Clarissa's Blog

I’m eating a poke bowl for lunch. Now that I have tasted it, I truly feel as one with the downtrodden classes.

Jokes aside, these are amazing.

I hear that young people these days love posting pictures of coffee. And I actually have real Seattle coffee in front of me.

But the most impressive thing is the enormous fresh fish. I’m almost ready to submit a letter of resignation and move here.

What do fathers of small daughters do when they take them to the playground or the park or wherever and they need to use the bathroom? OK, some men have a capacity to hold it in forever. But what about those who can’t? Or grandpas whose capacity to hold it in diminishes with age?

It’s a mystery that has bugged me for 2 years and 3 months.

Kevin de León. . is mounting a challenge to Senator Dianne Feinstein, arguing that she’s too willing to work with President Trump and out of touch with working-class voters. “It’s a tough race,” he admitted over an açaí bowl at a diner in San Diego.

Yeah, he’s totally in touch with working-class voters. They love discussing their shared love of açaí bowls with him.

I don’t happen to belong to a class that has even seen a photo of an açaí bowl, let alone eaten it. Maybe I should look for one while I’m in Seattle because I’m missing a cultural opportunity here.

The view from my balcony:

At the airport, there is a check-in counter for Amazon employees.

Two headlines side by side in my newsfeed:

American: “Only 3 survivors in a deadly airplane crash in Cuba.”

Ukrainian: “There are survivors in the airplane crash in Cuba! At least 3 people have survived!”

And now imagine how a Ukrainian with this disposition fares in American academia.

The Atlantic, on the other hand, regaled me with a true gem.

In America today, the article pompously announced, there is no better predictor if one will be able to form a stable, lasting marriage than if this person grew up with parents who were in a stable, lasting marriage.

The part about “in America today” is priceless. Because everywhere else, of course, people learn how to conduct relationships not from their parents but from Santa Claus. Suck on that one, Grandpa Freud!

The article’s goal seems to be to shame those of us who give our children an unfair advantage in life by not leading disordered, chaotic lifestyles. As liberal smugness and preachiness go, it doesn’t get worse than this. And to think I actually considered subscribing. I read a whole issue, and it’s all like this. There wasn’t a single insight I gleaned from it.

I just read an article in National Review that made it clear to me why I’m finding the SJW rhetoric so outlandish and incomprehensible. That’s because it follows in the Christian tradition. Speech crimes (first there was word; don’t pervert the language of the gospel), the centrality of suffering, the narratives of gleeful victimhood, the chants, the expulsion and the hounding of the unfaithful, “you are murdering me [destroying my eternal soul] by exposing me to heresy,” etc. I wasn’t raised in this tradition, so I’m not getting it.

Why, why do I never have cash on me?

There should be an app where you can tip people or donate money through the phone. Or a tradition where workers wear their PayPal handles on their shirts. I constantly feel like a cheapo bastard because I don’t carry cash or a wallet.

Mike always summarizes things beautifully:

Obama has re-taught me the importance of being a smooth, suave fraud as opposed to being a louche fraud like Trump.

I don’t want to accept this but how can you really argue with this?