she took Bauman’s name in vain to support these childish ideas, I couldn’t take it any longer.
Jews and COVID
Why wasn’t I immune, then? I got it twice, pre- and post-vax, both times very severe. I have two friends, both 100% Ashkenazi Jews, both got it. One almost died, it was so bad. She’s fit but older.
I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had it at least once at this point. The severity of symptoms invariably depends on age, weight, and overall health. COVID is here for good, and it’s an additional reason for people to lose weight and work out. N who is in perfect physical shape also had it at least twice and experienced exactly zero symptoms.
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