Clarissa's Blog

By the way, that scary cartoon of Russia’s “brand-new weapons” premiered back in 2007. The poor buggers couldn’t even make a new cartoon, let alone a new missile system.

It’s funny but I do feel different. I came home and immediately cleaned the refrigerator. Because it’s like “what kind of an American an I with such a dirty refrigerator?” And I’m guessing a very typical one but still the need to clean it is strong.

So now I’m an American with a clean refrigerator.

And in the meanwhile, the very excitable and dramatic people of whom I am now one are apocalypsing on a new subject today:

Trump’s buddy President Vladimir Putin has just announced that Russia has new nuclear-capable weapons in the works that “renders defense systems ‘useless,’” according to NBC News. To show off his developing nukes, he pairs his announcement with the chilling video above of a nuclear weapon going straight toward Florida.

The good news is that “the chilling video” is pretty much the limit of what Russians can produce in terms of technology. Their sophisticated state-of-the-art weaponry has a tendency physically to fall apart during military parades. They haven’t won a war against anybody since 1945. And they are at war all the time, and it’s usually more than one war.

So in spite of the “chilling video,” we can all chill. Florida is not in danger.

I can no longer say my favorite “I love you, Americans, but you are so wackadoodle” because I just had my citizenship ceremony and I’m now American. Yay!

There were 10 Daughters of the American Revolution at the ceremony, which was super rad because I never thought I’d get to see one in real life. They all had perfect hair and beautiful brooches.

There were 62 immigrants total. The largest group was from the Philippines. The second largest, Hispanics. Mostly Mexico but also Peru and Ecuador. No Spaniards, no Basques. Five very eager Brits. Aside from us, two Russians, one Ukrainian, one Estonian. All women, all emaciated, all deeply enamored of peroxide. Nobody else from Eastern Europe. One Canadian. One Palestinian. One German.

The keynote speaker was very talented but extremely politicized. He gave a passionately anti-Trumpian speech about how “it’s not the best time to immigrate. . . our democracy is in greatest danger ever. . . Forces of darkness in the highest echelons of power. . . promote distrust of the free press. . .rely on the meddling of certain foreign powers. . .”

Then the judge was all, “Erm, it’s not as bad as all that. The student activists in Florida give us all hope. Senator Dick Durbin is the greatest friend of immigrants.”

I almost registered to vote as a Republican because I’m contrarian and this was a bit too one-sided for me. Actually, I didn’t register to vote at all because N had to go back to work and I’m very hungry. They served us a breakfast but I couldn’t have any of it because of my diet.

Alton High School is located on Humbert Street.

A fantastic essay by Lionel Shriver. There is a paywall but you can get free access for 7 days, and the article is definitely worth it.

And these people are going to sneer at Fox News! We are destroying the media. We are doing it to ourselves. And then whine about the results. This is so self-defeating and pathetic.

The fear of the Norwegian flag. Love you, Americans, but you’ve got to stop navel-gazing so intensely.

Even after college nobody wants to hire them. Imagine what it’s like if they don’t even go to college.

If you are not following the scandal with the Governor of Missouri, you should. This guy is such a loser.

As if the #MeToo movement hasn’t been discredited enough, it’s now been joined by Monica Lewinsky. Turns out she’s a victim, too.

At the kids’ gym today I met a very gregarious, sociable daddy who looked me straight in the eye, smiled, responded to comments, and didn’t freak out when addressed.

“So you just came to the area?” I asked.

“Yes!” he said. “Moved here from Michigan just three weeks ago. How did you guess?”

The only thing I don’t like about this region is how horrible everybody is at basic human contact.

I hope I was as offensive as I meant to be in my response to the microaggressions survey I got at work.

Among the endless litany of microaggressions listed in the survey, my favorite is “Have you observed or experienced a professor turning the heater in their office up or down to make it uncomfortable for underrepresented professors who come to speak to them in their office.”

We don’t control heaters in our offices or anywhere. As a result, we often end up stewing in our offices or classrooms when it’s 75C outside and the heater is on full blast. I had to let students go early last week because it was so hot and stuffy in our windowless basement classroom that it was getting unsafe.

But even if we did control our heaters. People do have different temperature preferences. What kind of a sick bugger assumes that colleagues choose a different office temperature out of racism and not out of a normal human preference?

The questions on the survey produce an impression that the only correct way to treat “underrepresented faculty” is as if they were precious, fragile vessels that need to be approached with extreme care. You can’t treat them as intellectual equals or fully capable adults who are in control of their emotional responses.

The length of the questionnaire, the lack of a definition for the word “underrepresented,” and the outlandishly trivial nature of proposed offenses ensure everybody’s culpability. There is no way of proving whether, as you talk with a shivering colleague in a frigid office, you are thinking, “this is a great idea, I should ask him if he wants to work on a proposal together” or “serves you right, you underrepresented person, I wish we had more people from Norway instead of your undesirable ass.” Neither can I know if the underrepresented colleague is thinking “all women are dumb bitches and I hope she freezes to death” or “this is a great idea, I should ask her if she wants to work on a proposal together.” If I automatically assume it’s the former, all this means is that I’m a paranoid idiot.

Yes, kitchens that aren’t separated from living rooms are weird. I still can’t get used to them.

But the concept has an interesting history. Initially, such kitchen designs were considered a huge feminist advance. They allowed the person who cooked (and that was obviously almost always a woman) not to be isolated from the family while she was cooking. The sequence of “a woman goes into a kitchen => food magically emerges from said kitchen” was broken. Now everybody in the family could see how much work went into food preparation. Plus, a woman didn’t have to cook in silence (or while on the phone with another cooking woman.)

However, there was a negative side to this new design. It allowed and even promoted the brain-destroying, soul-crushing, concentration-slaughtering multi-tasking that leads so many women into anxiety and extreme exhaustion. Now that kitchen and living room were one, cooking was invariably combined with child-minding. So instead of a restorative activity based on a deep concentration, cooking became an exercise in trying to control several very different things simultaneously.

The result is that nobody wants to cook because it’s not even pleasant any more.

Another phrase that makes me feel the desire to get violent is, “they loved you the way they knew how.” Are people saying it maliciously because they know it’s going to wound, or are they that dumb?

The Russian language is very rich in offensive slang, so it’s next to impossible to recreate this in English, but there is a great expression to refer to the folks who want to stuff their positive thinking down your throat in the most inappropriate moments. We call them radiant pussy blowers.